“What can I tell you about my people?”

The great Duke Ellington was echoing a question from a long-ago interviewer.

“Well, I’m glad you’re recording. Of course, I had such an influence from the people. Because that’s the better word. The people, not my people. The people are my people. That is—people.”

And what about his work?

“It’s strongly American Negro music. There’s a difference. The African Negro music is so sophisticated that nobody can dig it but them. Nobody can duplicate it. It is the most sophisticated music in the world.” 

What stands out for me is the message, first of all, but also the vocabulary of the era. We unearthed old interviews like this one for a series of CBC Radio documentaries I made years ago about the Big Bands of the 1930s and 40s, the jazz bands. I could listen over and over again to the way musicians like Ellington spoke, partly because of the poetry, and partly because I write….not quite historical fiction, but novels like Time Squared that spend time in both the past and the present.

If you write fiction set in the past—permeated with the past—you have to be conscious of the way people spoke in different eras, both the vocabulary and sentence structure that’s come down to us, as well as what hasn’t survived.

This isn’t the reason I went back to the documentaries. As I wrote last week, I’d heard a rumour that the CBC was discarding old tapes while digitizing its archives. I wanted to save these particular docs–three out of the many that I made–because they contained more than clips from famous musicians. We’d also recorded interviews with sidemen from the Big Bands, the elderly musicians who probably hadn’t been put on tape elsewhere. I thought they were historically important, interviews opening a window onto fascinating, vibrant, moving and un-famous lives.

It turned out that the tapes we recorded are gone, the work already digitized. And while the CBC archivist was able to send me links to two of the Big Band documentaries, the middle of the three didn’t show up in a search. It’s uncatalogued, he told me when I pushed, although he thinks it’s still somewhere in the digital archives.

To me, that’s tragic. Unfortunately, this is the doc that contains most of the interviews with the sidemen. The voice of Duke Ellington lives on not just in his music but in many other recorded interviews, and I hope the sidemen turn up so historians can one day hear them, too. The archivist has promised to tell me if–serendipitously, as he put it–they reappear.

Meanwhile, I’m left with the interviews in the other two parts, mostly with the big-name musicians that we pulled from other sources. And I’ve ended up thinking hard about the vocabulary they contain.

Here’s Bing Crosby on why he didn’t sing “The Song of the Dawn” in one of the first colour movies, The King of Jazz:

“Well, I was booked to sing it, and it was a long picture, had a long schedule. We were out here for several months, had some holidays and celebrations and one time I got a little uh—juiced, should we say, and got involved in a bit of a traffic mishap. It was clear that I’d been drinking and the judge—’course we had Prohibition in those days—asked me if I’d been drinking. And I said, Yes, but everybody does a little these days. And he said, Well, haven’t you heard about the Prohibition Statute? And I said, Oh, of course, but nobody pays much attention to it. And he said, Well, you’ll have 30 days to think about it and pay some attention to it. And clang went the door, and there I was for 30 days and the song I was to do, The Song of the Dawn in the picture, which was my big moment, was done by John Boles—and done very well too, I might add, probably a lot better than I would have done it anyhow. 

Juiced, I think now. Traffic mishap. Prohibition Statute, when we tend to say just “Prohibition.”

And here’s Frank Sinatra, giving an onstage speech as he left the Tommy Dorsey band during the 1942-43 season:

“I’d like to say I’m going to miss all you guys after kicking around for three years. And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet the boy who’s going to take my place as the vocalist with Tommy and the band. He’s a fine guy and a wonderful singer, and he was good enough for Harry James and Benny Goodman, and that’s really saying plenty. Folks, I’d like you to meet Dick Haymes.” 

The boy singer, they said then. Kicking around. Really saying plenty.

Almost 20 years ago, when I was writing a novel called The Corner Garden set partly set in the 1940s and ‘50s, I asked my mother how she had spoken at the time. Her vocabulary. The slang terms she used, which she might have discarded as outdated later on. She paused to think, then said, “Well, I suppose I spoke just about the same as I do now.” I realized then that people older than me—and younger—sounded slightly different because they generally used the vocabulary and sentence structures of their youth. “Jeepers,” my husband’s grandfather still said when he was very old, early twentieth century slang spoken seventy years later.

Now I’m about to edit my next novel, which is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Ellington, Sinatra and Crosby were huge names. Serendipitously ending up with digitized versions of the documentaries will help me refine the vocabulary of my characters. The trick, at least the one I use, is not to try to reproduce speech from past times. Instead, I try to write simple declarative sentences salted with the occasional older sentence structure and very occasional period slang. Both of them can create a character or set a mood—and can ruin a book if there’s too much of them. Hilary Mantel is my goddess of writing historical dialogue, her Cromwell trilogy free of the “forsooths” of bad historical writing yet infused with the sense of a very different time. 

“I guess it was February or March of 1933, just before she was 18,” music producer John Hammond told me in an interview for the docs. “Billie Holiday was standing in for the owner of the speakeasy. It was called Monette Moore’s Place, and Monette Moore was working on a Broadway show, you know, downtown, and she couldn’t get there until about midnight. So she got this 17-year-old girl to stand in for her until she was able to get there herself. And I happened to get there early that night and I heard this incredible singer who sang in a style different from any I’d ever heard. Which is to say that she sang like a musical instrument. She’d take a pop tune of the day but she’d improvise on it just the way a horn would. Which is not what singers were not supposed to do in the early days.”

Girl singer, like boy singer. When did they graduate to being women and men?

Hammond was the one who put me in touch with the sidemen, but we also recorded some of his memories, and the interviews reveal a few crystalline moments in an active life. After hearing Lady Day at Monette Moore’s, he went on to arrange her first appearance on vinyl with Benny Goodman’s band. Decades later, Hammond signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen to CBS Records. Between the two, he produced a significant part of the music of the Big Band era, promoting careers he believed in while doing what he could, he felt, to promote racial equality. Hammond was the one who urged Benny Goodman to integrate his band, becoming the first band leader to showcase Black and white musicians playing side by side. 

“Benny Goodman’s, of course, was the first band that broke the colour line,” Hammond said. “That was in 1935 with the Benny Goodman Trio, and then the quartet, and then when he had up to six Black musicians in his band at one time. Charlie Barnett was the first person to follow Benny Goodman’s footsteps there. And Tommy Dorsey later had Charlie Shavers in his. So there was a modicum, let’s say, a minimum, I guess, of Black musicians in white bands. But only three or four white bands ever made an effort to do this, mostly because there was a lot of difficulty in travelling in the South. And even in the North there was an enormous amount of discrimination against Black musicians in a white band.”

Which is to say. The colour line. A modicum.

John Hammond is the only one from the Big Band docs that I ever met in person. Serendipitously, I heard him give a talk when we were living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1983 or 84. (Serendipity seems to play a big role in this story.) Hammond didn’t look at all well. Tall, a little gaunt, very WASPy–a Vanderbilt on his mother’s side–he sat on a sofa afterward with his hands clasped, his fingers fading to blue.

Heart disease. He would die three years later at the age of 76. I introduced myself and brought up the Big Band documentaries. He’d wanted me to go to New York, I reminded him, to record the sidemen in person and at greater length than I could do on the phone from Toronto.

“Missed opportunities,” he repeated sadly. 

I couldn’t read his expression, so courteous and still, and wondered what opportunities he might have missed, someone who’d both known Lady Day and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hammond had produced Pete Seeger. Benny Goodman had been his brother-in-law. Band leader Count Basie wrote a song about him called John’s Idea. 

On the other hand, Prince would write a song about him too, calling him out in “Avalanche” on One Nite Alone, released in 2002:

Hear the joyous sound of freedom

The Harlem Renaissance

Hear Duke Ellington and his band

Kick another jungle jam

Ooh, do you wanna dance?

Who’s that lurking in the shadows?

Mr. John Hammond with his pen in hand

Saying “Sign your kingdom over to me

And be known throughout the land!”

But, you ain’t got no money, you ain’t got no cash

So you sign your name and he claims innocence

Just like every snowflake in an avalanche. 

I saw Prince once too, by the way. This was when he lived in the Bridle Path neighbourhood of Toronto not far from the Canadian Film Centre, where I was a screenwriting resident. He was in the supermarket in the mall on the corner of Bayview and York Mills ordering something from the deli counter, dressed all in black and tiny, even tinier than my husband’s 5-foot-5 grandfather who said Jeepers. I’ve always liked that simple declarative line, “Just like every snowflake in an avalanche,” even while knowing I’m part of the avalanche.

The disappearance of the sidemen’s voices—well, there wasn’t any intent, but it’s part of a sad pattern of disappearance, isn’t it? Too many Black people’s and poor people’s un-famous voices snowed under.

I so desperately hope they find that third documentary. I don’t like to think of their voices being lost, their lives, their knowledge and their unique vocabulary.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been thinking about what remains. I’ve just started reading a book by archeologist David W. Anthony called The Horse, The Wheel And Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, which was published in 2010. Anthony notes the way we carry the past around with us, and not just in the shape of lips we get from our grandmother or our demonstrably heritable musical talent. (Or my lack of it.) “It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak.” 

As Anthony writes in the first chapter: 

“We all know that a past tense is usually constructed by adding -t or -ed to the verb (kick—kicked, miss—missed) and that some verbs require a change in the middle of the stem (run—ran, sing—sang). We are generally not told, however, that this vowel change was the older, original way of making a past tense. In fact, changing a vowel in the verb stem was the usual way to form a past tense probably about five thousand years ago.”

So the way we speak comes from both the time when we were young and from a time five thousand years in the past, and when you’re writing, it’s useful to keep that in mind. Also, at another level, to forget it. 

The interviewer asked Duke Ellington, “Where do you get your ideas?”

“It’s dreaming,” he replied. 

That’s the great Duke Ellington in the photo above.

Part Two of Two.