Kitted Out by Caroline Young

Author:Caroline Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

‘Hep-Jills’ were young women at the forefront of the swing and Lindy Hop craze and wore flat shoes, white bobby socks and short pleated dresses that flared when they swung around. In January 1938, the Benny Goodman Orchestra played Carnegie Hall to a wild audience, and the first strains of the climactic ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ became a trigger for inventing energetic moves. The Goodman Orchestra vocalist Helen Ward recalled how girls had initially dressed up in high heels and stockings, ‘but when the lindy really caught on, the gals began wearing saddle shoes’.

At an October 1939 Carnegie Hall celebration of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the public were invited to listen to Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller in the plush auditorium. Young girls were so desperate to dance to Glenn Miller’s ‘Little Brown Jug’, their ‘shoulders were shaking … arms were waving … hands were pounding’. But they were frustratingly prevented from up from their seats. At the Philadelphia Armory however, 10,000 ‘boys and girls leaped into the aisles, and many couples rose from the ground floor, dancing the jittery steps in wild abandon until forced to take their seats by the Armory’s staff of uniformed ushers’.

It was mass adulation, one of the first examples of the ‘teenager’ in action – independent and passionate. Swing could be delivered directly into bedrooms by radio stations like NBC’s ‘Let’s Dance’. Their fandom was expressed through new language, fashions and idolisation of musicians, and they also spent their money buying the latest records, with swing musicians Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman topping the charts in 1939. Phonograph records were big business by the end of the decade, with sales in 1939 up 50 per cent compared with 1938, while sales in 1938 were three times greater than in 1933.

At the end of August 1938, almost 100,000 racially mixed fans packed into Chicago’s Soldier Field for a mass swing jamboree. It was described as an ‘orgy of joyous emotions’ as the crowd rushed the stage when the Jimmy Dorsey band played the ‘Flat Foot Floogie’. The non-segregated audience was considered a shocking cultural moment, as hinted at in countless articles. ‘The melting pot boils over, and now we have the hoarse and jitterbuggy days. No longer prim, we’ve all gone primitive,’ wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune the day after, on 26 August 1938.

The jitterbug led to a moral panic, with concern over the lack of self-control caused by swing music. That the sound originated amongst the black musicians of New Orleans led to racist concern that it was from ‘the rhythmic jungle chants of descendants of Africans’.

An American professor, Harry D. Gideonse, in November 1938 declared swing ‘musical Hitlerism’, because ‘there is a mass sense of “letting one’s self go”’. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Nazi Germany, the government sought to ban swing as it was considered ‘forbidden music’ because of the black and Jewish musicians who created it.

The swing kids in 1938 were

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