Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing".
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music.
Goodman's bands started the careers of many jazz musicians. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first integrated jazz groups, his trio and quartet. He performed nearly to the end of his life while exploring an interest in classical music.
Goodman was the ninth of twelve children born to poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873–1926), came to the United States in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland and became a tailor.
His mother, Dora Grisinsky,(1873–1964), came from Kaunas. They met in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Chicago before Goodman's birth. With little income and a large family, they moved to the Maxwell Street neighborhood, an overcrowded slum near railroad yards and factories that was populated by German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, and Jewish immigrants.
Money was a constant problem. On Sundays, his father took the children to free band concerts in Douglass Park, which was the first time Goodman experienced live professional performances. To give his children some skills and an appreciation for music, his father enrolled ten-year-old Goodman and two of his brothers in music lessons, from 1919, at the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue.[4] Benny also received two years of instruction from the classically trained clarinetist and Chicago Symphony member, Franz Schoepp.
During the next year Goodman joined the boys club band at Hull House, where he received lessons from director James Sylvester. By joining the band, he was entitled to spend two weeks at a summer camp near Chicago. It was the only time he could get away from his bleak neighborhood.
At 13, he got his first union card. He performed on Lake Michigan excursion boats, and in 1923 played at Guyon's Paradise, a local dance hall.
In the summer of 1923, he met Bix Beiderbecke. He attended the Lewis Institute (Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1924 as a high-school sophomore and played clarinet in a dance hall band. When he was 17, his father was killed by a passing car after stepping off a streetcar.
His father's death was "the saddest thing that ever happened in our family", Goodman said.
