The holiday seasons of 1938 and 1939 in New York City were graced by two special concerts that marked a turning point in our musical history. The “From Spirituals To Swing” concerts on December 23, 1938 and December 24, 1939 at Carnegie Hall were a coming-out party for blues, jazz, and African-American music in general. Carnegie Hall was the citadel of performing arts, and the appearance of black and white artists playing music of African-American origin for an integrated audience was revolutionary for the times. Among the jazz greats to perform at these concerts were Count Basie, James P. Johnson, Lester Young, Benny Goodman, and Sidney Bechet. Producer John Hammond had trouble finding a sponsor for such an event. Even the NAACP wouldn’t help, and in the end Hammond got sponsorship from The New Masses, a Marxist journal– which did nothing to reduce the controversy!

A number of musical phenomena grew from these concerts. The boogie woogie craze of the late 30s and early 40s was represented by all three of the “kings of boogie woogie,” Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson. The advent of a loud and provocative vocal style in singers who became known as “blues shouters” got its start at “Spirituals To Swing” with two of the shouters, Jimmy Rushing and the great Joe Turner, who would go on to “Shake, Rattle, & Roll” fame in the 1950s. Sister Rosetta Tharpe gave us a taste of gospel music (with some humor!), which was just emerging as a commercial entity at the time. The Golden Gate Quartet, perhaps the greatest gospel group of all, also sang splendidly.

The blues-folk revival that would flower in the postwar years got its start here too, with harmonica player Sonny Terry, and Big Bill Broonzy, who was called in when John Hammond found out that Robert Johnson, whom he very much wanted for the concerts, was dead. A seasoned musical veteran, though unknown to whites, Broonzy was introduced as a “sharecropper,” and he played the part to the hilt.

Hammond still played two Robert Johnson songs from records from the stage, launching the Robert Johnson myth in the process. For some reason John Hammond felt the need to embellish the history of the concerts in later years, putting studio recordings in with the actual concert recordings on the albums he produced, and recording fake stage intros in 1958 that never took place at the concerts, having the engineer speed up the tapes a bit to give him the higher voice he thought he had back in the 1930s. This kind of smoke-and-mirrors deception would characterize the folk revival of later years as well, but “Spirituals To Swing” was a major milestone in our country’s musical and social history.

Picture for “From Spirituals To Swing” is from reproduction of the
program for that event, included in the CD boxed set reissue of the
concert “From Spirituals To Swing” on the Vanguard label.