For several months - well, no perhaps several years - it has been my ambition to write a book focusing on the first five months of 1938. Roughly the period between Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert in January 1938 and a musical revue called Bourbons Got the Blues which appeared at City Center in May 1938. That show was a bit of music, dance and theater arranged to protest the Senate's failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law.
At least that was the original concept. Now I'm not sure exactly what the "concept" is - except maybe an effort to recapture those months in the musical or cultural life of New York City at the height of the Swing Era. Can this be done through the media of that time? The general circulation and music magazines of the time. The daily papers. The political journals. The weather reports. Would that allow me to recapture something of the lived experience of that winter/spring in New York.
And then the question arose for me - where would I find all that stuff. I'm not a writer or researcher by trade. Where do you come across old copies of Downbeat magazine? Are there radio archives for early 1938? What about copies of the defunct newspapers that were available at subway newstands back then? And by the way, how would I discover what it was like to ride the subway in April 1938?
Of course, life being what it is - I've done absolutely zip with this concept. So that's where I got the idea of this blog. Let me document writing the book by writing this blog. Or not writing this book. But trying to do so.
So I welcome your reading and commenting if you remember those times - or your parents or your grandparents did. In any event - stay tuned. My first stop will be the online archive of The New Yorker.
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