It Does Not Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing-With Swing-master Benny Goodman In Mind

By Zack James

“Jesus, now that you mentioned Mr. Lawrence, our seventh grade music teacher, I am starting to remember some other stuff about the guy, about what a creep he was trying to break us from our unbreakable bond with rock and roll,” Seth Garth said to Jack Callahan as they both hoisted their third, or was it fourth, double scotch with water chaser, an old habit for both of them since the chaser made the drink last longer in the old days when they were short of dough and were sipping their drinks to stretch out the evening. The gist of what Seth had told Jack was in response to Jack’s remembering the very first time that they had heard Woody Guthrie and what song they had learned first. That gist of talk was based on Seth, an old time folk music critic, mainly for The Eye out on the West Coast having recently seen in a folk magazine the announcement that the Smithsonian /Folkway operation was finally putting out a treasure trove in four CDs of some Woody Guthrie songs recorded by Moses Asch during World War II. Seth for the life of him could not remember what song he had heard and when of Guthrie’s and so he had called upon Jack to meet him at their favorite watering hole the Erie Grille in Riverdale where they both were now residing (and after varying absences had grown up in the town). Jack had answered that it had been in Mr. Lawrence’s seventh grade music class and the song had been the alternative national anthem-This Land Is Your Land. 

The method to Mr. Lawrence’s madness, to ween the kids off of rock and roll, had gone beyond trying to foist silly folk music off on them since that was an exotic plant at the time and shortly before the big break-out folk minute of the early 1960sbut to drown them in any other kind of music he could think to distract, or attempt to distract them with, especially during lunch when they played their transistor radios and drove him crazy with their rock and roll. [As a younger teaching staff member, hire Seth found out later because he was younger and perhaps could “relate” to the kids and their weird music more than the old fogies who were hanging around waiting for their pension or the principal who had no “cred” on the subject of rock and roll at all, he drew the onerous lunch room duty task reflecting his junior status.] A few times, if you could believe this he tried to get them interested in jazz, in swing music, what each and every one of them considered the music that their parents listened to and which had driven them to the transistors in the first place.

Seth recalled that in his own household his mother, the usually complaint and complacent Delores, refused, utterly refused to have her housewifely duties disturbed by maddening rock and roll on the kitchen radio which she faithfully turned to WJDA which played Frank Sinatra, The Inkspots, Peggy Lee, the McGuire Sisters, the Andrews Sisters and all the rest which went wafting through the house and on more than one occasion drove him from the pre-transistor house. Of course the living room family radio which provided the Saturday night rest entertainment was totally off-limits to rock and roll, to  the devil’s music, that term her exact expression which she had grabbed from Mr. Fleck, the Pentecostal minister where they worshipped.        

Worse, worse of all Mr. Lawrence had tried to get his charges interested in the music of Benny Goodman, the so-called “king of swing.” That was all Seth needed to hear as he blurted out in front of the class “My mother and father dance to that pokey stuff on Saturday nights and they are barely moving when they dance. I am not going to listen to that here.” Needless to say Seth stayed after school a number of afternoons for his transgression. But he felt vindicated in what he had uttered and took the punishment like a soldier.

Still it did no good as Mr. Lawrence played something called Blue Skies which was his parents’ “their song.” Something else by a guy named Cole Porter that Benny Goodman made famous. It got no better when Mr. Lawrence played stuff with Peggy Lee because to his mother’s chagrin his father had a “crush” on old Peggy and Seth had admit to Jack that in those day he secretly thought she was kind of sexy looking at that.  

But that was then. A few nights after Seth and Jack were cutting up old touches, after drinking themselves to melancholia, Seth went to the library and picked up an old Benny Goodman CD with plenty of American Songbook stuff on it. Guess what old Seth, old rock and roll devotee Seth with an overhang of folk, blues, and a little mountain music started to pop his fingers to the beat, started laughing to himself that he now knew what they meant when they said “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.” And they were right. Just ask Benny,