Brown, Lester Raymond

▪ 2002

“Les” 

      American bandleader (b. March 14, 1912, Reinerton, Penn.—d. Jan. 4, 2001, Pacific Palisades, Calif.), led a top swing-era dance band that went on to long-term Hollywood and television success and spent 40 years accompanying comedian Bob Hope's stage and broadcast shows. Excellent arrangers and musicians contributed to the Brown band, notably singer Doris Day, who joined when she was 16 years old. While the dance-band business was collapsing in the late 1940s, Brown's band thrived by appearing on Hope's weekly radio programs, and it was featured on television with Hope, Steve Allen, and Dean Martin. Brown began playing soprano saxophone in boyhood; he later attended Duke University, Durham, N.C., where he led the student dance band. The big band he formed in 1938 won popular success, especially after Day joined in 1940, and made a musical breakthrough with its 1941 hit “Joltin' Joe Dimaggio.” Brown's arrangers, influenced by the Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, Woody Herman, and other top jazz bands, crafted a modern swing style; Brown's musicians, including his brother, trombonist Clyde (“Stumpy”) Brown, played with singular precision and technical skill. The band scored a number of hit records, including “Mexican Hat Dance,” “I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” and, most famously, “Sentimental Journey,” a number one song in 1945 featuring Day's vocals. Two years later the Brown band first appeared with Hope; it made 18 overseas Christmas tours with him to entertain troops, including 7 trips to wartime Vietnam, and appeared in over 800 shows with Hope. Brown led his band at inauguration balls for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as for the U.K.'s Queen Elizabeth. The band—often introduced as “Les Brown and His Band of Renown”—continued to perform at concerts and dances and record throughout the rock era, although in 1990, a decade before his retirement, he maintained, “There won't be much demand for big bands soon.”

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