With little income and a large family, they moved to the Maxwell Street neighborhood, an overcrowded slum near railroad yards and factories that was populated by German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, and Jewish immigrants.

On Sundays, his father took the children to free band concerts in Douglass Park, the first time Goodman experienced live professional performances.

Benny also received two years of clarinet lessons from the classically trained clarinetist and Chicago Symphony Orchestra member, Franz Schoepp.

[5][6][7] During the next year Goodman joined the boys club band at Hull House, where he received lessons from director James Sylvester.

[8] He performed on Lake Michigan excursion boats, and in 1923 played at Guyon's Paradise, a local dance hall.

When he was 17, his father was killed by a passing car after stepping off a streetcar,[10] which Goodman called "the saddest thing that ever happened in our family".

[3]: 42 His early influences were New Orleans jazz clarinetists who worked in Chicago, such as Jimmie Noone,[11] Johnny Dodds, and Leon Roppolo.

The session resulted in the song "When I First Met Mary", which also included Glenn Miller, Harry Goodman, and Ben Pollack.

[14] In a Victor recording session on March 21, 1928, he played alongside Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Joe Venuti in the All-Star Orchestra directed by Nathaniel Shilkret.

[20] Goodman's band was one of three to perform on Let's Dance, playing arrangements by Henderson along with hits such as "Get Happy" and "Limehouse Blues" by Spud Murphy.

He and his band remained on Let's Dance until May of that year when a strike by employees of the series' sponsor, Nabisco, forced the cancellation of the radio show.

An engagement was booked at Manhattan's Roosevelt Grill filling in for Guy Lombardo, but the audience expected "sweet" music and Goodman's band was unsuccessful.

[25] Goodman and his band, which included trumpeter Bunny Berigan, drummer Gene Krupa, and singer Helen Ward were met by a large crowd of young dancers who cheered the music they had heard on Let's Dance.

British author J. C. Squire filed a complaint with BBC Radio to demand it stop playing Goodman's music, which he called "an awful series of jungle noises which can hearten no man.

"[3]: 243  Germany's Nazi party barred jazz from the radio, claiming it was part of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the culture.

Italy's fascist government banned the broadcast of any music composed or played by Jews which they said threatened "the flower of our race, the youth.

"[3]: 244 In November 1935, Goodman accepted an invitation to play in Chicago at the Joseph Urban Room at the Congress Hotel.

[29] Slingerland Drum Company had been calling Krupa the "King of Swing" as part of a sales campaign, but shortly after Goodman and his crew left Chicago in May 1936 to spend the summer filming The Big Broadcast of 1937 in Hollywood, the title "King of Swing" was applied to Goodman by the media.

[3]: 365–367 In 1939, pianist and arranger Mary Lou Williams suggested to John Hammond, who was responsible for finding new talent for Goodman, that he see guitarist Charlie Christian.

[32] Unbeknownst to Goodman, at an August 16 concert at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills, Hammond inserted Christian onto the stage.

Goodman started playing "Rose Room" on the assumption that Christian didn't know it, but his performance impressed the audience immensely.

"[35] Christian was a member of the Benny Goodman Sextet from 1939 to 1941, and during these two years he turned the electric guitar into a popular jazz instrument.

From 1942 to 1944, and again in 1948, the musicians' union went on strike against the major record labels in the United States, and singers acquired the popularity that the big bands had once enjoyed.

[38] By the 1940s, some jazz musicians were borrowing from classical music, while others, such as Charlie Parker, were broadening the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic vocabulary of swing to create bebop (or bop).

[39] He consulted his friend Mary Lou Williams for advice on how to approach the music of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs by Leonard Bernstein was commissioned for Woody Herman's big band, but it was premiered by Goodman.

In the early 1970s he collaborated with George Benson after the two met taping a PBS tribute to John Hammond, recreating some of Goodman's duets with Charlie Christian.

This integration in music happened ten years before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's six-decade-long color line.

[53] Members of the band included Jimmy Knepper, Jerry Dodgion, and Turk Van Lake (Vanig Hovsepian).

[54] Bassist Bill Crow published a very colorful view of the tour and Goodman's conduct during it under the title "To Russia Without Love".