Dance Bands in Chester
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DANCE BANDS IN CHESTER : AN EVOLVING PROFESSIONAL NETWORK Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Helen Vera Southall Dance Bands in Chester: An Evolving Professional Network ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been a long time in the making, and a great many people have helped along the way, starting with my parents who encouraged my early forays into music-making, and continuing with a long list of teachers in school, university and elsewhere, including my clarinet teacher Paul Harvey (formerly of the Royal Military School of Music), and Professor Stephen Banfield, then of the University of Keele, who first sparked my interest in music for dancing. Particular thanks must go to my supervisors David Pattie and Peter Harrop, who managed to give me the advice I needed when I needed it; I know from my own experience as a lecturer that this is more difficult than most people appreciate. Three local musicians have been especially helpful; Norman Frost and Les Stevenson introduced me to the network of dance band musicians still active in the area, initially via the Heswall Concert Band and later in Norman’s dance band the Norman Roy Orchestra, which I played with from 2000 to 2005. Those experiences, and the many stories I heard from musicians and enthusiasts along the way, led to my undertaking this study in the first place. Don Owens, who also played for Norman, devoted a great deal of time and effort to doing many of the interviews on my behalf. Without his help, the fieldwork for this project would have been slower, more difficult, and a great deal less complete. I am also grateful to the interviewees who gave so generously of their time and knowledge; these included musicians and their families, and also others such as local historian Len Morgan, who contributed a great deal of relevant information on both entertainment venues and military installations in the area. More recently my colleague Evelyn Jamieson, Dr. Duncan Light of the University of Bournemouth, and Dr. Catherine Tackley of the Open University have all contributed expert academic advice and encouragement, and Pauline Barnes has done a highly efficient (and very fast) job of proof reading my final drafts. Finally, special mention must go to my husband Garfield Southall, who has coped admirably with the ever-growing piles of books, cassette tapes, photographs and other dance band ephemera which have taken over much of our home in the last few years. He has done a splendid job of looking after me throughout this long, painstaking, but ultimately very enjoyable process. My thanks go to all of those mentioned above, and to everyone else who has helped, whether or not they realised it at the time. Any errors or omissions in this final product are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. ii Dance Bands in Chester: An Evolving Professional Network ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the live music scene in Chester in the mid-20th Century, and in particular jazz-based styles of dance music, played for the most part by local musicians. The basis of the study is a set of interviews with musicians, promoters and fans who were all active in the Chester area during the period between 1925 and 2008, in settings ranging from military bands and youth clubs to resident dance hall bands, touring concert parties, summer season shows and radio broadcasts. Thirty interviews were undertaken, and along with many hours of taped conversation, these yielded over 200 photographs and other pieces of evidence In this thesis I have synthesised existing theoretical approaches from a number of fields to account for the large number of part-time dance-band musicians who were active in the Chester area, especially during World War II and in the decade that followed. Ideas from popular music studies and jazz studies were part of this framework, but were not sufficient, as both fields have historically had a tendency to concentrate on musicians and places considered to be highly significant or exceptionally influential, rather than routine and local. I have therefore turned to other disciplines in search of appropriate analytical approaches, and used ideas from geography, economics and sociology as alternative lenses through which to view the problem. In the process, I have shown that this dance band scene grew from the people and entertainment infrastructure of the previous, inter-war, period. In turn, the musicians, promoters and venues of the dance band scene, combined with changes in technology and society which fundamentally changed the economics of live entertainment, formed essential parts of the environment in which much better-known rock and pop musicians of the 1960s and 70s emerged and developed. iii Dance Bands in Chester: An Evolving Professional Network FOREWORD … the work of local amateur musicians is not just haphazard or formless, the result of individual whim or circumstance. On the contrary, a consistent - if sometimes changing - structure lies behind these surface activities. The public events … are part of an invisible but organised system through which individuals make their contribution to both the changes and the continuities of English music today. Finnegan (2007, p. 3) By focusing upon the practice of music making rather than on its texts or theory, and on local 'amateur' musicians rather than on 'professionals', [The Hidden Musicians] challenges some of the assumptions made about music and how to study it. It contradicts views of 'the mass' as passive and deluded and questions class-based explanations of cultural activity by indicating the role and importance of factors such as kinship and gender. The final chapters are particularly illuminating. They point out that far from having a peripheral role in society, music is a central ritual that structures time and space and perpetuates and recreates cultural traditions and institutions. In addition, unlike other social activities music has a special value in society because of the way in which it relates to 'self and the emotions and to the rituals of life and the life cycle. It can also bind people together in shared experience. Cohen (1990) My original motivation for undertaking the research which forms the basis of this thesis goes back to my own extensive practical involvement in amateur and semi-professional music- making from the 1980s onwards, when I studied and performed in a variety of genres including classical, light classical, rock, and jazz. My formal musical education included a joint honours degree in Physics and Music, which I completed in 1988. However, the more recent catalyst for this work was an evening class in jazz improvisation which ran at the University of Liverpool a decade after that. As well as honing my practical skills, I made friends and contacts among the other students. These included a bass player called Fred Cooper, who introduced me to two other musicians that he played with regularly - Les Stevenson and Norman Frost (both of whom were later to be interviewees in this research project). I joined the Heswall Concert Band, a local amateur wind band formed by Stevenson which was at that time based at the Heswall British Legion club on the Wirral peninsula on Merseyside. In due course I also joined the Norman Roy Orchestra - a semi-professional dance band run by Frost, also based on the Wirral. It was in the course of rehearsals and performances with these two bands in particular that I gradually realised that there had apparently been a great deal of live dance band iv Dance Bands in Chester: An Evolving Professional Network activity in the Chester area, that it lasted for longer after World War II than I would have expected, and that tentacles from that live music scene reached well into local amateur music- making in the 21st Century. It also had not previously been documented, except tangentially (for instance as a small part of a historical exhibition on life in Chester during World War II, in a local museum). My curiosity was aroused, on two levels. First, were the stories I was hearing about a busy live music scene in and around Chester actually true? Secondly, if they were true, how had that busy scene developed and sustained itself, and when and why did it dissipate? Like Finnegan (2007), I wanted to ‘uncover and reflect on some of these little-questioned but fundamental dimensions of local music-making, and their place in both urban life and our cultural traditions more generally’, but with a specific focus on Chester from the 1930s to the 1970s, rather than Milton Keynes in the 1980s. I embarked on a part-time Ph.D. in 2005, submitting the first version of this thesis in 2013. I was aware of a substantial degree of urgency associated with collecting my data, as many of my interviewees were already elderly. The collection of a large amount of oral history material as quickly as possible - while working full-time as a lecturer in a different discipline - therefore preceded the production of any clearly defined analytical framework. This urgency also affected who I could collect data from, and a result of this was that most of my interviewees were musicians. There was certainly not a conscious decision to avoid any particular group, such as fans, but the network I tapped into, being composed mainly of a tightly-knit group of musicians, simply did not include many people who were fans but not musicians. The principle exceptions were Mary Kelly and S. Sweeney (both female dance fans, mentioned in Chapter 5), promoters Gordon Vickers (Chapters 7 and 8) and Paul Bridson (Chapter 8), and local historian Len Morgan (Chapter 3), all of whom provided important ’non-musician’ perspectives.