Jazz Band

New York: Greenberg: Publisher. Good+ in Fair dj. (c.1935. First Edition. Hardcover. [a well-worn ex-rental library book, with all the usual depredations (dust jacket lined with brown paper and firmly affixed to the book at the flaps, circulation slip (University Libraries, Inc., Middletown, Ohio) affixed to front endpaper); the front jacket panel is largely intact, but there are a number of missing pieces from and adjacent to the spine panel]. Popular novel about a musician/singer in a popular dance band whose "life is hectic, artificial, trivial [and who] plays at love as flippantly as he plays on his fiddle," until he meets and marries "a girl who to him is from another world." Apart from the struggling-young-couple-in-love angle, the book is "a colorful, authentic, behind-the-scenes picture of a modern dance orchestra and the curious characters that people it" -- which is exactly the kind of jacket blurb that gets me wondering (a) who this "Wyatt Rundell" character was, and (b) was the book, or any of its characters, based in any way on his personal experience? According to a contemporary newspaper account, the author was a "member of a popular dance band which plays the New York night spots and tours the country between times" (another version has him as a "former member"), but nothing beyond that. This was apparently his only published book, and is quite scarce: only three copies are recorded in OCLC. Kansas City, Missouri, is the home base for the book's "Babe Bunton and His Trocadero Orchestra," and a substantial portion of the book is set there; maybe that will provide a clue to its real-life background for somebody more familiar with the K.C. music scene than I am. This isn't the prettiest copy you'll ever see, but considering that most of Greenberg's books were targeted precisely for the rental-library market, survival of a jacketed copy in any condition is a small miracle. . (Inventory #: 28972)