“Song of the Volga Boatmen” by Glenn Miller

At #1: March 15, 1941 (one week)
Still alive? Very much not alive. Major Glenn Miller went missing in action on December 15, 1944



When I was a kid growing up and suckling on the teat of television, sometimes during cartoons or comedies an odd background tune would play when someone was slaving away or being forced to perform some odious task. The tune – very slowly – went:

bwha bwha BWAAAAAAAH bwhaaaa
bwha bhha BWAAAAAAAH bwhaaaa

And now I can tell people what that tune is. It’s the “Song of the Volga Boatmen”. The version by Glenn Miller – well, actually arranged by Bill Finegan – is very peppy. There’s clearly no toting of barges or lifting of bales. This is the kind of music that your average person would associate with “big band” music, lots of brass and clarinets and trombones.

There’s so much to write about when it comes to Glenn Miller. One can write about the circumstances of his death. One can debate whether or not Miller counts as a “war hero”. One can write about his place in music history.

Instead, I want to write about the concept of the “Ghost Band”. What happens to a big band when the person after whom the orchestra is named passes away? A lot of big bands became “ghost bands”, named after band leaders who were no longer alive and becoming nostalgia acts.

After Glenn Miller died, his estate allowed the Glenn Miller Orchestra to keep playing. Tex Beneke became the band leader of Glenn Miller’s band, but there was a struggle over the musical direction with the Glenn Miller estate. Beneke didn’t want the band to sound too much like Glenn Miller’s, whereas the estate wanted the Glenn Miller Orchestra to play Glenn Miller songs just the way Glenn Miller wanted them. They parted ways.

The Glenn Miller Orchestra still exists today. Not every song they play is a Glenn Miller Orchestra but a lot of them are. These ghost bands are a cross between a rock band losing its lead singer and a rock band essentially becoming a nostalgia/tribute band, playing its old standards and not creating anything new. (The only modern rock band I can think of that has taken this direction is Queen after Freddie Mercury died. Most rock bands keep creating new material even after a change in personnel, but I guess it would be a lot tougher for Eddie Van Halen to hire Sammy Hagar as lead singer if his band were called the David Lee Roth Quartet.)

Count Basie is long gone, but his orchestra is still active in 2012. Harry James gave Frank Sinatra his first big start, but his band outlived both of them. Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra is still out there, somewhere.

A music fan of the 21st century would probably suggest that these ghost bands just pack it in. Andrew Gilbert wrote:

Though descriptive rather than pejorative, the term often carries a whiff of the dismissive, as if a musical legacy should be interred with its creator (things work differently in the world of dance, where no one seems interested in tossing dirt on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater).

Artie Shaw actually had a ghost band under his name while he was still alive. It was conducted by Dick Johnson. Shaw said, “…that term ‘ghost band’. I hate it. I’m not a ghost. It’s just a band.”