When John Hammond died in 1987, his "discoveries" of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan were cited in his front-page New York Times obituary. He might as easily have been credited with discovering Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom he signed to recording contracts in a long career as a producer for Columbia Records (now owned by Sony) and its subsidiaries. Dunstan Prial's exhaustively researched The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music ($25, Farrar, Straus Giroux) covers the career of this once legendary figure.
A Vanderbilt heir, Hammond grew up in Manhattan and lived in a mansion off Fifth Avenue, a short bus ride away from Harlem, whose nightspots and jazz clubs he first visited in the 1920s while he was still in his teens. His nocturnal habits made him a familiar figure on the scene. Shortly after dropping out of Yale, he began writing articles for music magazines and touting his own early efforts as a DJ, manager of jazz artists and record producer--dubious credentials by current journalistic standards.
Among his early accomplishments: the Bessie Smith session that produced the memorable "Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer)," a sentiment, delivered with full-throated gusto by the great blues diva, that takes you a long way from summers at Newport. Hammond's personal charm and generosity toward the musicians he supported didn't stop him from developing a reputation as an acerbic critic--he had running battles in print with Duke Ellington--and as a sometimes unwelcome meddler in the bands, like Count Basie's and Benny Goodman's, that he could influence.
But in the studio he was laissez faire all the way, typically sitting in some corner working his way through newspapers and political magazines while the musicians were left on their own.
Hammond deserves some credit for stepping out of the way when an extraordinary stream of sides were recorded by the young Billie Holiday. Led mostly by the pianist Teddy Wilson, these sessions remain the epitome of small-band jazz of the '30s and are as perfect in their way as anything American culture has produced. When Hammond stepped in, things sometimes got messy: His idea of recording Paul Robeson and Aretha Franklin as jazz singers did little for their careers.
Wilson figured in another of Hammond's ongoing concerns, when Hammond persuaded Goodman (later to become Hammond's brother-in-law) to hire Wilson, making Goodman's group the first prominent integrated band. The need to extend civil rights to the people responsible for the music he loved was clear to Hammond from the beginning. He was on the NAACP's board for decades--quitting when he thought it assumed too moderate a position--and during his World War II service he had the hopeless task of trying to boost the morale of ill-treated black recruits at Southern army bases.
Hammond's influence diminished after the war. Though his tastes extended to blues and gospel, he had little interest in postwar jazz or rock 'n' roll. But his sinecure at Columbia allowed him to sign and promote Dylan, Franklin and Springsteen, although having these "discoveries" introduced to a prominent industry figure was much less dramatic than hearing a band on the radio and driving from New York to Kansas City to sign up Count Basie.
This book corrects many of the errors of fact and omissions that appeared in Hammond's autobiography and includes well-placed biographies of the musicians he worked with and colorful details about Harlem in the '30s, the '60s folk scene and the jazz geography of Kansas City and Oklahoma City. The tone is generally laudatory, though balanced enough that one can appreciate Hammond's critics, who thought he was good at spotting raw talent but may have received more credit than he deserved.
How influential was Hammond?
Count Basie would have made it to New York, with or without him. And no doubt Dylan would have just as decisively jumped out of the pack of early-'60s protest singers had he signed up with Elektra instead of Columbia. And with or without Hammond, no one was going to stop the long march to civil rights for American blacks.
And no one "discovers" an Aretha Franklin, just as surely as America existed before Columbus. But a few more years of frustration might have killed the careers of some of the musicians Hammond scouted. At least one of them barely escaped oblivion.
Working on a tip from jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, Hammond made his way to Oklahoma City in 1939 to listen to an electric guitar player. The plane trip from Chicago to Oklahoma City involved eight stops over 15 hours. A short time later, Hammond got the guitarist together with Benny Goodman.
They hit it off musically and were soon appearing together in the country's most popular swing band. The only recordings that we have of Charlie Christian, which have influenced each successive generation of guitarists and contributed so much to the distinctive sound of rock 'n' roll, were produced in the brief span that he played with Goodman. Christian died in 1942 at the age of 25.
Sometimes, timing is everything.
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