Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams… by Andrew S. Berish (2012)

Now, here is a really clever idea on how to research a jazz-related topic and not to approach it entirely the academic way.
Andrew Berish, assistant Professor of cultural studies at the University of South Florida, elaborates on the important themes of travel, mobility, space and authorship as related to cultural effects, segregation, interdependency, musical influences and modernity in the music of the big bands of the 1930s and ’40s.

Thus his analysis of travel is not limited to highways, toll roads or asphalt interceptions. Just as the blues spread by travel and so making local songs, guitar techniques and topics popular in other counties and states due to traveling workers/musicians, some decades later, jazz was spread by means more powerful and quicker. Travel, rambling, mobility and trains in particular have always been important topics in countless blues lyrics; this fascination with motion saw a new stage when cars became affordable, some bands rode in their own train wagons, and planes now allowed gigs on the other American coast on the next day. This is one of the reasons why the names of many compositions of the day ring with speed, trains and stomping engines.

This book is both a travelogue of 1930s and 1940s life on the road (if you were a jazz musician) and a history of jazz appreciation via the latest network of highways and radio broadcasts (if you were a radio listener or a concert goer.) Both experiences were changed fundamentally in those years while highways and freeways were built; suddenly, the country seemingly became smaller, since cars and new roads connected new regions.

While this development put formerly remote places on the map, it simultaneously met resistance as Berish demonstrates: many patrons of various venues still preferred times when ballrooms were strictly segregated, hot bands (mostly black bands) were a “problem” of other regions, and black people were invisible working in the kitchen, behind the bar or at the hat rack.

So by comparing and analyzing the routes, touring schedules and modes of travel of four popular jazz musicians and their bands, the importance of all sorts of communication, transport and thereby musical and intellectual force is demonstrated very elaborately. While concentrating on Jan Garber, Charlie Barnet, Duke Ellington and Charlie Christian, Mr. Berish explains both the distance the protagonists had to each other as well as the sometimes extremely contrasting effect the music industry and their audiences had on their individual status and success.

By concentrating on swing music we witness the two black and two white jazz musicians making different experiences with regard to place, modes of travel and meeting with audience expectations.

Many ballrooms also had a recording room where live broadcasts were produced and hence a sense of place then was additionally conveyed by the radio, and people thousands of miles away suddenly experienced their own peculiar sense of place even though they were merely tuning in to a radio station.

The sense of mobility that definitely influenced social developments and challenged racial relationships is actually one of Berish’s major topics. And naturally all the other features of mobility mentioned earlier are interrelated. “Big band jazz of the 1930s and’40s helped shape America’s perception of the spaces of their lives and created locales infused with particular meanings. The jazz of the era provided listeners and musicians with new maps of their reality” (p. 217).

We today have to keep in mind that in the era described jazz music was the sound of the day, with music charts and the entertainment sectors of the whole country full of jazz music. And Basie, Miller and Ellington were superstars (while jazz in the 30s and 40s could mean hot jazz, swing, sweet jazz, or pop tunes disguised as jazz performed by mostly all-white bands in countless hotel lounges).

It is because jazz played such a prominent role that many interesting conclusions about American popular culture and the changing social environment represented by Berish survived. Many recollections, memories, biographies and anecdotes of the jazz life luckily are preserved on paper as well as on shellac. Add to this many anecdotes from band leaders and musicians about car culture, hotel regulations, song arrangements, venues and segregated audiences, you have a compact impression of what is waiting for you in the book.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert (2014)

Andrew S. Berish. Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s. University of Chicago Press, 2012, 313 p.