Let's Dance: Popular Music in the 1930s

by Arnold Shaw, Bill Willard (Editor)

In this exuberant sequel to his prize-winning The Jazz Age, Arnold Shaw captures virtually every aspect of popular music during the Depression.
Here is a colorful year-by-year chronicle of music in the '30s, blended with chapters on broader topics - the jazz clubs on Swing Street, the Big Band boom - and spiced with interviews with major figures (such as Burton Lane and Lionel Hampton), who bring a vibrant first-hand feel to the narrative. Readers visit every corner of the music scene. We watch as the Hollywood musical takes off, highlighted by the brilliant Busby Berkeley and the luminous partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We read about the incredible popularity of radio shows such as Your Hit Parade and Martin Block's "make-believe ballroom," which brought music to households from coast to coast. And we experience once again the great Broadway musicals of the period - from “Girl Crazy” to “The Cradle Will Rock” - written by a who's who of American song: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter. But above all, the '30s were the Swing Era, when swing bands dominated dance halls, ballrooms, radio broadcasts, and record sales, and Shaw provides superb portraits of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and countless others. From Gershwin's “Porgy and Bess” to Disney's “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, from Woody Guthrie to Ethel Merman, and from the Carioca to the Lindy Hop, here is an affectionate and informative account of this golden era of popular song.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 6, 1998

About the author

Arnold Shaw, born Arnold Sokolof, was an American musicologist, composer and author. He received his BA in English literature from the City College of New York in 1929 and his MA from Columbia University in 1931. He pursued further studies in American Literature at New York University.

During his career in the music publishing industry, he began writing about music for various newspapers and magazines, and eventually began writing books about music and musicians. He won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award two times, in 1968 and 1979, and was also posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame for his book 'Honkers And Shouters: The Golden Years Of Rhythm & Blues'. He was also a songwriter, but found relatively little success in that field.

In 1979, Mr. Shaw proposed the creation of a music literature course titled "History of Rock Music" which he would teach on a part-time basis for the UNLV Music Department. His proposal was accepted and he began teaching the course in the fall of 1980. While he taught there, he founded the Popular Music Research Center at the UNLV College of Arts and Letters, which was named in his honor following his death in late 1989.