Those Swinging Years: The Autobiography of Charlie Barnet

by Charlie Barnet, Stanley Dance

Charlie Barnet (1913-1991) is best known as the popular bandleader whose hits included Cherokee, Pompton Turnpike, and Skyliner. But he was also the first to break the color barrier in a popular dance band, and his black musicians included Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, and singer Lena Horne; his white musicians included Jack Purvis, Red Norvo, Maynard Ferguson, and Doc Severinson. Barnet not only played jazz, he lived the jazz in this book, he writes of his whiskey and marijuana habits, of his whorehouse visits and his half-dozen marriages. Charlie Barnet epitomised the jazz age, and there are few memoirs as lively as Those Swinging Years .

225 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 1992

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. It sounds like it was a transcription of a chronological account of Charlie Barnet's life as dictated to an editor. This guy was a party animal who really lived a wild life. He talks about gigging as a young guy during the Great Depression and explains the music scene back in the day with his predecessors Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and his contemporaries Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Benny Carter, and on and on. Each paragraph is another recollection along the way. It's amazing to hear accounts of a time gone by, when he used to play a club in NYC that had a roof that would open up where you could see all the stars, but that was before the sky got messed up. His accounts of touring, dating, drinking and getting into trouble (I couldn't keep track of how many times he got married) were almost unbelievable, but Charlie Barnet really lived an incredible life.