Benny Goodman — jazz ("king of swing") with roots in the Russian Empire
Benjamin David Goodman was born in Chicago on 30 May 1909, the ninth of twelve children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873-1926), came to America in 1892 from Warsaw, then in Congress Poland, and became a tailor; his mother, Dora Grisinsky (1873-1964), came from Kovno, now Kaunas in Lithuania. They met in Baltimore and moved to Chicago before Benny was born.
The family was poor and lived in the crowded Maxwell Street district, near the railway yards. His father, who for a time worked in the stockyards, took the children to free band concerts in Douglas Park, and in 1919 enrolled ten-year-old Benny and two of his brothers in music lessons at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue. Benny also took two years of clarinet lessons from Franz Schoepp of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At sixteen he joined Ben Pollack's band, with which he made his first recordings in 1926; that December his father was killed in a traffic accident, which Goodman called the saddest thing that ever happened in the family.
In New York he worked as a freelance and radio musician before forming his own orchestra, and in the mid-1930s his band became one of the most popular in America, launching what came to be called the swing era. He hired the pianist Teddy Wilson and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and his trio and quartet were among the first racially integrated groups to appear in public. On 16 January 1938 his orchestra gave a concert at Carnegie Hall, with guests from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands; the recording, issued in 1950, is in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
After the war he spent much of his time touring abroad and playing classical music as well as jazz. In 1956 he toured the Far East for the State Department, and in 1962 he led the first jazz tour of the Soviet Union sponsored by the State Department, giving some thirty concerts in six cities over about five weeks. Nikita Khrushchev attended the opening concert in Moscow, and the band met him again at the American embassy's reception on 4 July. A live album, Benny Goodman in Moscow, was released that December.
He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1982 and continued to perform until shortly before his death in New York on 13 June 1986, aged seventy-seven.
"His father David Goodman came to America from Warsaw in 1892; his mother Dora Grisinsky came from Kovno. They met in Baltimore and moved to Chicago, where he was born in 1909."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Warsaw, Congress Poland (father) and Kovno, Kovno Governorate (mother) (now Poland and Lithuania)
Both his parents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire: his father from Warsaw, in Congress Poland, his mother from Kovno, now Kaunas in Lithuania. In 1962 he led the first State Department jazz tour of the Soviet Union.
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Warsaw, Congress Poland (father) and Kovno, Kovno Governorate (mother) (now Poland and Lithuania). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.