Benny Goodman was born in 1909, in Chicago, to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw and Lithuania. His father worked in stockyards and as a tailor. His mother, Dora, gave birth to twelve children and raised them. The Goodmans shifted from tenement to tenement, once spending a winter in an unheated basement room. “A couple of times there wasn’t anything to eat,” Goodman wrote in his memoir. “I don’t mean there wasn’t much to eat. I mean anything.” The Goodmans drank coffee once they were weaned “because milk for so many kids cost more than Pop could afford.”
“If it hadn’t been for the clarinet, I might just have been a gangster,” Benny once said. David Goodman devoted his life to boosting his children up a rung of the ladder – he’d bought into the promise of America in the way only someone working fourteen hours a day in a stockyard could. He urged his kids to do well in school, to find jobs that weren’t in a sweatshop. For the Goodman brothers, music looked feasible. They could play weddings and bar mitzvahs, instruments were affordable on the installment plan, and there were free lessons at synagogues and at Hull House on Halsted Street, which had an amateur band.
Learn about the father of Swing music, and how that would start to turn the world upside down both musically and Diversely. We will explore both Diversity – something that you may not at first see with Benny… but also we will see how his music and life balance another key leadership trait – Right vs. Effective.
