JOHN HENRY HAMMOND JR., the legendary talent scout and record company executive, was an emblematic figure of the American musical scene. His artistic predilections and his social activism affected the course of our culture beginning in the Depression years and continuing -- long past his death in 1987 -- into the 21st century.
If that seems an excessive claim, consider that even as we speak, Bruce Springsteen's album of songs associated with Pete Seeger is high on the charts. Springsteen was among the last (although by no means \o7the\f7 last) of Hammond's discoveries, signed by him to Columbia Records in 1972. Eleven years earlier, Hammond had fought to bring Seeger, a controversial figure in the 1950s because of his leftist politics, to Columbia. Seeger later became a father figure to the modern folk music movement and to a young Bob Dylan -- another artist Hammond signed and mentored.
So goes the history of Hammond's brilliant enthusiasms, back through the decades to the early 1930s and his initial great find: a teenage singer in Harlem named Billie Holiday, who achieved iconic status in her lifetime and still inspires singers as diverse as Norah Jones and Courtney Love.
Hammond's felicitous life and career have now been chronicled and celebrated in worthy fashion in Dunstan Prial's elegantly written, substantive and exciting biography, "The Producer."
Prial traces his subject's love of American music to a unique childhood, in which the young Hammond's preoccupation with popular culture was linked from the start to an awareness of vast social disparities.
Born in December 1910 to a New York family of great privilege (his mother's great-grandfather Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt was at one time the richest man in the world), the young Hammond hung out with the mostly African American servants in the basement, where he found warmth and acceptance -- and first heard the jazz and blues music that shaped his tastes. "James P. Johnson ... was one of the great piano players of all time," Hammond recalled in a 1981 interview. "He had a record called 'Worried and Lonesome Blues,' which he made on the old blue label at Columbia Records in 1922, and this is the record that changed my life."
