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Swing-Era Dossier

Charlie Barnet

1913 – 1991

Born

Oct 26, 1913, New York City. Given name Charles Daly Barnet. Parents Charline (née Daly) and Willard Barnet — divorced when he was two. Money came down the maternal line: maternal grandfather Charles Frederick Daly was a vice-president of the New York Central Railroad, a banker, and businessman. The family wealth bankrolled a series of boarding schools in the New York and Chicago areas and, more importantly, gave him a lifelong trust income — the practical reason he could keep an integrated, deliberately un-commercial band running through the Swing Era without panicking about ticket sales. Family wanted him to be a corporate lawyer; he picked up piano and saxophone as a child and skipped school to chase bands.

Died

Sept 4, 1991, Hillside Hospital, San Diego, age 77. Cause: complications of Alzheimer's disease and pneumonia. Spent retirement years in Palm Springs and San Diego; kept a 46-foot boat moored in San Diego harbour.

Instruments

Tenor saxophone (primary — the late-1930s/early-1940s hits are tenor features). Added alto saxophone in the late 1930s, then soprano. Piano as a child.

Nicknames

  • "Mad Mab" / "The Wild Mab" — short for "Wild Mab of the Fish Pond," the band's running joke about an unscheduled, drunken plunge into a hotel fountain. Stuck for the rest of his career.
  • His band was tagged "the blackest white band of them all" by Metronome and DownBeat — a compliment, and earned: he hired Black sidemen, charted Ellington and Basie, and sounded the part.

Bands / years

  • First band at 16 on a transatlantic ocean liner; made 22 Atlantic crossings as a teenage bandleader.
  • 1935 — Hotel Roosevelt, New Orleans engagement; Governor Huey Long had the band ruined (see facts below); Barnet decamped to Havana.
  • Charlie Barnet Orchestra, 1932/33–1949 — peak popularity 1939–1941.
  • 1947 — pivoted the book toward bebop; lost the dance audience.
  • 1949 — retired the full-time band ("apparently because he had lost interest in music"). Sporadic reunion bands and one-off dates through 1967.

Active

c. 1932–1967 (mostly part-time after 1949).

Signature tunes

  • "Cherokee" (recorded July 17, 1939, Bluebird; released Aug 14, 1939) — composed in 1938 by British bandleader Ray Noble as the 64-bar first movement of his five-part Indian Suite. Noble and Spud Murphy both recorded it in 1938; Barnet's 1939 version, arranged by Billy May, made it a standard. May reportedly finished the chart on scraps of manuscript paper in the back of a station wagon on the way to the date.
  • "Skyliner" (recorded Aug 3, 1944) — composed by Barnet himself. Arrangement attribution is contested across sources: Billy May, Neal Hefti, and Billy Moore Jr. all named in different places.
  • "Redskin Rhumba" (1940) — Barnet's theme tune; composed by Barnet under his pseudonym "Dale Bennett" (the original 78 label reads "Dale Bennett"). Grew out of the closing vamp of his "Cherokee" — stretched live until it became its own number.
  • "Pompton Turnpike" (1940) — written by Will Osborne & Dick Rogers, not Barnet; arranged by Billy May. About the Meadowbrook Inn ballroom on Pompton Avenue, Cedar Grove, NJ.
  • "The Wrong Idea" / "The Right Idea" (1939) — co-written with Billy May. Open parody of the sweet-band sound (Sammy Kaye, Kay Kyser) under the band slogan "Swing and Sweat with Charlie Barnet."
  • "Nagasaki," "In a Mizz," "Southland Shuffle" — period hits.

Famous compositions

  • "Skyliner" (1944) — Barnet, sole composer.
  • "Redskin Rhumba" (1940) — Barnet under the "Dale Bennett" pseudonym.
  • "The Wrong Idea" / "The Right Idea" (1939) — Barnet with Billy May.
  • "Scotch and Soda" — frequently listed under Barnet, but the famous "Scotch and Soda" is the 1959 Kingston Trio standard copyrighted by Dave Guard (origin: a 1932 hotel-lounge piano tune the Seaver family heard; true composer never identified). Any Barnet "Scotch and Soda" credit should be treated as suspect until a primary 78 label is sighted — likely a discography conflation.

Interesting facts

  • Married eleven times. Final marriage in 1958 to Betty Thompson lasted 33 years until his death. Barnet himself in Those Swinging Years: "I went through several more marital fiascos, but they were mostly Mexican marriages and quickly annulled." Britannica hedges to "at least 6, some sources say 11"; Wikipedia and the autobiography give eleven as the working number.
  • Palomar Ballroom fire, Oct 2, 1939. Barnet was three weeks into a six-week engagement that had opened Aug 23. The Palomar burned to the ground; the fire destroyed the band's instruments and the entire library of arrangements. The most-repeated rescue story names Duke Ellington as the man who lent replacement charts — but Wikipedia and contemporary accounts credit Count Basie, who was due to follow Barnet into the Palomar and lent his book. Ellington was a friend and stylistic patron (Barnet recorded "The Duke's Idea" / "The Count's Idea") but the chart-rescue is Basie's.
  • One of the first white bandleaders to integrate, and the most aggressive about it. Hired Lena Horne (vocalist, early 1941), Roy Eldridge, Frankie Newton, Benny Carter, Charlie Shavers, John Kirby (1937) — more Black musicians than virtually any other popular white leader of the era.
  • First white band to play the Apollo (1934, as a last-minute Benny Carter substitution). Police riot squads worked the door; the theatre ran six shows a day instead of the usual three to clear the queue.
  • The Huey Long ambush, New Orleans 1935. Barnet won an engagement at the Hotel Roosevelt intending to drop swing into the home of jazz. Governor Long heard a set, disliked it, and arranged for the band to be lured to a bordello which was then raided. The bust effectively broke the band up; Barnet placed his now-unemployed sidemen with Joe Haymes and others, then shipped out to Havana, where he worked as a paid escort for wealthy women holidaying in the tropics.
  • Notorious party band — booze, brawls, vandalism. The temperamental opposite of Glenn Miller's clean discipline. Barnet was famous for not caring whether a gig sold out; the trust income meant he didn't have to.
  • Composed under the pseudonym "Dale Bennett" — the credit on the original "Redskin Rhumba" 78 and several others. The name appears alongside Ray Noble's on the Bluebird label of his "Cherokee" / "Redskin Rhumba" coupling.
  • Sidemen and graduates included Buddy DeFranco, Neal Hefti, Doc Severinsen, Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry, Barney Kessel, Dodo Marmarosa, Oscar Pettiford, Jimmy Knepper. Trumpeter Irving Goodman — Benny Goodman's younger brother — passed through too (he's in the 1950 filmed Cherokee). Billy May arranged for Barnet (including "Cherokee" and "Pompton Turnpike") before Glenn Miller poached him in 1940.
  • Autobiography: Those Swinging Years: The Autobiography of Charlie Barnet, with Stanley Dance, foreword by Billy May. Published 1984 (LSU Press). Reissued by Da Capo, 1992.

Sources

Clips