FEVER

PART I
Dreamland on the Train
ONE
In Dakota
ON THE BARE stage of a small town hall in the middle of an isolated farm village in a large, empty state, a blond girl sat at a piano with her back to the audience, playing the music she loved more than anything else in life. She was ten years old. The year was 1930. The town was Nortonville, North Dakota.
Friends and neighbors had gathered on folding chairs on the floor below. Like most of the people in those times, they had little to spare. The Depression was as unrelenting as the summer winds that scoured their parched topsoil and buffeted the town hall's six narrow windows that day. But the people of Nortonville were happy enough to listen to the girl play, and not only out of a sense of obligation--everyone knew she had troubles at home--but because the fifth-grader with the remarkably upbeat disposition was an obviously talented child.
Norma Egstrom had never performed in a venue as grand as the Nortonville town hall. The biggest room she'd ever played before was the practice space behind the sanctuary over at the modest Methodist church, where she sat at the Washburn upright piano. The town hall was the big time, the social anchor of a community boasting one bank, one hotel, threegrocers, a restaurant, a bowling alley, a blacksmith, a livery, a hardware store, and a railroad depot. A long, thin clapboard structure, free of architectural adornment, the hall had been raised from the dirt a dozen years before, in all of three weeks, by townspeople eager to see their crossroads claim some sort of recognition in the beleaguered grassy outback of the southeastern part of their state.
It was here that Nortonville gathered to watch the motion pictures, as kids chewed the sunflower seeds that grew in the endless ocean of fields surrounding their homes. It was here that citizens came to hear the lectures that brought news about the world beyond the plains horizon. It was in the hall that they skated, played basketball, and danced. And it was in the town hall that Norma Deloris Egstrom made her public debut in a recital on that summer afternoon in 1930.
Finishing her song, she rose from the piano stool and heard the applause: the unequivocal and tangible affection that only an audience can provide, a feeling that can be especially gratifying when acceptance is hard to come by in the usual places. She had always been a shy girl; she would later say that she'd sung before she talked. Now she'd spoken, and she'd been heard.




People in Nortonville who recall that day won't go so far as to say that the girl was the best child pianist they'd ever heard, but they still marvel at her dedication. They speak of her with pride, though some concede that even before she played a note, the members of the audience were already disposed to like her. Norma Egstrom's dad, a father of seven, the station manager for the humble Midland Continental Railroad depot just down the street, was a gentle, kind, whimsical man. But he was also a drinker. He wasn't morose, or somber, or violent, but neither was he responsible or accomplished. Marvin Egstrom was a "rail"--an itinerant depot manager and agent--at a time when depots and railroads dotted the landscape of America.
Before his sixth child's birth, Marvin's curriculum vitae had been a checkered one. He'd been a superintendent with the South Central Dakota line down in Sioux Falls until his drinking prompted the railroad to demote him to station agent. After that, he'd hooked up with the Midland Continental, up north in Jamestown, North Dakota, where, according to documents from the archives of the railroad's owner at the time, Egstrom had been associated with a scandal involving fraud and larceny.The railroad had exiled him to Nortonville, with a significant cut in salary, when Norma was eight.
Most people who knew him would say that Marvin Egstrom and the everyday did not, in general, make a good fit, especially in a part of the nation where a man was defined by the acreage he owned. The railroad people had no real place there. They worked for a machine that signified transience in a state that was still enough of a frontier to pride itself on roots, literal and figurative. The Midland, not one of the more impressive lines, comprised only seventy-seven miles of track running north and south from Wimbledon to Edgeley with just a dozen stops in between.
Marvin Egstrom was a pleasant, ineffectual man who, like nearly all of his family's members, had music in his soul. It manifested itself in unconventional ways, like the performance of an impromptu jig in the post office in the middle of the day, or a solo sung to the rails at two in the morning. "A couple of drinks," recalled one of Norma's classmates, "and her father could do the best soft-shoe dance you ever saw."
Marvin's wife, Min--Norma's stepmother--cut a very different figure. She was stout, dour, congenitally cross, and surrounded by rumors. One concerned the freak accident in South Dakota--involving a torch and a frozen valve on a drum of gasoline--that had blown her first husband's head off. Speculation would persist that the man had killed himself. His widow's stern and humorless demeanor did little to lessen the credence of the tale.
Other stories came closer to home, and were far more credible: Min Egstrom, it was whispered, beat her stepdaughter.
The people of Nortonville (population 125) knew little about Norma's early childhood up the road in Jamestown, the county seat. Jamestown could boast the college and the mighty Northern Pacific's terminal, as well as the headquarters station of the humble Midland. It was also the home of the "bughouse"--the state mental institution, south of town.
Norma's real mother, Selma Anderson Egstrom, had died in Jamestown at the age of thirty-nine, when Norma was four. In April 1924, she had given birth to her last child, a daughter named Jean, and was confined to her bed after that. On August 6, Selma passed away, leaving seven children: Norma, her five older brothers and sisters, and her infant sister. Marvin and Selma Egstrom had been married for twenty-one years.
With the Reverend Joseph Johnson of the Scandinavian Lutheran church presiding, the memorial service was held in the Egstrom home. Toosmall to peek over the coffin's side, Norma was lifted up to peer into her mother's casket. She would recall seeing a frail woman at rest. Selma Egstrom's remains were sent to her family's hometown of Volga, South Dakota, where she was buried. Norma's infant sister, Jean, went to live with Selma Egstrom's sister until the girl's death, at age fourteen, of "a heart ailment of long standing."
Norma was now the youngest in the household: a four-year-old with no mother, an alcoholic father, and her music. It was upon the occasion of her mother's death that Norma wrote her first song. "I remember writing a lyric to the song 'Melody of Love' when my mother died, when I was four," Peggy Lee would recall, many years later when her imagination and sense of her own myth had been heightened. "It wasn't a brilliant lyric, but I think it was interesting that a child would write one. I would walk around the house singing, 'Mama's gone to dreamland on the train.'"
Norma's memories of her mother's home were vivid. In later years she would recall Selma's crystal and fresh linen, the scents of her baking, and the melodies her mother sang and played on the keys of her prize possession: a Circassian walnut piano. As in so many households of the time, entertainment in the Egstrom house was left to the creativity of the family, and music had always been part of the Egstroms' lives. Years later, a classmate would remember that both Della and Marianne Egstrom, Norma's two older sisters, had exceptional voices. "But they did not," recalled the classmate, "have the oomph to do anything about it."


Six months after Selma's death, the Egstrom home burned to the ground. Until the family relocated to another place in Jamestown, Norma lived with the former in-laws, and then the parents, of Min Schaumberg, who had been working as the nurse for Norma's married sister Della's first child.
Norma enjoyed her time with the elder Schaumbergs as best she could. The old man's meerschaum pipe, his German-language newspaper, his old-world ways--these intrigued and comforted her. Best of all, they had a player piano. During the afternoons, the Schaumbergs would try to coax the girl into taking a nap in the parlor, but she spent more time on her knees pumping the pedals with her hands than she did sleeping.
More often, Norma would be in the yard outside, peering out through the black iron picket fence as she waited for her father to visit and take her away, if only for a meal. One day Marvin Egstrom arrived with news: MinSchaumberg would be Norma's new mother. Min's son, Edwin, would be her stepbrother. One year to the week after her mother's death, Marvin Egstrom officially took a new wife. The unusual figure they cut--the thin, pleasant Marvin and the fat, frowning Min--would prompt many remarks.
"I didn't want to imagine him loving her after mama," Norma would later write in her memoir, Miss Peggy Lee. "I often wondered why Daddy and Min got married. Was it because of what Marianne and I heard ... about Daddy being asked by [his supervisor] to 'fix the books a little for the good of the railroad'? It was something about the per diem reports. Was it because Daddy was drinking and Min knew and might tell on him?"
Far likelier was that Marvin Egstrom, a widower with several children, wanted a woman who could run his household while he tried to hold down his own job and his children did their share around the home and in the community. Like all the kids in Jamestown, Norma and her siblings who still lived at home--Marianne and brother Clair--would be sent out to help on local farms. It was Clair she was always closest to, though he did torment his little sister in the universal fashion of older siblings. When they had to harvest pails of gooseberries in a local park, Clair would stuff the bottom of his own bucket with grass and leaves and talk Norma into exchanging pails. When they'd help out on a local farm, Clair would get Norma to milk the cows that he was supposed to milk. As for Min's own son, Edwin, neither Norma nor Clair was particularly fond of him. The feeling was said to be mutual.
It is not hard to imagine bashful, quiet Norma acceding to her older brother's schemes. Self-conscious about her weight and no doubt baffled by the inexplicable (to a young child) disappearance of her mother, Norma had trouble meeting someone's glance. Her reticence even extended to the legendary local barnstormer whose aerial antics above the fields outside Jamestown provided prairie entertainment. Still, despite her shyness, Norma was fascinated with Ole Olson's Curtiss; it was said he could pick up a handkerchief with the wingtip of his plane. Norma wanted to go up into the sky so badly that one day, when Olson told her he'd take her if she'd dance the Charleston for him, dance she did, and up she went.
The escape was fleeting. Within days of her father's wedding, Norma's stepmother had wielded the willow switch she'd commanded the girl to pluck for punishment. Whatever the woman's motivation, discipline was frequent and formidable: "Florid face, bulging thyroid eyes, long blackhair to her waist pulled back in a bun, heavy breathing," was Norma's later recollection of Min. "Obese and strong as a horse, she beat everyone into a fright. Even the men were afraid of her."
Added to the physical beatings were psychological ones. Her stepmother would criticize Norma's physical attributes: She weighed too much; her hands were too big. "I grew up terribly self-conscious of [my hands]," Peggy Lee once said, many years later. "I would hold them behind me ... fold them up, never present them flat to view but edge-wise only. I was one of the quickest handshakers you ever saw."


When the Midland relocated Marvin and his family down to Nortonville, the Egstroms didn't have much to move. Norma took her love of music, and a subtle sound that had imprinted itself in her head during the years she'd lived just a few blocks from the busy Northern Pacific tracks: the downbeat of iron boxcar wheels clacking one after another, hundreds of them, forever on end. She would carry the rhythm wherever she went--just as she carried the songs she had learned to love--for the rest of her life.
Music surrounded her. With radio in its infancy, and with most of the prairie towns not yet electrified, it was routine for folks to play instruments in their homes. As Norma played her recital in 1930, windup Victrolas and Columbia Grafanolas across the land were featuring anthems designed to buoy the listeners: "Happy Days Are Here Again," "Puttin' On the Ritz." Even the instrumentals, like Ted Lewis's "On the Sunny Side of the Street," had a skip to them, a rhythmic current whose spirit could carry a girl along, afloat, away from the plains, with their infinite horizons. If Peggy Lee would grow to master the minimal, to practice the art of less-is-more, perhaps the empty, featureless plains of her childhood are owed some of the credit.


Make no mistake: Nortonville, North Dakota, was not a desperate place. It was a village where life was simply lived, and lived simply, a place where people would not abide self-pity. Largely of sensible Scandinavian stock, the residents did not complain about the things they couldn't control, like the windstorm that razed half of Bismarck, the state capital, one hundred miles due west, in 1929. Or the drought that made that same summer the driest in the state's history. The soil, already loosened by too many years of punishing droughts and settler farmers tearing up the prairie, was raked bywind that swept the Midwest from Texas to Canada and back again. The dust settled into people's pores, and the silt piled up a half-inch deep on the sills of Nortonville's windows. Women would hang sheets wetted at the town pump to keep the grit out of their homes. But nature's indifference wasn't personal, and it was best just to play the cards you'd been dealt.
Like any small town, Nortonville was full of characters. Harmless little Hoover, a dim-witted boy, would dip his bucket into the pond outside of town again and again, in an effort to drain it and catch the duck out in the middle. Odd, boozy Fred Bitz's in-laws, who sold Fred their moonshine, were the last folks to see him alive before his body was discovered in his old pickup in the middle of a bean field. The suspicion was suicide by carbon monoxide. No one was surprised; life was growing increasingly unsettled. New faces arrived every day, men and boys dripping off the sides of the boxcars. The hoboes, many of them young--at the Depression's height, the army of men on the road included a quarter-million teenagers--came to the door asking for food. They passed word along about who gave a "lump" (a bit of food in a bag) and who was a "knee-shaker" (a more giving sort who dispensed a full tray). The odd markings on the pole at the end of one street had a secret significance: They were a private code that pointed out where to go for food, shelter, or work.
Norma, as generous as she could afford (or was allowed) to be, gave the workers--among them the first Negro men she had ever seen--bread and butter. She felt for the boys turned out from their homes, their parents unable to support them. She felt for the older men stripped of their pride. But their freedom was intriguing, too. "I'll leave," Norma Egstrom thought, "when I find out where these railroad tracks lead."


The train, coming up from Edgeley, to the south, and down from Jamestown, to the north, carried more than vagrants. It brought news of life in Jamestown; reports of the biggest moonshiners' bust in history west of Chicago; news of farmers blockading roads to drive prices up. In Nortonville, the concern was more immediate: heating the homes. Local farmers had taken to burning the grain they couldn't sell, to keep their families warm.
The winter of 1930 was typical for North Dakota. The snow didn't stop until it had completely buried one house. The neighbors had to dig it out, starting with the chimney. It was the kind of winter in which a little girl,loaned out to help with chores, found her hands frozen by the water from the cistern. She thawed them by running them through snow.
On the bitterly cold day of January 5, 1930, the Nortonville Midland depot burned. It was the second time in ten years that fire had taken the Egstroms' residence. "A lot of the residents were in church," recalled Mattie Brandt, one of Norma's schoolmates. "The door burst open and someone yelled, 'The depot is on fire!' Everyone left church and went to the fire. When we got there, the fire was beyond control. And there was a second accident to be dealt with: Min had come down the stairs to get a pail of water and had slipped on the ice around the old pump and lay there with a broken leg."
The cause of the blaze was unknown. A cinder, perhaps, from a Midland engine's coal stove. Or perhaps the recklessness that curses an alcoholic home. The family moved into a tiny gabled clapboard house one block behind Main Street, which Clair and Marianne--Norma's only siblings still at home--would both soon leave: After the family's arrival in Nortonville, Norma helped Marianne run away to her sister Della's home in the eastern part of the state. Norma suffered a beating for not revealing where her sister had gone. Some years later, she would also be complicit in Clair's escape. "Marianne, Clair, and I seldom found much happiness" was her concise assessment, years later, of their time in Nortonville.
The house lay less than a hundred yards from the school, and for Norma, whose chores began early, the proximity was fortunate; her teacher would ring the schoolhouse bell extra long on the mornings that the young girl hadn't yet arrived. He'd keep ringing it until he saw her run out the door and sprint to school, lest she be marked tardy and have to face the consequences back home.
Next door to Norma lived a woman named Pearl Buck (no relation to the famous author), beloved in the county, the epitome of the independent North Dakota pioneer. So firm in her opinions was Mrs. Buck that she voted only once in her life. (Displeased with the outcome, she never voted again.) But Pearl was the best pianist and organist for counties around. She played the piano in the Methodist church, and would teach music to many girls before she finally passed away at the age of one hundred and three. Pearl found Norma Egstrom a delightful, funny little child. When Norma watched the older woman's hands on the piano keys, she became very serious. It was as if, somewhere inside her, something had opened up.




The day that the Otter Tail Power Company electrified Nortonville was an occasion for villagewide celebration. No one was more delighted than Norma. Before the power company had harnessed the current of the Otter Tail River back east in Minnesota, villagers had been forced to rely on the largesse of those few folks lucky enough to have basement generators. The arrival of power in every home brought new possibilities. What mattered most to Norma were the radios.
On a grand scale, radio changed the world, opening the doors to a new kind of town hall: a place where not only news but music could reach us all, from the hymns that were so dear to the staunch Lutherans to new sounds from distant cities--the orchestra of Duke Ellington, Chick Webb's rollicking band, the revolutionary trumpet solos of a man named Louis Armstrong.
But on a smaller scale, for a certain kind of child, radio wove together the disparate elements of a dream. For a young girl searching for a place to belong--a place that, until recently, she could only try to imagine--the melodies of a single song, from a distant city or an exotic rooftop ballroom, became more than tunes. They carried the first glimpse of an alternate life, facets of a picture of a very different future.
When Norma was eight years old, another little girl could ask her, "What are you going to be?" and Norma could answer, without really knowing what it meant, "I'm going to be in show business some day."


Picture Norma Egstrom like this, then, if you need a few snapshots: Imagine her at the piano by Pearl Buck's side, or, a few years later, splayed on her stomach listening to her family's new Atwater-Kent five-dial radio in the mahogany cabinet with the bell-horned speaker that looked like nothing so much as a blooming flower. Picture her singing along to the tunes of the day: "Night and Day," or "Georgia on My Mind," or a song that particularly appealed: "My Blue Heaven," with its lyric "Just Molly and me, and baby makes three." Or, to Norma's ears, "Just Mama and me, and Daddy makes three." To a girl with no mother, the lyrics of popular romantic ballads lent an idea of the way it might have been. If.
Lots of little girls were sitting in front of radios in 1930s North Dakota, but very few were hearing what Norma Egstrom did. This was obvious to those who hired Norma to babysit, only to discover quickly that she wasnot the most reliable of girls if there was a radio or a piano in the house. Not reliable at all. As a Nortonville neighbor recalls, "We had a new baby, and she was supposed to help out with the chores, but she wasn't very helpful. She just sang all the time."
Norma's generally buoyant nature concealed, but couldn't erase, a more confused, darker disposition. Though she tried to avoid it, she occasionally lingered on the shadowy side of the street. One particularly gloomy day, all alone, Norma raised a glass full of cleaning fluid emblazoned by a skull and crossbones to her lips. Interrupted by her stepbrother, she wound up pouring the bottle down the sink. It was all likely no more than a theatrical gesture--and a natural impulse for any child who had lost a parent at too young an age to understand death as anything but abandonment.
One day when she was ten, Norma's stomach started to hurt, and she had to ride eighteen miles to the south over unpaved roads to have her appendix removed. The procedure was performed in a doctor's office on the second floor of a dark brick building on the main street of Edgeley; in the next room, Norma heard the moans of a patient "taking the cure"--presumably, withdrawing from alcoholism. But she was back at her chores within a week. She cooked for threshing crews for good money, $2.50 an hour. She fed the pigs and the sheep of the neighboring farms. She also fed and plucked the chickens, which delighted her. One day, in a rainstorm, she watched a small bird open its beak, tilt its head back, fill its gullet with water, and tip forward to the ground dead, a scene so absurd as to be cosmically comical to her. Not surprisingly for a bright, creative kid looking for ways to deal with a difficult life, she was already developing an ironic and unconventional sense of humor, an irreverent and skewed way of looking at the world. She and her friend Ebbie told the same joke over and over, the one about the man whose toe and nose had been cut off and reattached in the wrong places: Whenever he had to blow his nose, he'd take off his shoe. It would make her laugh for the rest of her life.
She washed clothes, and scrubbed floors, and cleaned out barns. She delivered milk and eggs to neighbors. She was diligent and reliable, careful not to drop an egg or spill a bottle of milk. The consequences would have been severe, though no one in town was absolutely certain about the beatings. They never saw Min shove Norma's head into the garbage pail, or use the willow switch or the leather razor strop. Peggy Lee would say, yearslater, that these things happened. She would tell the stories again and again. One time, Norma related famously, Min used an iron skillet as her weapon, and the girl felt a crack inside her jaw. Decades hence, when every detail of the girl's face had become widely known, a distinctive sideways rocking of her jaw would come to be a signature, along with her coolness and hip nonchalance.
Norma did not generally confide in her father. She would later say that she had no desire to burden him any more than he was already burdened. She did not want to rely on his help. She would depend on her own ability to survive.
She would depend on her own resources--her talent, her inner muse, her growing determination to lighten the burdens she was now bearing at a very young age.
And they were considerable. It would have been difficult enough for an insecure and reserved child to suffer the inexplicable loss of a mother and the functional absence of a dad whose love was earnest but incomplete. Add to that the physical and psychological abuse rendered for no good reason at all, and Norma Egstrom's determination to break away, to use her gift as a passport to a promised land as soon as possible, is hardly baffling. Within a very few years, she would turn her back on the desolate, dark monotone of her prairie upbringing to seek love and acceptance in the multihued palaces of another land entirely. But for the time being, she would shoulder her burdens within.


By the time she was twelve, Norma was snapping her fingers to music featuring a beat decidedly at odds with Lutheran hymns. The sound bouncing out of radio speakers was hardly new to the people filling the clubs of New Orleans and Kansas City, Chicago and New York, or to the sophisticated listeners who had spent the previous decade imbibing the music called jazz. Norma, getting her first taste of the music that would change her life, didn't know that Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington were packing them in over in London, where--as always--the Europeans were light-years ahead of the Americans.
She didn't know about the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, rocking New York's Paramount Theater, or the wild act of two kids named Bing Crosby and Al Rinker, or the cornet accompaniment of Bix Beiderbecke, the firstwhite jazzman to prove that the new music crossed racial barriers. She hadn't heard of the work of Louis Armstrong, who seemed to be dreaming up something absolutely original every time he set foot on a stage. Norma had not yet listened to the new female voices, either. She hadn't encountered the women who had supplanted the soprano males whose megaphoned warblings had traditionally accompanied dance bands: Bessie Smith, who was packing them in at the Alhambra in Harlem, and Al Rinker's cousin Mildred Bailey, who would be considered the greatest white female jazz singer for a few more decades, until a girl named Peggy Lee stole her crown.
Norma's ears were more attuned to devotional melody and sentimental pop. She had never read R.W.S. Mendl's The Appeal of Jazz, written in the late twenties. But as her treasured radio began to introduce her to the rhythms, beats, and inflections that would change her from the inside out, she would have appreciated Mendl's boast: "Jazz, or syncopated dance music, appeals to more people in the world than any other form of music."
Untrained (and never to be) in music theory, she couldn't have explained what was happening technically. She couldn't have sensed that the European canon--the backbone of the music she sang at church--was blending with African rhythms coming out of the South, out of Bill Basie's stride piano over in Kansas City, out of Fletcher Henderson's wild piano stylings up in Harlem. She would not, could not have known that the frenzied, insistent 2/4 ragtime beat of the jazz of the last few decades was stretching out into 4/4--the tempo of a heartbeat, as an arranger named Nelson Riddle would say years later.
She certainly knew nothing of the place where the siren song of jazz was coming from most entrancingly: a block of about-to-be-famous speakeasies on West Fifty-second Street in New York City. Halfway between the Village and Harlem, West Fifty-second sampled from both of the island's extremes. The block that drew musicians of all stripes fronted a total of thirty-eight speakeasies boasting bad liquor, good music, and a heady haven from Prohibition. Norma knew nothing of an occurrence on West Fifty-second one night in 1933, when, at 10:30 in the evening, two men met in a club called the Onyx. They were men whose backgrounds would have made their acquaintance unlikely, if not impossible, outside the world of the new music. And they would alter not only Norma's life, but those of a million musicians who would change the sound America loved.




On that fateful night in New York, John Hammond, society swell, uttered the Onyx's three-syllable password--Eight Oh Two, the local of the musicians' union--then walked through the door to wait for the arrival of a clarinet player raised in the Jewish ghetto of Chicago.
At first glance, or on paper, the handsome, twenty-three-year-old Hammond, a familiar Fifty-second Street patron, didn't fit the profile of the average "speak" denizen. He'd been raised in a household of sixteen servants and owed it all--Hotchkiss, Yale--to the New York Central Railroad, founded by his grandfather, Commodore Vanderbilt, one of the most influential railroad barons in history. But the grave black-and-orange volume of the annual Social Register was not the book where John Hammond's name was destined to be most prominently featured.
In 1922, on a trip to London at the age of twelve, Hammond had heard his first jazz band: Paul Specht's Georgians, led by one of the first bandleaders to experiment in that decade with "arranged jazz." At first listening, something had shifted inside Hammond. Thereafter, on vacations from his red-brick prep school in Connecticut's Litchfield County, or later from the Yale campus in New Haven, he did not hang out in the family mansion. He visited Fifty-second Street, and the Village, and Harlem, where he became a regular at some of the hotter clubs: the Yeah Man, the Hotcha, the Alhambra Grill.
Hammond was not the first white kid of privilege to be drawn to places where music defies societal convention. Nor was he the first prep-Ivy sort to discover the effect of unfamiliar rhythms on the bluest of bloods. But he was one of the first to devote his life to the marriage of black beat and white convention. From behind the scenes, John Hammond would do more to change the course of American popular music than any other single musician ever did.
By his early twenties, Hammond was a correspondent for British Gramophone and Melody Maker magazines, reporting for Londoners on the burgeoning U.S. jazz scene, and when he was back home, rounding up jazz musicians for English recordings. Britannia had a taste for the new stuff. In particular, British record executive Sir Louis Sterling wanted to make records with the young clarinetist Benny Goodman, a white kid from Chicago who had made a name for himself. Did Hammond know Goodman? Could he sign him?
Hammond may not have let on that they had met and hadn't clicked--hardly a surprise, given Benny's reserved demeanor and Hammond's confident strut. Then there was Hammond's obvious bias toward black musicians. To top it off, Hammond had been less than enthralled by Benny's playing ("I felt that Benny was a good clarinet player," Hammond would write in his autobiography, "although no better than Jimmy Dorsey, and less good than several black clarinetists I could think of").
But business was business, and Hammond promised to deliver four sides by Goodman. Hammond's mission at the Onyx on that fateful night in 1933 was to bring home the bacon. "I have a British contract," he told Benny, who was persuaded to listen: Goodman was, at the time, bringing in the sum total of $50 a week for a radio show. When Hammond relayed the news that Sterling wanted a "mixed" band, with Lionel Hampton on vibes and Teddy Wilson on piano, Benny balked--not out of prejudice, but pragmatism: The times were not enlightened enough for Goodman to record with Negroes. Nonetheless, there were some white guys around who might be able to do a passable job: Benny's quintet would ultimately include drummer nonpareil Gene Krupa and fabled trombonist Jack Teagarden.
Their first two sides were a pleasant enough Fats Waller tune called "Aintcha Glad" and a number called "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," written for a Broadway revue called Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1932 by a couple of guys attracting a lot of attention: Harold Arlen, a cantor's son from Buffalo, and his wordsmith partner, Ted Koehler.
Hammond wasn't overly optimistic when Benny's band arrived at the Columbia studios in New York; he thought both songs too commercial for what he'd promised to deliver--until Benny took the reins in the studio. "He suddenly abandoned the commercial considerations that had dominated his thinking about the date up to now," wrote Ross Firestone in his biography of Goodman, "and began to tear the arrangements apart, setting riff backgrounds here, assigning solo spots there, giving himself over to the spirit of the music that Hammond had been trying so hard to instill in him."
The feel was infectious. The record sold an impressive five thousand copies--the first ripple of a wave that, in a very few years, would buoy a whole nation. A wave that would lift and carry Norma Egstrom away.


In 1933, as a thirteen-year-old, all Norma could hope for was to catch the stuff riding the airwaves out of distant Fargo, a hundred miles east, onWDAY: Basie's work with Benny Moten's band, which she loved, and Lester Young's tenor sax, with the Blue Devils of Minneapolis, Arlen's dark, langorous, enduring "Stormy Weather," and Ellington's ultimately cool "Sophisticated Lady." Maybe, if she was lucky, she got to hear Fletcher Henderson's orchestra itself, from a New York studio.
All of them were coming from the same place: a land where any outsider with a taste for a beat might belong. With their joyous urgency, their rhythmic flow, these songs and anarchic stylings spoke to a girl whose true language, from the very start, had been the music inside her. They took her someplace the straighter rails never ventured.
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Richmond