The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music
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The son of a Vanderbilt heiress, John Hammond listened to jazz records with his parents’ servants, went to Harlem as a teenager, and became a regular in clubs where very few white faces ever appeared. Taking a little family money, Hammond went across racial lines in pre–World War II America and came back with recordings of some of the greatest jazz musicians in history. By age twenty-two, he had convinced Benny Goodman to integrate his band and made his first big discovery: Billie Holiday. Later, as jazz gave way to pop and rock, Hammond championed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in his life’s extraordinary second act.
In Dunstan Prial’s hands, Hammond’s biography is the story of American popular music since the 1930s, a tale of a man at the center of things, with his ears wide open.
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Dunstan Prial covered the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for the Associated Press and the 1990s stock market boom for Dow Jones. He lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
Ray Porter is a prolific voice actor that has recorded for over 100 audio books and dozens of television series, video games and video shorts. Among his wide variety of audiobook credits are The Silver Linings Playbook, The Black Hole War, and the Joe Ledger series. He claims, “With every book I’ve done, I have found that the author has a voice and if I can just do my best to stay out of the way of that voice, then the writer will convey what he’s trying to put across. So for me, it’s really more about enabling the text and what the author is trying to say.”
