The History of Swing Music

David Stowe explodes myths about swing music in this chapter from his book Swing Changes. These myths include the following: that swing was created by artists but ruined by businessmen; and that it began as a "pure" black form that was colonized by whites. (He acknowledges a grain of truth in these myths, however). He explodes the myths by examining the institutional history of swing music. He doesn't just analyze the music - in fact, he does very little musical analysis at all-but instead he focuses on the ways in which institutional forces emerged, fought, and came together to create and promote the form of music known as swing.

The chapter begins with the curious phenomenon of "swinging the classics." Only after a few pages does he back up and show us a bigger picture, explaining why so many bands made swing arrangements of classical music: because they were banned from using ASCAP-owned material and the classics were royalty free.

The question of censorship comes up very quickly in his piece-around the attempt to censor swing versions of the classics (a pseudo-event?) - and it's worth considering what censorship means. Mostly we think of censorship as a legal injunction against the distribution or exhibition of a work. That characterization of censorship is both accurate and misleading, accurate in the sense that such cases are indeed censorship, but misleading in the sense that censorship is not restricted to such cases alone.