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Jack Payne & His BBC Dance Orch. - Blondy, 1929

1,573 views · Published 4 December 2015 · 3:03 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2015 · Music

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Blondy, Theme song from „Marianne” (Freed – Brown) - Jack PAYNE & His B.B.C. Dance Orchestra, Vocal refrain: Jack Payne, Columbia 1929 (UK)

NOTE: This is one of the less known recordings made by Jack Payne - the superb British dance band leader - during his best years when he led the B.B.C. Dance orchestra in the late 1920s/early 1930s. The hottest dance music sides were cut by his band in that that period. John Wesley Vivian "Jack" Payne was born in 1899 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, the only son of a music publisher's warehouse manager. Payne served in the Royal Air Force during World War I, and led dance bands for the troops. In the early 1920s, he played with visiting American jazz bands before moving to London in 1925. He played in a ten-piece band which became the house band at London's Hotel Cecil. This ensemble regularly performed on the BBC in the latter half of the decade. In 1928, Payne became the BBC Director of Dance Music and the leader of the BBC's first official dance band. In 1929 the band was featured in the first ever BBC television broadcast. After leaving the BBC in 1932, when he was succeeded by Henry Hall, he returned to playing hotel venues and took his band on tours in UK, he also toured South Africa and France, where his band proved, the British dance orchestras could play the hot swing and other orchestrations of the American jazz. In 1941 until 1946 he was again at the BBC as Director of Dance Music at the BBC, in later years he had his own BBC Television programme, Words and Music, through the decade of the 1950s he made frequent television appearances in other popular music programmes. During his final years, Payne wqithdrew from the musical scene and ran a hotel in Sussex, which was not a successful venture. He died in Tonbridge, Kent in 1969.

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