Fletcher Henderson

Fletcher Henderson was born on the eighteenth of December 1897 in Cuthbert, Georgia — christened James Fletcher, he later took his father's name. His father was principal of the Howard Normal Randolph School; his mother, a teacher, set him at the piano. He took a degree in chemistry and mathematics at Atlanta University in 1920 and went to New York for the chemistry — and found the music: song demonstrator for Pace and Handy, then musical director of Black Swan Records, touring behind Ethel Waters.

His orchestra took the Club Alabam in January 1924 and the Roseland Ballroom that July, the anchor of a decade. Louis Armstrong arrived that fall for the year that changed the band's blood; Coleman Hawkins held the tenor chair from 1923 to 1934; and first through Don Redman's pioneering arrangements, later Henderson's own, the band worked out the call-and-response, section-against-section language that became big-band swing.

When his own band's fortunes broke in the mid-thirties, he sold his book to Benny Goodman — King Porter Stomp, Sometimes I'm Happy, Down South Camp Meeting, Wrappin' It Up — the very charts that lit the Palomar Ballroom in August 1935, the night the Swing Era is said to have caught fire; Goodman credited him plainly. He joined Goodman's organization in 1939, led bands again in the forties, and toured once more with Ethel Waters.

A stroke in December 1950 stilled his hands, and he died in New York on the twenty-ninth of December 1952, at fifty-five, carried home to Cuthbert. The years have given him the name the bandstands knew: an architect of swing. Honored be Fletcher Henderson, whose pen taught the big bands to breathe.