Andrew Berish

Bio

Andrew Berish is an Associate Professor in the Humanities and Cultural Studies Department at the University of South Florida. His book, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (University of Chicago Press, 2012), examines the ways swing-era jazz represented the geographic and demographic transformations of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War.

Contributions

“The Baritone with Muscles in his Throat”: Vaughn Monroe and Masculine Sentimentality during the Second World War

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During the Second World War sentimentality reclaimed the mainstream of American popular music. Ballad recordings—slow, romantic love songs—increasingly pushed aside the hot jazz sounds of the era’s dance bands. The singers of these songs were an assortment of old and new faces—Bing Crosby, Dick Haymes, Vaughn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra. Their hit songs, recordings such as “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Together,” “My Devotion,” and “There Are Such Things,” exchanged cynicism and irony for optimistic...

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jazz World War II sentimentality