Editorial Review
The time: 1936-1938. The mood: Hopeful. It wasn't wartime, not yet. The music: The incomparable Count Basie and Benny Goodman, among others. The setting: Living rooms across America and, most of all, New York City.
Dream Lucky covers politics, race, religion, arts, and sports, but the central focus is the period's soundtrack—specifically big band jazz—and the big-hearted piano player William "Count" Basie. His ascent is the narrative thread of the book—how he made it and what made his music different from the rest. But many other stories weave in and out: Amelia Earhart pursues her dream of flying "around the world at its waistline." Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., stages a boycott on 125th Street. And Mae West shocks radio listeners as a naked Eve tempting the snake.
Critic Nat Hentoff praises the "precise originality" with which Roxane Orgill writes about music. In Dream Lucky, she magically lets readers hear the past.
Cached date: AWS Called=true
Customer Reviews
a breezy trip down Memory Lane, but something's missing 
2008-08-11
This is a highly readable account of a by-gone era, aptly titled. Although I was not born until the 1950's, I am a long-time fan of Count Basie, FDR, Eleanor and some of the old radio shows that pop up in this travelogue
The book seems purposefully superficial, almost intentionally impressionistic. It is unassuming. There are countless more informed sources on everything covered. The author's goal, rather, is to string assorted sources of 1930's diversions/entertainment together to create a mood and sense of time and place. In this she succeeds. I recommend background audio of, guess what, The Count
But something is missing, and the amateur historian in me suggests it is the Depression. The omission must be deliberate; i.e., here are some of the interesting distractions Americans had during the Depression and before Pearl Harbor. We have plenty of other sources to go to for the economic, human miseries of the 1930's...
Still, for me, this trip down Memory Lane would have been richer had it also woven in more of the harshness of the times
The flavor of an era 
2008-06-23
Billie Holiday performing in blackface, Eleanor Roosevelt sharing a racially stereotyped joke with her newspaper readers, Benny Goodman dropping by a black jazz club to listen to Count Basie play: These sound like scenes from an imaginative historical novel, but they are among the delightful and tantalizing historical events reported in "Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat..."
Author Roxane Orgill, a former music critic who in recent years has written books for children, turned to the period from 1936 and 1938 and the emergence of swing as the dominant American music of the era for her first book for grown-ups. Some of the stories are outrageous: Mrs. Roosevelt, who in later years was reviled by liberals, writing in her daily newspaper column, "Many of us do not appreciate what we owe the colored race for its good humor and its quaint ways of saying and doing things," before reprinting tasteless dialect joke from a book called "Chocolate Drops from the South;" a club manager in Detroit who insisted Billie Holiday wear black greasepaint because she looked white next to the members of Count Basie's orchestra; Adolf Hitler wishing boxer Max Schmeling "every success" in his fight with Joe Louis.
"Dream Lucky" - the name comes from a Jimmy Rushing song - offers a series of well documented historical vignettes and people with names like Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Orson Welles, and Lanston Hughes. It recounts the parts of history too intimate to be recorded in textbooks that flesh out our understanding of a storied era.
Every Tub on its own Bottom 
2008-05-27
I really liked this book. It is a kind of feelgood history. We all know how terrible the Great Depression was but we sometimes forget how exciting those times were. Additionally, we often lose touch with the human element in history. Dream Lucky shows how the unimportant events of history sometimes help capture the feel of past eras.
This book provides glimpses into a highlight of the career of star heavyweight Joe Lewis, the Count Basie Orchestra's defining moment, Benny Goodman as he is usually remembered, FDR at work and play, the joys of radio, and several other moments which lessened somewhat the grimness of the thirties. An advantage of this book is that it allows us to briefly become almost a part of those moments.
The central story in the book is the sudden rise of the Count Basie Orchestra from Kansas City house band to leading status in the jazz world. In its day the Basie band was the exemplar of swing jazz. While it was not as great a dance band as Chick Webb's orchestra, as financially successful as Benny Goodman's bands and small groups, or as creatively potent as Duke Ellington's Orchestra, it outperformed all its competition at one time or other.
If you are interested in how Roosevelt beat the Dpression (if he did) or what the Dustbowl was like, don't bother reading this book. You won't find answers. If, however, you want to know about some of the glittering but fleeting joys of the Thirties, this is the book for you.
Some men still wear hats 2008-05-04
It took a little while for me to get used to the tone of this book -- the author's voice, and her approach to history and storytelling. Once I figured out, however, to think of it as the print equivalent of a jazz album, with the author riffing on a series of repeated themes, the book became not only much more accessible, but enjoyable. Even ... dare I say? ... swinging.
"Dream Lucky" isn't really a history book about the days "when FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat," even though it sometimes feels like it wants to be. Nor is it really a view of America during the years in question, except insofar as it defines what we were all listening to on the radio. With the exception of a description of Basie's road trip through the south and midwest, this is a New York-centric story, and an impressionist sort of story at that, weaving a little politics and some current events around the story of Basie's rise from a moderate level of fame and success in Kansas City to the big time in the Big Apple. It's an interesting approach, and within that narrower focus Roxane Orgill pulls it off well. And whereas I tend to judge a book in part on how many other books on the topic it makes me want to read, "Dream Lucky" has given me a whole list of CDs to track down and listen to, which I think is just as good a sign of merit (I'm pleased to say I already had several of the recordings she cites, including Benny Goodman's landmark 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, which you really need to hear if you haven't yet).
Again like jazz, this relaxed and, at first glance, erratic way of storytelling may not be to everyone's taste. But if you're inclined to give it a try, I think you'll find it a rewarding way to spend a few hours.
