The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music

The son of a Vanderbilt heiress, John Hammond listened to jazz records with his parents' servants, went to Harlem as a teenager and became a regular in clubs where very few white faces ever appeared. Taking a little family money, Hammond went across racial lines in pre-WWII America and came back with recordings of some of the greatest jazz musicians in history. By age twenty-two, he had convinced Benny Goodman to integrate his band and made his first big discovery: Billie Holiday. Then, as jazz gave way to pop and rock, Hammond championed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in his life's extraordinary second act. In Dunstan Prial's hands, Hammond's biography becomes the story of American popular music since the 1930s, a tale of a man at the center of things, with his ears wide open.