A String of Pearls

Glenn Miller

I think a lot about the music of the 20th century, as long-time readers of Sometimes a Song certainly know. And what a century it was for popular music, music of the people. It isn’t that earlier eras didn’t have popular song; they absolutely did. And they even had some superstars, singers such as Enrico Caruso and Jennie Lind, “The Swedish Songbird,” a sensation in Europe in the 1840’s and in the United States and Canada in the 1850’s. Jennie Lind was known by people around the world by her reputation, and due to her sensational promotion by P. T. Barnum, millions may have actually heard her sing during her American tour. To reach that degree of notoriety in 1850 did require a career-long preparation and a tremendous degree of publicity. Jenny Lind may have been the world’s first super-star. But she had reached the end of her formal career when Edison developed the invention of cylinder recording, and so we have no way to evaluate her music, other than by the sheer number of people who flocked to hear her sing and by what was written about her by experts of her day. And we do have some recordings of Caruso, although the quality is too low to properly evaluate his voice.

But when Glenn Miller was born, in 1904, popular music was on the brink of taking recorded music to the masses by other than in-person performances. By the time Miller’s music hit the airwaves (when my and Tony’s parents were young children), flat shellac discs were being pressed, and recorded music had become an “industry,” with a mighty audience of listeners on radio, in concerts, in film, and later on television. Instead of hearing Jenny Lind or Enrico Caruso in person once in a lifetime (for the lucky few), ordinary people could hear big bands like Glenn Miller’s over and over and over without leaving their homes. And from the masses, came a new kind of connoisseur who raised the bar on popular music. I don’t doubt that this availability of music from many genres brought about the great musical flourishing in the mid-century — from the 1930’s and following. And in a time when superstardom was much easier to achieve (albeit still relatively rare), along came Glenn Miller and in the short three years between 1940 and 1944, swept the field in popular music, racking up a record-breaking 16 number-one singles, and 69 hits that hit the top-ten on the charts. The long-term accomplishments of later superstars such as Elvis Presley, at 40 top-ten hits, and The Beatles, at 34 top-ten hits, pale in comparison. And Miller’s accomplishment is even greater when you recall that he spent over two of his top-selling years serving in the military (he volunteered right after Pearl Harbor) until his plane went missing in action, in 1944. What he might have done had he survived the war, no one can know.

I’ve written about Glenn Miller before on these pages (here and here). For today, however, I want to give you his first number-one hit, “A String of Pearls,” recorded only a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The song was written by an extremely gifted composer, arranger, and band leader, Jerry Gray, who also composed Miller’s great hit, “Moonglow.” Gray had just started working for Miller, having spent a long time with the Artie Shaw. Miller scooped Gray up when his contract with Shaw ended, and the rest, as they say, is show business history. So without further ado, here is today’s song, “A String of Pearls.”

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