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McKinney's Cotton Pickers - To Whom It May Concern, 1930

1,488 views · Published 15 April 2016 · 3:13 · Indexed 21 October 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2016 · Music

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McKinney's Cotton Pickers – To Whom It May Concern, Fox trot (Mitchell – Gottler – Meyer) Vocal chorus by Lois Deppe, Victor 1930 (USA)

NOTE: McKinney's Cotton Pickers was an Afro-American seminal jazz band, one of the first developers of Swing. It was founded in Detroit in 1926 by a jazz drummer, William Kinney. In 1927, Fletcher Henderson's arranger and saxophone player Don Redman was invited to become the Cotton Pickers' musical director, and he assembled a band which rivaled Henderson's and Duke Ellington's. Many of their records for Victor were bestsellers. However a number of dance bands in the 1920s/30s used "black" sounding names to convince the record-buying public of their being the genuine article. So, often the genuine McKinney’s Cotton Pickers were mistaken for The Cotton Pickers - the Brunswick's generic name for its studio orchestra (initially led by a trumpeter Phil Napoleon)  recording thru the 1920s the blues fox trots and other music which was rooted in the public's imagination as being black in origin. The reason for that was enormous success in the late 1910s/20s of the Original Dixieland Jass Band – the group of white guys who copied African-American music, and played it as their own. From the spring of 1921 instrumental blues were increasingly featured by recording groups, composed and published mainly by black songwriters but performed by white bands and orchestras. Many of those white "hot jazz" groups were good but no way in the same league as McKinney's band. Between 1927 and 1931, they were one of the most popular African-American bands in USA. In 1931 Redman left to form his own band and was replaced by Benny Carter. The Cotton Pickers disbanded in 1934, unable to make money during the Depression. 
The slideshow contains – appropriately to the band’s origins – some vintage views of Detroit.

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