The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history.
W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television.
Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music.
Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells
Acknowledgments A Note on the Paul Whiteman Collection at Williams College Lisa Conathan Introduction: Naming and Placing Whiteman W. Anthony Sheppard Black Music, White Bodies, Paul Whiteman’s Body Stephanie Doktor Paul Whiteman, Cultural Ownership, and Jazz Historiography in Dave Peyton’s “The Musical Bunch” Christi Jay Wells Paul Whiteman and Modern Metropolitan Music, 1927–1940 John Howland Arranging Orientalism for Whiteman Ryan Raul Bañagale Concertized Jazz: The Divergent Motives of Whiteman (1924) and Goodman (1938) Sarah Caissie Provost “Symphonised Syncopation”: Paul Whiteman in the United Kingdom and Europe in the 1920s Catherine Tackley RCA v. Whiteman and the Case for Radio Broadcast Rights Katherine M. Leo Integration and Segregation in Whiteman’s Music Television, 1948–1955 W. Anthony Sheppard Afterword Elijah Wald Contributors Bibliography Index
W. Anthony Sheppard is the Marylin & Arthur Levitt Professor of Music at Williams College. He is the author of Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination
Reviews for Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture
“This book, transcending praise and blame but holding its subject accountable, offers a welcome variety of historical and critical perspectives on an indisputably major figure and goes a long way to restoring who Whiteman was and is, rather than rehashing what he was and is not.”--Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater
