At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career—the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. He had managed to keep much of his orchestra intact during the war and had maintained a high public profile with concerts and broadcasts during the 1943-44 recording ban that kept him and other artists out of the studios. In late 1944 he’d scored a smash hit with “I’m Beginning to See the Light”…and with service men and women beginning to return home as the war wound down in 1945, it seemed that the big bands would keep riding the wave of popularity that had sustained them since the mid-1930s.

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In part 2 of American Popular Song and World War II we’ll hear music from Louis Jordan (”You Can’t Get That No More”), Kitty Kallen with Jimmy Dorsey (”They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”), Sam Donahue’s Navy band (”Convoy”), a rare recording of Bing Crosby with Glenn Miller’s…

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In honor of the holiday weekend, we’re posting both parts of last year’s “American Popular Song and World War II” Afterglow program, featuring special guest Michael McGerr, author, cultural historian, and Indiana University professor. We’ll hear some of the martial-spirited songs from the early months of America’s entry into the war (”Remember Pearl Harbor” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”), as well as pre-war songs about the draft, songs about…

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“Bix is jazz’s Number One Saint,” critic Benny Green once wrote of cornet player Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931). In 2003 I produced a one-hour WFIU centennial tribute to the man who, in the span of six years and more than 200 recordings, left a legacy that still echoes through jazz today, as well as a troubled personal tale that continues to provoke scrutiny. Richard Sudhalter, author of the Hoagy Carmichael biography

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Our guest on this week’s Night Lights program Suite History is Michael McGerr, a historian and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Michael, author of the book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, frequently teaches a course at IU on American popular music in the 20th century. He has a particular passion and expertise for Duke Ellington, one of the three composers whose music is featured in Suite History, and he can be heard in two previous WFIU documentaries…

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The inspiration came from a late-night party, a convergence of Hollywood glamour and nascent civil-rights activism with one of America’s greatest jazz orchestras. In the summer of 1941, as Americans warily regarded a world war that seemed to be edging ever closer to their shores, Duke Ellington staged what he would later call “the first ’social significance’ show,” Jump for Joy. Jump for Joy was an all-black musical revue that Ellington said “would take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think.” It featured the Ellington orchestra in its so-called “Blanton-Webster” years, playing at the peak of its powers, and up-and-coming African-American…

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In the early 20th century African-American composers began to write extended musical depictions of black American life–Scott Joplin with his unstaged opera Treemonisha, pianist James P. Johnson with his Yamekraw: a Negro Rhapsody, and–perhaps most successfully–William Grant Still with his Afro-American Symphony in 1931. That same year Duke Ellington told a reporter, “I’m going to compose a musical evolution of the Negro race.” It took Ellington…

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