Fletcher Henderson (1897 - 1952) was a key figure in the development of the ensemble jazz style known as swing. As a bandleader and composer himself, and as an arranger for the Benny Goodman Band in that group's golden years just before World War II, he nurtured both the sound of swing and the players who made the music.
Henderson did not grow up playing jazz or improvised music of any kind, and as a musician himself, he was no more than adequate. Historians have differed as to his significance in jazz history. Some argue that the swing genre sprang practically full-blown from his arranger's pen, while other better-known musicians reaped the benefits of his discoveries. Other writers contend that Hen-derson happened to be at the center of a vital musical scene in New York City just as the new music was taking shape, and that other musicians deserve equal credit for swing's artistic accomplishments and growth in popularity. Henderson's biographer Jeffrey Magee takes a middle ground, writing in The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz that "to get at what Henderson did, it might be best to describe him as a musical catalyst, facilitator, collaborator, organizer, transmitter, medium, channel, funnel, and 'synergizer,' if such a word existed."
Studied Classical Music
Henderson was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, on December 18, 1897. His father was an educator, and both his parents played the piano. Henderson enjoyed an unusually good education for an African American in the South at the height of segregation. His father mortgaged the family home to the hilt to finance his son's education. Henderson attended Howard Normal School, a black prep school in Atlanta, and then majored in chemistry at Atlanta University, graduating in 1920. He began taking classical piano lessons at age six. His parents steered him clear of ragtime piano and the other African-American musical traditions of the rural South, but he developed sharp musical instincts and a good ear that allowed him to learn new musical traditions quickly. In the Atlanta University chapel he served as the school organist.
With ideas of studying chemistry at Columbia University, Henderson moved to New York in 1920. Higher education, in the sciences as elsewhere, was still highly segregated, and he ended up working as an assistant in a chemistry lab. Music actually offered him greater opportunities. Rooming with a pianist, he filled in for his roommate on a riverboat job and was noticed and hired for further work by Fred "Deacon" Johnson, an influential booker who had worked with the Clef Club orchestra, the leading black ensemble of the pre-jazz years. Soon Henderson had a full-time job as a song plugger - a salesman who promoted songs to artists - with the Pace & Handy music publishing firm, recently formed by legendary blues arranger W.C. Handy and Atlanta University alumnus Harry Pace.
In 1921 Henderson moved on with Pace to the new black-oriented Black Swan record label. The classically trained Henderson turned out written musical arrangements quickly for use in the Black Swan studios, and Henderson was picked to lead the backing group for Black Swan artist Ethel Waters on her national tour. It was on that tour that Henderson began to grasp the energy of blues, jazz, and popular African-American rhythms. "On that tour Fletcher wouldn't give me what I call the 'damn-it-to-hell bass,' that chump-chump stuff that real jazz needs," Waters recalled (as quoted by Magee). She gave Henderson some piano rolls by the Harlem "stride" pianist James P. Johnson. "To prove to me he could do it, Fletch began to practice," Waters said. "He got to be so perfect, listening to James P. Johnson play on the player piano, that he could press down the keys as the roll played, never missing a note. Naturally he began to be identified with that kind of music, which isn't his kind at all."
Back in New York, Henderson began to show up on records as accompanist to an increasingly wide variety of singers. The piano or small-band accompaniments heard on the mid-1920s recordings of jazz-influenced "classic blues" singers such as Bessie Smith and Gertrude "Ma" Rainey are often Henderson's. His name became better known among musicians, and by 1923 he had joined with an eight-piece band of his own, performing at New York's Club Alabam. The college-educated Henderson was picked as leader because it was thought that he projected the personable image the group would need in order to crack the New York high society market. Henderson proved to be an astute judge of emerging talent. His 1923 band included future saxophone superstar Coleman Hawkins, then 19 years old, and another saxophonist with arranging talents, Don Redman. By the following year, when Henderson settled in for a long residence at New York's Roseland Ballroom, his band had expanded to ten and then to sixteen musicians, and had taken on a trumpeter recently arrived from New Orleans - Louis Armstrong.
Added Jazz Elements to Dance Styles
Henderson experienced success partly because he identified an unfilled niche: a top-notch African-American dance band that could read music and compete on equal terms with white ballroom orchestras like that of Paul Whiteman was bound to make a splash among both black and white audiences. For downtown appearances, trumpeter Howard Scott recalled (as quoted by Magee), that Henderson "was a very strict leader. Every night you had to … stand inspection. He'd look at your hair, your face, see if you shaved, your shoes, see if they're shined. You had to be perfect to suit him." In Harlem, musicians sought to emulate Henderson by learning to read music. The big bands of the swing era, which depended partly on musical notation, would soon be stocked with players who had either worked directly with Henderson or been inspired by him indirectly.
But Henderson did not simply imitate the sound of white bands. Armstrong, who remained with Henderson for 14 months, and the other young jazz players Henderson hired, pushed the sound of the band toward the freer, more energetic type of jazz that was flowering as Americans became more and more aware of the non-notated ensemble improvisations coming out of New Orleans and traveling northward toward the Midwest. Armstrong and Henderson both characterized their relationship as a mutually beneficial exchange. Don Redman began writing arrangements that balanced the talents of individual improvisers with varied large-band textures, and Henderson's band began to gain popularity beyond New York. He took over some of the arranging chores in 1927 after Redman departed to form his own group, and the music he made during this period features the textures that became characteristic of swing in general: interaction between brass and reed sections, a smooth surface with plenty of dance-floor energy coming from drummers, and solo interludes that provided a space for the artistry of talented individual players.
Saxophonist Benny Carter, another important entertainer who emerged from the Henderson band, also wrote arrangements for the band, creating effective showcases for his own playing. The innovative arrangements of the Henderson band were closely followed by other musicians. One who credited Henderson as a direct influence was bandleader Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, who raised the Hendersonian art of showcasing distinctive individual players to a level of perfection. White clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman was another Henderson admirer who began purchasing Henderson's arrangements and compositions. That helped Henderson and his big band stay afloat financially when Henderson suffered injuries in an auto accident in 1928. But Goodman's appropriation of Henderson's material also disguised Henderson's contribution to jazz at a key point in its history - the emergence of swing onto a national stage. One of the Benny Goodman band's most-played pieces, "King Porter Stomp," was based heavily on a Henderson arrangement. But the Great Depression severely curtailed the activities of recording companies, and the musical activities of Henderson himself during the Depression years are poorly documented. Even so, Henderson pieces like "The Stampede" and "Rocky Mountain Blues" became well-known jazz standards.
Henderson led a band at the Harlem club Connie's Inn in the early 1930s and continued to record sporadically. His popularity dropped somewhat with the emergence of newer swing bands led by Ellington, Count Basie, the Dorsey Brothers, and other musicians. His business skills were inferior to his musical ones, and jazz historian John Lincoln Collier (as quoted in American Heritage) noted that Henderson had "an almost pathological lack of self-assertiveness." Henderson's group disbanded when he ran out of money to pay them after a Detroit engagement in 1934. He had not lost his eye for talent, however; a new group he formed for a 1936 residency at Chicago's Grand Terrace ballroom included future trumpet star Roy Eldridge. Henderson's role with the Goodman band expanded as the band rose to the top of the charts, thanks to appearances on the Camel Caravan radio program sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco firm. Henderson took a full-time job as staff arranger with the bandleader in 1939, dissolving his own group and sometimes playing piano in the newly integrated Goodman band.
Toured in Battle of Sexes Act
Goodman's recordings made between 1935 and 1940 came to be seen as emblematic of swing at its height, and Henderson was a key unseen presence behind their creation. Henderson's work for Goodman brought financial rewards, but he soon gravitated back to the bandstand himself. During World War II he formed a band that took on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all female Jazzband, in a touring "Swing Battle of the Sexes." After the war he continued to work with a diminished Goodman band and came full circle by touring as accompanist once again for Ethel Waters. Always quick to catch on to new trends, Henderson adapted to the decline of swing by forming a sextet that appeared at New York's Café Society club. In the late 1940s he was slowed by a variety of health problems.
Henderson suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1950, and became partly paralyzed. He died in New York City on December 28, 1952. The specific talents of the swing giants who came after him eclipsed his pioneering contributions, and Henderson's name was forgotten for a time. Reissued LPs helped revive his musical reputation, as did the historical studies of jazz that were undertaken in the late twentieth century; enthusiasts and jazz scholars traced the careers of jazz musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, and they noticed how many jazz career paths intersected with Henderson's.
Whatever his specific role, it is indisputable that the bands Henderson led in the 1920s and 1930s were on the forefront of new developments in jazz. Henderson drew on his unusual musical background to facilitate the incorporation of improvisational jazz styles from New Orleans and other areas of the country into the musical life of New York, and into a dance band tradition that relied on arrangements written out in musical notation. The new music that developed under Henderson's leadership struck a balance between improvisation and compositional planning - a balance that continues to shape jazz today.
Books
Bushell, Garvin, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning, University of Michigan Press, 1990.
Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 34, Gale, 2002.
Magee, Jeffrey, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz, Oxford, 2005.
Porter, Lewis, and Michael Ullman, Jazz from Its Origins to the Present, Prentice Hall, 1993.
Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era, Oxford, 1989.
Periodicals
American Heritage, November 1994.
Online
"Fletcher Henderson," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (February 8, 2006).
"Fletcher Henderson," Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_henderson_fletcher.html (February 13, 2006).
"Fletcher Henderson (1897 - 1952)," Harlem 1900 - 1940: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/text/fhenderson.html (February 13, 2006).
"James Fletcher Henderson," Red Hot Jazz, http://www.redhotjazz.com (February 13, 2006).
