Dream Lucky: When FDR Was in the White House, Count Basie Was on the Radio, and Everyone Wore a Hat...

A really unusual mix and, I thought, really fun to read. Since I can remember "real radio", FDR and much of the rest, it's a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and one I'd certainly recommend.

I was attracted by a reviev of this title in the WSJ. The author knows her music an the times of the 1930's. Highly recommended.

Billie Holiday performing in blackface, Eleanor Roosevelt sharing a racially stereotyped joke with her newspaper readers, Benny Goodman dropping by a black jazz club to listen to Count Basie play: These sound like scenes from an imaginative historical novel, but they are among the delightful and tantalizing historical events reported in "Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat..." Author Roxane Orgill, a former music critic who in recent years has written books for children, turned to the period from 1936 and 1938 and the emergence of swing as the dominant American music of the era for her first book for grown-ups. Some of the stories are outrageous: Mrs. Roosevelt, who in later years was reviled by liberals, writing in her daily newspaper column, "Many of us do not appreciate what we owe the colored race for its good humor and its quaint ways of saying and doing things," before reprinting tasteless dialect joke from a book called "Chocolate Drops from the South;" a club manager in Detroit who insisted Billie Holiday wear black greasepaint because she looked white next to the members of Count Basie's orchestra; Adolf Hitler wishing boxer Max Schmeling "every success" in his fight with Joe Louis. "Dream Lucky" - the name comes from a Jimmy Rushing song - offers a series of well documented historical vignettes and people with names like Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Orson Welles, and Lanston Hughes. It recounts the parts of history too intimate to be recorded in textbooks that flesh out our understanding of a storied era.

I really liked this book. It is a kind of feelgood history. We all know how terrible the Great Depression was but we sometimes forget how exciting those times were. Additionally, we often lose touch with the human element in history. Dream Lucky shows how the unimportant events of history sometimes help capture the feel of past eras. This book provides glimpses into a highlight of the career of star heavyweight Joe Lewis, the Count Basie Orchestra's defining moment, Benny Goodman as he is usually remembered, FDR at work and play, the joys of radio, and several other moments which lessened somewhat the grimness of the thirties. An advantage of this book is that it allows us to briefly become almost a part of those moments. The central story in the book is the sudden rise of the Count Basie Orchestra from Kansas City house band to leading status in the jazz world. In its day the Basie band was the exemplar of swing jazz. While it was not as great a dance band as Chick Webb's orchestra, as financially successful as Benny Goodman's bands and small groups, or as creatively potent as Duke Ellington's Orchestra, it outperformed all its competition at one time or other. If you are interested in how Roosevelt beat the Dpression (if he did) or what the Dustbowl was like, don't bother reading this book. You won't find answers. If, however, you want to know about some of the glittering but fleeting joys of the Thirties, this is the book for you.