By John "Jack" Behrens (website)
You can order an autographed copy of Jack’s new book by sending a check for $15 to Jack Behrens, 57 Stebbins Drive, Clinton, NY 13323. Make sure you send a return address. US postal takes approximately three to five days from the date of the order.
He Led A Danceable Dance Band Collegians Loved
When it came to dance music college students loved, Sam Donahue usually scored. He could swing and yet he also could create the soft sounds that identified a Billy Butterfield, Charley Spivak, Glen Gray-ish type band.
Listen to how the Flat Hat, the student newspaper at William and Mary College, described his group:
“To band leader Sam Donahue goes the honor of playing the longest engagement of the Paramount Theater in New York last year. Donahue’s show went five weeks and closed only because of picture commitments. It was the first time since 1948 that a new band had lasted more than four weeks and the first time in two months that any band at the Paramount stayed five. The consensus of opinion along Broadway is that sax playing Sam Donahue was the next big band in America.” The Donahue band was selected by dorm reps and sorority and fraternity presidents as the band to end the campus dancing season at William and Mary.
Says a lot about the Donahue aggregation in those days. George Simon, the resident big band observer and writer in that glorious day of the big bands, offered a similar opinion:
“Talented, self-assured, virile and dynamic Sam was one of the most respected musician ever to appear on the big band scene. A forceful saxophonist and an inspiring leader, he started his first band in Detroit in the early forties, gave it up to Sonny Burke when Gene Krupa offered Sam a job, then reclaimed it after leaving Krupa and was fashioning it into one of the most impressive bands around when the draft called and he entered the Navy.”
Like a few other bandleaders and experienced sidemen, service in the military during War II actually enhanced his notoriety. Sam, for example, took over the Artie Shaw Navy band when Shaw was discharged and he developed the orchestra of sailors into “one of the most magnificent bands of all time,” said Simon. The band’s recordings for the V-Disc program were considered some of the best done during the war.
A musician with a number of talents, Sam played the sax, trumpet and was an arranger too. When he was discharged from the military, he gathered a number of his former players and formed a civilian band. But what worked in the US Navy, didn’t happen touring peacetime America. He was plagued by booking difficulties and working with bookers. He disbanded his group and took other work. A jazz master named Eddie Bert, a sidemen with name bands for seven decades, remembered his days when he “almost” played for the Donahue band.
Eddie found out that Sam needed a trombonist and was ready to join. . . but he wasn’t a member of the Musicians Union. “Thankfully, his father knew a violinist in the Mount Vernon local who served as his mentor, Eddie remembers he ‘had to take a test . . . I had the second trombone part to ‘Tiger Rag’ and somehow got through it and into the union,” Bret Primack, wrote in an official biography of Bert.
Eddie connected with the Donahue band in Boston but he no sooner had played a gig when the fact that he couldn’t read music became apparent. Sam told him he liked the way he played solos but “I have to have a guy who can read.”
Touring bands of the 1940s, ‘50s required musicians who could read---preferably sight read---because they frequently got theater gigs and other locations that featured singers, shows and acts and bands backed the performers. It was a day, however, when a good number of top talent weren’t musically literate although they could play many things by ear.
Donahue was tapped by the Tommy Dorsey to head the Dorsey band after Tommy’s death. Again, Sam was credited with giving the band the boost it needed. He took a group of inexperienced musicians and a young singer named Frank Sinatra and created a band that soared in drawing crowds. Said Simon: “ As a molder of musical, though seldom successful commercial bands, Sam had few equals. And few maestri can claim so many enthusiastic alumni.”
Sam led the Dorsey band until his death in Reno in March in 1974.
If you heard Sam Donahue let me know what you thought of his band. Write to jbehrens@roadrunner.com.
Big Bands and Great Ballrooms: America Is Dancing...Again
Available now!
You’ll enjoy a nostalgic look back at bands and dance halls and get an up close view of today leaders and bands in this new book. Now available via AuthorHouse at 1-888-519-5121 ext. 5253 or www.authorhouse.com
My previous book "The Big Band Days: A Memoir and Source Book":
