On January 18, 1956 Elvis Presley made his first national television appearance as a guest on Stage Show, a variety hour hosted by the big band leaders Tommy Dorsey and his brother, Jimmy. Tommy, who had fought racism with raw physical courage his entire career, had been using the show to feature African American greats such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Ratings began to suffer. Tommy booked the 21-year-old unknown as a sop to white southerners. In rehearsal, the members of the Dorsey Orchestra were contemptuous. One of them later admitted, “We didn’t like him because he looked dirty, and he needed a haircut. We thought he never bathed.” Tommy was a classy perfectionist. His musicians were supremely talented and highly disciplined professionals, widely celebrated for their precision—the best, well dressed.
The clash of styles was grating, but Tommy’s eye for spotting talent did not desert him even then. He prophesied to his incredulous players, “You see that guy Elvis Presley—he’s going to be one of the biggest names in show business in a short time.” Elvis wore a black shirt and sang “Shake, Rattle and Roll” while gyrating his body. The age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll was born.
Things were different back in the good old days of sex, drugs, and swing. Tommy Dorsey (1905-1956), “The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” had a penthouse suite at the top of that world, and Peter J. Levinson tells his story in a well-researched and engaging biography. In the Dorsey Orchestra’s exquisite rendition of “Marie,” the members of the band chant the phrase that Levinson has chosen as his subtitle, “Livin’ in a Great Big Way.” For Dorsey, such plentitude included habitual infidelity (he was in the midst of his third divorce when he died, and he had not been faithful to any of his wives), a drinking problem, and pill popping (the New York Times headline on his death at the age of 51 said it all: “Dorsey Drugged When He Choked”).
But the music was good. Really good. Levinson’s book draws on numerous interviews with performers who saw Dorsey’s dark side—he could be cruel, violent, bad-tempered, controlling, sadistic, and vindictive—and yet who could not help but honor and revere him. The splendor of that sound is the thing.
Dorsey grew up in Pennsylvania coal-mining country. His father toiled hard for little pay in that industry for twenty years before finally escaping by becoming a music teacher. “Pop” Dorsey was determined that his boys would not end up working in the mines. He forced them to practice their instruments four hours a day. Tommy became one of the greatest trombonists of his generation, while his older brother Jimmy rose as high blowing into a saxophone. They started touring with bands in their mid-teens, graduating into the unrivaled crew of Paul Whiteman, the “King of Jazz,” before founding the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in their twenties. This story was told in the 1947 feature film, The Fabulous Dorseys. Alas, it should have been called The Fighting Dorseys. Tommy had an unfortunate habit of expressing a divergent point of view by smashing his brother’s saxophone. But who’s complaining? After a decisive fraternal confrontation in 1935, there were two phenomenal Dorsey bands instead of just one.
By that time, the virtuosity of both Dorsey brothers was well established. Tommy transformed the very possibilities imaginable for the trombone. He did not play it with blithe gusto but rather coaxed silken, lyrical tones out of the instrument. Bing Crosby was also working for Whiteman in the 1920s, and Dorsey learned how to make a trombone sound like the singing voice of a romantic crooner.
Indeed, so many greats were together in those early days. In prohibition-era New York, the speak-easy of choice for this cadre of musicians was Plunkett’s on West Fifty-Third Street. Deference was paid to the trombonist’s disciplined commitment to heavy drinking in the place’s very password: “Tommy Dorsey sent me.” At Plunkett’s, beside Tommy and Bing, one could also run into Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Bix Beiderbecke, and Artie Shaw. Together, they roared their way through the Twenties, sacrificing their livers in the noble cause of civil dis0.obedience against an unjust law.
Tommy’s gift for recognizing talent and potential meant that his band was populated with a dazzling array of top performers. Bunny Berigan was one of his trumpeters, as was Charlie Shavers. As Shavers was an African American, Dorsey had one of the few bands that was racially integrated. Many today have forgotten or never knew what a powerful taboo there once was against mixed musical groups. Tommy had to fight on behalf of his black musicians perpetually. When the tour went South, Shavers joked that the “N.C.” on their itinerary stood for “No Charlie.” Even at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Tommy had to threaten that the whole band would walk out to ensure that Shavers would be allowed onstage. In another of many such confrontations, brandishing nothing more lethal than a trombone, Tommy single-handedly scared off five angry racists armed with baseball bats.
A string of Dorsey performers eventually founded their own bands. Tommy actually put up the money for one of his erstwhile players, Glenn Miller, to start his own orchestra. Bob Crosby was a Dorsey singer before founding his band. Two celebrated drummers worked for Tommy before organizing their own bands, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. Like a candle in the windy age of the electric guitar, Tommy’s influence lingered on in full view of American popular culture all the way to 1992. Only then did the former Dorsey trumpeter Doc Severinsen retire from leading the Tonight Show band.
Musicians and singers who passed through the Dorsey Orchestra line up in Levinson’s volume to declare that working with Tommy made them better at their craft. Just watching Tommy perform his solos was a musical education. He had an uncanny mastery of breathing, working his way seamlessly through a long section of music on one gulp of air. He had perfect control, even in the high register. He knew how to extract the emotional potential embedded in a piece of music.
Not least of all, Tommy recruited and trained Frank Sinatra. If Tommy learned to play trombone like Bing Crosby sang, the cycle came full circle when Sinatra learned how to sing like Tommy played trombone. Sinatra once testified, “The two most important people in my life have been my mother and Tommy Dorsey.” This is particularly apt as Tommy became a father figure for him (and the godfather of his first child). Sinatra did not merely learn the business from Tommy. He modeled himself on him, right down to using the same obscure brand of foreign toothpaste. Over the course of 2 years, he recorded 83 songs with the Dorsey Orchestra. In that span, Sinatra finished his apprenticeship and became a star in his own right, ready for a solo career.
In its first two decades, rock ‘n’ roll, at its best, became a protest against the conformity and materialism that flourished in the postwar boom. Unkempt hair and ragged clothes served to prompt reflection on the shallowness of so much of what passed for the American dream. Swing played the opposite role back when times were lean. It was the soundtrack for America’s worst economic depression and the most destructive war in the history of the human race. Winston Churchill enthused to Sinatra that his Dorsey Orchestra recordings were a vital resource for Londoners enduring the danger and austerity of the Blitz. Tommy and his ilk out there livin’ in a great big way were a kind of sign and promise that happy days would be here again. Tommy was ready to step up and serve his nation in this way. He reputedly had the first swimming pool in the state of New Jersey. He owned a 98-foot yacht, The Sentimentalist. He could be spotted driving his Cadillac convertible at 75 miles per hour while shaving. His personal wardrobe ran to 60 suits and 40 pairs of shoes. A quintessential bandstand look for Tommy Dorsey was a white dinner jacket and shirt with a black bowtie and trousers.
Tommy also loyally served in the war’s other theater of cultural resistance, those lush and zany Hollywood musicals with large casts, big sounds, and plenty of tuxedos and dancing. The ending was guaranteed to be not only a happy one but an extravaganza. If your own emotional economy is in a slump, try self-medicating with Girl Crazy (1943) and see if the finale with Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and Tommy and his band all joyfully making music together does the trick. Or A Song Is Born (1948), featuring Tommy with an all-star ensemble that includes Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and Louis Armstrong.
Even the very notion of a “big” band was an expression of a defiant people determined to see plentitude. At its height, the Dorsey Orchestra comprised more than thirty musicians and singers. It is often said that the big bands died out after World War II because it was too expensive to pay all those people and take them on the road. But no one made that argument during the Great Depression. It was only in the postwar era, when money began to flow all too freely, that four musicians onstage alone—or even just a solitary singer strumming his or her guitar—started to have cultural resonance. Although this analysis is mine rather than Levinson’s, Tommy’s biographer does dryly explain why Sinatra’s marriage to Mia Farrow, who had imbibed the latest sensibility of New Age earnestness, was star-crossed: “Maharishis and martinis simply didn’t mix.” Apparently Frank was shaken rather than stirred.
Dorsey’s band swung gloriously while it lasted, though. And the music still holds up. If it’s been a while, treat yourself and listen to Dorsey Orchestra classics such as “Song of India,” “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,” or “Opus No. 1.” Tommy achieved a monumental 186 pop chart hits. He was the biggest selling artist in the history of RCA Victor—that is, until they signed Elvis Presley. We live in uncertain times. Along with the canned goods and duct tape, stockpile some Dorsey recordings just in case.
Timothy Larsen is professor of theology at Wheaton College. His most recent book, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
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