CHAPTER 15 | JAZZ IN THE SWING ERA 375
Sung in its entirety, “People Will Say We’re in Love” makes musically explicit
the main characters’ growing interest in each other. When the verse is omit-
ted, however, as in virtually all the popular and jazz recordings, the song drops
everything specifi c to Oklahoma! and behaves like any other standard love song.
Long after its record-setting fi rst run, Oklahoma! continues to be revived by pro-
fessional and amateur theater groups—except for Show Boat and perhaps Cole Por-
ter’s Anything Goes (1934), the oldest musical to enjoy such longevity. What makes the
shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein unique is their combination of the theatrical
integrity that audiences since that day have come to expect (largely as a result of
their infl uence) with a remarkable propensity for launching hit songs that, after a
profi table run on the pop charts, have lived on as standards. The ephemeral musical
comedies of the 1920s and 1930s succeeded at the latter, and more recent Broadway
shows at the former, but few shows by other songwriters have done both—and, since
1943, all of them have been indebted to the model set by Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein II.JAZZ IN THE SWING ERA
By the end of the 1920s the jazz style that had developed in New Orleans had
spread from that city throughout the United States and as far abroad as Eng-
land and France. The presence of New Orleans musicians in New York City—
starting as early as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917 and continuing
with shorter-term residencies by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and others
through the late 1920s—profoundly affected that city’s dance bands. With the
pre-1920 ragtime styles of James Reese Europe as a starting point, sophisticated
dance bands like those of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington embraced
the looser, bluesier manner of New Orleans jazz. Meanwhile, dance bands in
Chicago, Kansas City, and other urban centers were making similar experiments.
By the mid-1930s a new sort of jazz had emerged, and it took its name from a new
emphasis on rhythm: swing.
Several markers distinguish jazz of the Swing Era (roughly 1935–45) from
1920s jazz: First, there is a more equal emphasis on all four beats in a bar; theListening Guide 15.3“People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Oklahoma!
CD 3.4 RICHARD RODGERS AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II- View a stage performance of the scene in which this song appears, either live, online,
or on DVD. What techniques smooth the transition from the end of the song back to
dialogue? How do the actors maintain their characters through the song’s chorus, where
the language is least like the spoken dialogue? - Locate a recording of this song by a popular or jazz singer (it has been recorded by Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, and Nancy Wilson, to
name only a handful). How does the vocal technique resemble or differ from that of the
Broadway voices heard in this recording?
style features172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 375 23/01/13 8:36 PM