Let's Dance: Popular Music in the 1930s - Hardcover

Arnold Shaw was Director of the Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He wrote The Jazz Age, which won as ASCAP/Deems Taylor Prize in 1988. He died in 1989, soon after completing the manuscript for Let's Dance. Bill Willard is Director of the Arnold Shaw Research Center for Popular Music at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives in Las Vegas

The history of popular music in the 1930s, a decade that boasted such eminent figures as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hart, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen, is a story worth readingAbut not as presented here. Shaw, who died in 1989, was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught popular music history courses and established the school's Research Center for Popular Music. In his foreword, Williard rather confusedly explains that the manuscript for this, Shaw's 13th book, "had often repeated numerous situation accounts and names, necessitating proper juxtaposition to keep the Shaw continuity and meticulously glowing writing style a fascinating adventure into a marvelously productive musical timespan." With that established, Williard presents seven introductory chapters covering Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, movie music, Broadway shows, Swing Street (52nd Street), radio's weekly Hit Parade program and the rise of the big bands. The book goes on with a chapter-by-chapter survey of each year's song hits, inevitably repeating information in the first seven chapters. While there are interesting anecdotes scattered throughout the work, the book is poorly organized and awkwardly written. On a single page, for example, the text wanders from Bob Hope's singing "I Can't Get Started with You" with Eve Arden, to Fats Waller singing two comedy hits, to a suicide song imported from Hungary, to a discussion of the "cataclysmic events of 1936" (including the Duke of Windsor's abdication), to the market for Latin rhythms, to Jeannette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy's famed "Indian Love Call" duet, to a dance scene with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Few readers will have the patience to slog through this mass of unrelated information.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.