The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music

“Solid research” in this behind the music story about a record industry legend has been “fashioned . . . into a very readable narrative.” (New York Times).

A pioneering producer and talent spotter, John Hammond discovered and championed some of the most gifted musicians of early jazz—Billie Holliday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman—and staged the legendary “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1939, which established jazz as America's indigenous music. Then as jazz gave way to pop and rock Hammond repeated the trick, discovering Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in his life's extraordinary second act.

Dunstan Prial shows Hammond's life to be an effort to push past his privileged upbringing and encounter American society in all its rough-edged vitality. A Vanderbilt on his mother's side, Hammond grew up in a mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As a boy, he would sneak out at night and go uptown to Harlem to hear jazz. As a young man, he crusaded for racial equality in the music world and beyond. And as a Columbia Records executive, he saw music as the force that brought whites and blacks together and expressed their shared sense of life's joys and sorrows.

In Hammond's life, the story of American music is at once personal and epic: the story of a man at the center of things, his ears wide open.

“Prial writes with knowledge and feeling.” —Washington Post

“An elegant, winning biography.” —Boston Globe

“As smooth and beguiling in its flow as one of John Hammond's 'look Ma, no hands' recording sessions." —Los Angeles Times

© 2024 Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Ebook): 9781429931328

Release date

Ebook: 4 September 2024