Alfred Cobbs Said It

"See, what happened in that era, when we go to record, we go down to the studio. The man say, 'Okay, Jimmie [Lunceford, pictured], what you got?' 'Okay, I got this number, I got that number.' 'Good, let's record it.' Now those were numbers that we had played on the road, and numbers that we had gotten any good response to. New numbers, you know what I mean. So there we knew just what the public liked, what they wanted, and we're goin' record that.

“And then one time, we came in, and same thing. 'Well, what you got?' 'Well, we got this, we got that.' 'Good,' he said, 'but now here try this.' Now we looked at that and we went, 'What is this?' Now you see, what was creeping into the thing was politics. So now here is somebody that his son wrote something, and he owns a record company. Or he's got this X amount of money, you know what I mean, so he gives it to the company, said, 'Get this recorded, it's my son's tune.' And we looked at it and...we know it's nothing. So there we are trying to make an arrangement on this nothing. And consequently the music business went down. And then a lot of people came into the business that didn't know A from B."

--Alfred Cobbs, a trombonist with Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra, on the music business in the late 1940s, from Eddy Determeyer's Rhythm Is Our Business: Jimmie Lunceford and the Harlem Express (2006).