This Day in Jazz History (Glenn Miller Puts America “In the Mood”)

August 1, 1939—In RCA Victor Studios in New York City, Glenn Miller recorded “In the Mood,” a jazz-influenced pop tune that made the Greatest Generation forget about the Depression and war clouds abroad through delirious dance fever.

All that fun came from musicians melded, through fear and discipline, into a unit as tight as the best regiment. Five years later, the taskmaster who oversaw this process—now Major Glenn Miller—would lose his life while flying abroad, entertaining American troops.

Had you seen him as a high-school student in Iowa in the early 1920s, you could be forgiven for not guessing he’d grow into such a grimly determined professional. The tales of people uninspired by the American educational system who go on to spectacular success are legion, because so many youths have found nothing in the school routine to fire their imaginations.

So it was in high school for Miller, who loved football (even being voted “the best left end of Colorado”) but was indifferent to academics. It was no surprise, then, that shortly before graduation, he was so taken by the dance music then making inroads into the white world that he didn’t bother attending his commencement ceremony.

Instead, he traveled to Laramie, Wyoming for a gig. When his mother was left to pick up his diploma in absentia, the principal consoled her: “Maybe you’re the one who should get it anyway; you probably worked harder on it than he did!”

Success might have seemed so important because it took him so long to achieve it. For more than a decade, he did apprentice work as an arranger in a variety of bands (including the Dorsey Brothers') before starting his own, in 1937. This first attempt failed, but he renewed his effort the following year, with different musicians and a different cultural environment (Goodman had pushed big-band music into the mainstream with his triumph at the Carnegie)—and this time succeeded.

A trombonist, Miller might not have been the equal of Big Band rivals Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw on his instrument, but his was the most successful of the groups. Moreover, in at least one respect he might have bested Shaw: as a canny editor of material.

“In the Mood” featured lyrics by Andy Razaf (a Fats Waller collaborator) and music by Joe Garland. Shaw gave up on the song when Garland presented it to him because it was longer than eight minutes. One of Miller’s great talents, however, was in editing material, knowing how to cut just enough to make it onto one side of a 78. He snipped just enough from his arrangements to put his song out there before the public.

Ironically, Miller’s contract did not allow for royalties, so he only made $175 from the sale of this huge hit. After his death, however, the deal was renegotiated and his estate began to receive royalties from it.

Big band music played a huge part in spreading American culture around the world, but its heyday was comparatively short—only about a half-dozen years. Ironically, the same session in which “In the Mood” was recorded also witnessed a song sometimes thought of as the forerunner of the style that would replace the big bands: "Wham (Re-bop, Boom-Bam),” foreshadowing the rise of bebop.

As his band began to establish itself as a commercial force, Miller made his home in a New York suburb, Tenafly, N.J. (only a five-minute drive from my house) at Cotswold, a mansion and carriage house that had been converted to apartments only a few years before. Miller’s wife was still staying here in December 1944 when the sad news was broken to her that her husband’s plane had disappeared over the English Channel.

A half century later, Tenafly approved the designation of this as a local historic site. Around the same time, halfway across the country, a movement began in Miller’s hometown of Clarinda, Iowa, to build a museum at his birthplace.

As musicologist Gary Giddins has pointed out, during Miller's lifetime, jazz critics tended to dismiss the bandleader's work as sentimental and vanilla. His popularity remained stubbornly high, however, until, in recent years, critical opinion became more positive.

"In the Mood," along with "Moonlight Serenade" and "Chattanooga Cho-Cho," could readily be placed in a time capsule--perhaps more so than any other Big Band songs -- to identify the culture of the age. As a new generation of young men went off to war--and as their loved ones stayed behind, dreading calls that might inform them of their deaths--this tune lightened their hearts, in USOs all over, in the face of terror. It is a powerful talisman of the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age.