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Rightful Heir to a musical property which may run into real money appeared to be another lanky musician named William Harold ("Red") Hodgson. In Chicago he emerged from obscurity to assert that he had first played the tune on a mellophone while a member of Ernie Palmquist's band at Galesburg, Ill. in 1931. There were plenty of people in Chicago to support Hodgson's claim that as far back as 1934 he had played and sung The Music Goes Round And Around with Earl Burtnett's band at the Drake Hotel. A girl named Ruth Lee, out of Burtnett's band, had taught the song to Riley last autumn, declared the aggrieved Hodgson, and had it not been for a vigilant friend in New York, Hodgson would not even have got his name on the sheet music along with Farley's and Riley's. Apparently aware that Farley and Riley could not be denied credit for having made the tune a bestseller, Mellophonist Hodgson last week contented himself with a third of the royalties and a vaudeville engagement at the Chicago Theatre.
Significance. To students of native U. S. music The Music Goes 'Round And Around seemed to be something more than another Yes, We Have No Bananas. Like all previous successful nut songs, that ludicrous melody remained in the straight popular ballad tradition. The Music Goes 'Round And Around, on the other hand, was fundamentally a "swing"' tune.* It was jazz, and it came significantly at the precise moment when jazz music was reaching a second peak in U. S. musical history.
Jazz addicts are about as testy, uncompromising and mutually suspicious as yachtsmen. Unlike yachtsmen, they have been utterly unable so far to agree on denning the terms of their cult. Probably the majority would assert that in jazz music the most important element is "improvisation," which means playing a melody as it is not written. Other characteristic qualities of jazz music are surprise, amusement, eroticism. The jazz cult splits on the matter of whether paramount credit for the original development of "swing" music must be given to white men like the Dixieland Jazz Band or black men like King Oliver in the decade before the War. However it got its start, jazz reached its first peak in the late 1920's.
The black hero of the first great period was Louis Armstrong, who migrated from New Orleans to Chicago to join King Oliver. His trumpet solos on such Okeh records as Struttin' With Some Barbecue, Gully Low Blues and A Monday Date are as important to many lovers of American syncopation as Beethoven's 9th Symphony is to subscribers of the New York Philharmonic. At the same time, a white youngster named Leon ("Bix") Beiderbecke from Davenport, Iowa was also performing on the trumpet with astonishing grace and invention. He played with many of the great "swing" combinations like Jean Goldkette's, Frank Trum-bauer's and (for a time) Paul Whiteman's. Beiderbecke's death in 1931 coincided with the artistic and commercial collapse of jazz music in the U. S. Public taste and patronage ran almost exclusively to "sweet" bands like Guy Lombardo's, Wayne King's, Eddy Duchin's.