Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry by Gareth Murphy

success stories of the period, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Representing sixteen orchestras, Mills took over an entire floor next to Brunswick’s head office at 799 Seventh Avenue. Knowing record companies had no budgets to produce jazz records, he underwrote their recording costs on the condition that his publishing catalog be used. With a few thousand sales per record, everybody walked away with a small profit. The records were calling cards for his bands and repertoire, and as songs like “Minnie the Moocher” amply illustrated, the occasional smash hit flew out of the salami machine.
    Apart from Irving Mills, New York’s music industry fell deathly silent as the American economy hit rock bottom around 1932 and 1933. Yet it was from this dead sea that probably the greatest-ever record man landed some giant fish. Enter a young writer by the name of John Hammond.
    While Irving Mills symbolized the caricature of the cigar-puffing entertainment impresario, Hammond was an entirely different breed of jazz adventurer, eloquent, bohemian, and fiercely principled. The names of the most respected jazz masters of the era—King Oliver, Earl Hines, and Duke Ellington—suggested a jazz aristocracy was forming, Hammond really was an aristocrat. His mother, Emily, was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Dutch tycoon who built America’s railroads. As everyone knew, the Vanderbilts were among the richest, most powerful WASP dynasties in the land.
    Although his father was the son of a Civil War general and a successful banker in his own right, the Hammonds were benefactors of Vanderbilt trust funds and property holdings. Summers were spent in the idyllic surroundings of Lenox, Massachusetts, which they visited in their very own train carriage. His parents had been given a luxurious five-story metropolitan palace on Ninety-first Street, just off Fifth Avenue and Central Park. It had a domestic staff of sixteen and contained marble staircases, elevators, a library, a squash court, and a ballroom big enough to comfortably seat two hundred.
    Born in 1910, John Hammond was the only boy following four sisters, which may have explained his solitary tendencies. Classical music constantly poured through the mansion’s many oak-paneled rooms, decorated with all the opulence of European Baroque design. Virtuoso teachers regularly came to give lessons to the family, and the latest Victrolas played Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and all the European masters.
    His sisters often found their younger brother hiding downstairs in the servants’ quarters, legs dangling from a chair, listening to popular records on a battered Grafanola. Although young John was taught classical viola, he developed a fascination with black people and their reaction to music. The family servants would break into dances and sing along, and they were never afraid to cry over songs. He also observed with a sense of injustice how they stiffened as they walked upstairs. John devoured all of New York’s entertainment magazines, notably Variety, and avidly collected records. “In the grooves of those primitive early discs I found in my house, I discovered a new world,” he would write.
    As was standard for a boy of Vanderbilt lineage, he was sent off to the respected boarding school Hotchkiss, where, under the guidance of a particularly inspirational English teacher, his communication skills were carefully groomed. After Sunday church, his English teacher would invite John and other promising students to his house, where they would lunch with his family, then adjourn to the drawing room to discuss poetry and books.
    Taking the train in and out of New York, once old enough to get past the door, he began frequenting restaurants and speakeasies where he’d retreat into a quiet corner, order a nonalcoholic beverage, and diligently observe the musicians. In his young mind, jazz, politics, writing, and religion seemed to be interconnected in one all-encompassing