Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Hey Vinyl Community, this is episode of the Spotlight series is about John H. Hammond II.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hammond_(record_producer)
nytimes.com/1987/07/11/obituaries/john-hammond-76-critic-and-discoverer-of-pop-talent-dies.html
vimeo.com/187169049
theamericanscholar.org/the-man-who-got-his-way
As it reads in The American Scholar’s article “The Man Who Got His Way”, by Wendy Smith.
Listen to From Spirituals to Swing telling the Carnegie Hall audience “tonight we have a treat in store for you” or introducing Hot Lips Page to that same audience as “one of the great trumpeters of the world.” Those unmistakable upper-class cadences—mahvelous was his favorite adjective—would be ridiculous in this context if it weren’t for the ardor in Hammond’s voice, his obvious pleasure in presenting this wonderful music. Forty-six years later, he was back at Carnegie Hall to bring on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble—a trio of young, white musicians who played a fiery stew of electric blues, soul, and rock ’n’ roll, genres whose widespread impact and commercial acceptance were due in part to Hammond’s pioneering efforts.
“this elderly man dressed like a college professor” beaming at the band’s earsplitting onslaught of amplified sound. Vaughan’s raucous fans were probably just as startled by Hammond’s incongruous presence as Harlem’s hard-drinking, reefer-smoking jazzmen had been in the early 1920s when they spotted a preteen in a St. Bernard’s School blazer sipping lemonade in their clubs. Perhaps it was his background of aristocratic entitlement that made Hammond assume that he belonged anywhere great music was being made, but so what? Louis Armstrong incorporated the structure of the opera arias he heard as a boy into his cornet solos; Ray Charles liked country-western songs so much he made an album of them. Armstrong and Charles were born with none of Hammond’s privileges, but they shared his conviction that any form of music that spoke to them belonged to them too.
Hammond set out to change more than just popular culture. A lifelong political progressive, seldom seen without a stack of left-wing periodicals under his arm, he was a firm supporter of labor unions and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Invited to join the naacp board of directors when he was 21, he turned them down because he thought the group was too middle class and conciliatory. He changed his mind a few years later and spent three decades urging the organization toward greater militancy. He resigned in 1966 because of executive director Roy Wilkins’s refusal to join forces with younger civil rights groups. Some of the most impassioned pages of his autobiography chronicle his stormy military service. As an Army private during World War II, he confronted the brass with the contradiction of fighting racism overseas while practicing segregation in training camps. He refused to pull strings to evade the draft or to get an officer’s commission, though he unabashedly used his family connections to gain better treatment for black soldiers and to bring African-American musicians to the camps to play for integrated audiences.
Sketched in broad outline, Hammond’s life assumes the proportions of legend: a scion of the Gilded Age plutocracy who championed the oppressed, a white boy who fell in love with black music and brought it into the mainstream. Of course the story is more complicated than that, and Hammond was no saint. He could be domineering and insensitive, a “sometimes-intolerant champion of tolerance,” as he acknowledged in his memoirs. Duke Ellington, for one, bitterly resented being lectured about his lack of solidarity with his race by a white man living on an inherited portion of the Vanderbilt millions. During his years as a jazz critic, he was notorious for writing enthusiastic columns about musicians whose records he produced—a conflict of interest. His musical vision had blind spots; he saw Aretha Franklin as a jazz singer and thought Bruce Springsteen worked best as a solo artist.
I don’t think he was completely wrong in either case. Aretha definitely could have gone either direction and made it. Now look back on Bruce’s songs. Some of Bruce’s best songs are ballads and I don’t know, might be better stripped down.
At Columbia, where he spent most of his music-industry career, he was regarded as someone with a knack for spotting raw talent who didn’t necessarily know what to do with the talent once he’d signed it.
But if Hammond hadn’t pressured an apprehensive Benny Goodman to add Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his all-white orchestra, how much longer would it have taken black jazz musicians to get the broader exposure and the decent pay they deserved? How much shallower would rock ’n’ roll be if he had not told the Columbia executives who wanted to get rid of Bob Dylan (dubbed “Hammond’s Folly” because his early records sold so poorly), “You’ll drop him over my dead body”?
Hey Vinyl Community, this is episode of the Spotlight series is about John H. Hammond II.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hammond_(record_producer)
nytimes.com/1987/07/11/obituaries/john-hammond-76-critic-and-discoverer-of-pop-talent-dies.html
vimeo.com/187169049
theamericanscholar.org/the-man-who-got-his-way
As it reads in The American Scholar’s article “The Man Who Got His Way”, by Wendy Smith.
Listen to From Spirituals to Swing telling the Carnegie Hall audience “tonight we have a treat in store for you” or introducing Hot Lips Page to that same audience as “one of the great trumpeters of the world.” Those unmistakable upper-class cadences—mahvelous was his favorite adjective—would be ridiculous in this context if it weren’t for the ardor in Hammond’s voice, his obvious pleasure in presenting this wonderful music. Forty-six years later, he was back at Carnegie Hall to bring on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble—a trio of young, white musicians who played a fiery stew of electric blues, soul, and rock ’n’ roll, genres whose widespread impact and commercial acceptance were due in part to Hammond’s pioneering efforts.
“this elderly man dressed like a college professor” beaming at the band’s earsplitting onslaught of amplified sound. Vaughan’s raucous fans were probably just as startled by Hammond’s incongruous presence as Harlem’s hard-drinking, reefer-smoking jazzmen had been in the early 1920s when they spotted a preteen in a St. Bernard’s School blazer sipping lemonade in their clubs. Perhaps it was his background of aristocratic entitlement that made Hammond assume that he belonged anywhere great music was being made, but so what? Louis Armstrong incorporated the structure of the opera arias he heard as a boy into his cornet solos; Ray Charles liked country-western songs so much he made an album of them. Armstrong and Charles were born with none of Hammond’s privileges, but they shared his conviction that any form of music that spoke to them belonged to them too.
Hammond set out to change more than just popular culture. A lifelong political progressive, seldom seen without a stack of left-wing periodicals under his arm, he was a firm supporter of labor unions and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Invited to join the naacp board of directors when he was 21, he turned them down because he thought the group was too middle class and conciliatory. He changed his mind a few years later and spent three decades urging the organization toward greater militancy. He resigned in 1966 because of executive director Roy Wilkins’s refusal to join forces with younger civil rights groups. Some of the most impassioned pages of his autobiography chronicle his stormy military service. As an Army private during World War II, he confronted the brass with the contradiction of fighting racism overseas while practicing segregation in training camps. He refused to pull strings to evade the draft or to get an officer’s commission, though he unabashedly used his family connections to gain better treatment for black soldiers and to bring African-American musicians to the camps to play for integrated audiences.
Sketched in broad outline, Hammond’s life assumes the proportions of legend: a scion of the Gilded Age plutocracy who championed the oppressed, a white boy who fell in love with black music and brought it into the mainstream. Of course the story is more complicated than that, and Hammond was no saint. He could be domineering and insensitive, a “sometimes-intolerant champion of tolerance,” as he acknowledged in his memoirs. Duke Ellington, for one, bitterly resented being lectured about his lack of solidarity with his race by a white man living on an inherited portion of the Vanderbilt millions. During his years as a jazz critic, he was notorious for writing enthusiastic columns about musicians whose records he produced—a conflict of interest. His musical vision had blind spots; he saw Aretha Franklin as a jazz singer and thought Bruce Springsteen worked best as a solo artist.
I don’t think he was completely wrong in either case. Aretha definitely could have gone either direction and made it. Now look back on Bruce’s songs. Some of Bruce’s best songs are ballads and I don’t know, might be better stripped down.
At Columbia, where he spent most of his music-industry career, he was regarded as someone with a knack for spotting raw talent who didn’t necessarily know what to do with the talent once he’d signed it.
But if Hammond hadn’t pressured an apprehensive Benny Goodman to add Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his all-white orchestra, how much longer would it have taken black jazz musicians to get the broader exposure and the decent pay they deserved? How much shallower would rock ’n’ roll be if he had not told the Columbia executives who wanted to get rid of Bob Dylan (dubbed “Hammond’s Folly” because his early records sold so poorly), “You’ll drop him over my dead body”?
