Music: Horn of Plenty

Swing fans milled around the Boston Theater’s stage door, clamoring for autographs and drying the tears in their eyes. Glenn Miller had played one of his last vaudeville stands for the duration; within the fortnight he will be gobbled up by the Army. But fans, though tearstained, were fickle. Already they had picked a new favorite: the six-foot-one, wavy-haired son of a circus bandleader and circus bareback rider, Trumpeter Harry James. Already the “modern Gabriel” and his band had pied-piped away the followers of many hotter orchestras. When he blew his sweet, shrill horn, his fans were sent out of this world; and this was fast sending James into the land of plenty.

Last January, Harry Haag James and his 28-piece band had been $42,000 in the red. Today he has paid off his debt to ex-boss Benny Goodman, is well on his way to his first million. In the past few weeks he has bagged three commercial programs: Spotlight Bands for Coca-Cola, Monday evenings; the Jack Benny program while Benny is in New York; the Chesterfield program, three times weekly. He has also pocketed a juicy Hollywood contract, has played in two Class B pictures and. next January, will be featured in M.G.M.’s Girl Crazy with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. This year James has broken every record on every job he has played. Examples: for San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater he grossed $41,000 in seven days (previous record was Sammy Kaye’s $35,000); at Manhattan’s Astor Roof he grossed 8,500 covers in one week, topping Tommy Dorsey’s record by 600. The newest Jamesiana, a sentimental arrangement of the old / Cried for You, is a candidate for the best-seller lists.

Three years ago, Benny Goodman gave his dark-haired, blue-eyed trumpeter a friendly shove toward bandleadership. A semi-failure at first, Bandleader James began tasting success only when he laid away his ambitions as a “hot” man, and developed a simple sweet style that features the clear, cool James trumpet against a mass of soft strings (he added five strings to his band to give it the un-swing-like total of eight). Imperturbably, James alternated blues and boogie-woogie with Viennese waltzes and technical specialties out of his own trumpet. But it was his revival of Al Jolson’s 1914 hit, You Made Me Love You (I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it) that catapulted him into Bigtime; it fast became a bestseller, has sold about 800,000 records.

James’s own first choices, harking back to the days when his father taught him classic circus numbers, are probably his trumpet arrangements of music-master favorites (Flight of the Bumble Bee, Carnival of Venice, et al.) His biggest Success Secret is the astute James theory that wartime fans, tired of pure heat, now want their heartstrings twanged. Other heartthrob Success Secrets in James’s band: Helen Forrest, throb-voiced torcheuse, who copes as smoothly with wacky songs as with moon-June lyrics; Johnny McAfee, vocalist, and Corky Corcoran, sax wizard.