 The Cavalcade of America, presented by Dupont. Beginning this evening, The Cavalcade of America will bring you a series of four weekly musical half-hours featuring one of Radio's distinguished conductors, Don Voorhees and his orchestra. This evening, the Evolution of Dance Music in America. These programs, illustrating the development of interesting phases of American music, will be another chapter in the summer series of The Cavalcade of America in Music, presented by Dupont. An interesting feature of each program will be a brief story of chemical research, illustrating the Dupont phrase, better things for better living, through chemistry. America has always been a dancing nation, from the days when the old fiddle concertina played for the rollicking barn dance, to the present day with hundreds of polished dance orchestras beating out their rhythms on roof gardens high up toward the clouds. Dance music of the day gives us a smooth pattern of restful tone colors, or a brilliant flash of rhythmic design, lights and shadows, a variety of arresting effects. Photographs and radio have made their varying styles of different dance orchestras familiar to Americans from coast to coast. How did it all happen? Let us turn the calendar back to the 1880s, and look in on an old-fashioned square dance, to the tune of 30 of the stars who wrote the music, and it was four of infectious melodies. One of them seems to typify the life of that day, and the perpetual popularity of that most romantic of all dances, the Waltz. In all of New York, remember it? But even then the tempo of life was increasing. America was in a hurry to advance. The business panic of 1907 came unwed. That same year the Lusitania made its maiden voyage, and the merry widow came to America from Vienna. The Nickelodeon movie house came into vogue. Burt Williams was in the Ziegfeld Falleys, and women began to smoke. But the Waltz was still the favorite dance. Sentiment was still the leading characteristic of the song and spirit of the time. And then something happened, and it marked the beginning of dance music as we know it today. They played with gyrations, they shook, twisted, swayed. The listener's head was dizzy, but his feet understood and beat time. It was cool perhaps, but its rhythm was arresting and its spirit catching. It had vitality and sincerity. It was peculiarly American. For some time, the Dixieland Jazz Band was not well-known. But in 1912 in New York, something else happened. 23-year-old songwriter of Kent Pound Alley wrote Alexander's Ragged Band Band. Nothing like its syncopated jubilant had ever been heard before. Its new rhythm insinuated itself into the life of America with a bang. Shoulders started swaying. The lobster palace of Diamond Jim Brady fame came to an end, where every restaurant had to provide dance music with meals, and dining became insinvitable. The haunting strains of Alexander's Ragged Band Band were heard everywhere. It was a song of the hour. The dance craze was on. Alexander's Ragged Band Band started it. America literally went dance crazy. It seemed as if no one could dance enough. Dance orchestras sprung up everywhere. Many strange variations and dance steps came into fashion. Turkey trot, bunny hugs, grizzly bear, one step fishwalk, and fox trot. Two celebrities emerged from this dancing world. Irene and Vernon Cafferl, whose charm and graceful dancing made them idols of the day. Meanwhile, the Dixieland Jazz Band journeyed from New Orleans to Chicago, where the crowds went wild. From there to San Francisco, where they also created a sensation. But the Dixieland had never been to New York, and New York had never heard anything quite like it, and yet New York was supposed to set the styles. The Dixieland Jazz Band finally came east and was engaged by Rice and Webbers Cafe. Let's look in at Rice and Webbers in New York on the evening when the Dixieland Jazz Band is to be introduced to New York for the first time. There's no mistakable air of excitement and pleasant anticipation. Every table is filled, and mostly with celebrities. We hear a couple talking at one of the tables. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, it's late, please. Well darling, isn't it about time for them to introduce the Dixieland Jazz Band? Yes, yes, they're coming on the stand now. I hear it's great music. Oh, I can hardly wait. Oh, I bet it's wonderful for dancing. Well, I hope so. I never thought it would turn out right. Every celebrity in town is here. Oh, look, look, the manager's going to make an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my privilege to introduce to you the greatest dance music you've ever heard, the Dixieland Jazz Band for its first appearance in New York. It started something when they began double years ago in New Orleans. They went to Chicago, they came to talk of the town, then San Francisco, and now ladies and gentlemen, Rice and Webbers in New York. Get ready to dance, ladies and gentlemen, the Dixieland Jazz Band. Shall we dance? Well, no, no, wait a minute. I didn't want to be the first on the floor. Somebody has to start. Come on. Well, I don't know. I'm kind of scared. Well, anybody who likes to dance as much as you do, I am. Yes, but I never heard music like this before. I wouldn't know how to dance to it. You wouldn't either. Well, I admit it. Well, look. Oh, on the dance floor. Well, no one's even smiling. Oh, that's too bad. After all we've heard, and I thought it would be such a success. Never once the world heard that. The world heard? Huh? Look at the manager. He looks as if he lost his last friend. Yes, he looks funny. And you're blaming. Ladies and gentlemen, please, you don't understand. This is jazz. It's meant to be danced to. Try it, and you'll see how someone started. Please. I'll even dance myself. This is because someone laughed. Whatever it was, the crowd at Weiss & Rivers that night danced as they had never danced before. Jazz that hit New York and New York loved it. While this was going on, something was happening out in California. A young man named Paul Whiteland had organized an orchestra and was playing at the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles. He believed that jazz was the soul of America, and he gave himself a job obtaining it, refining it to bring out the beauty he thought sure was there. He and his orchestra came east for an engagement at the Ambassador in Atlantic City. They didn't cause much of a stir, and they might have packed up and gone home. The representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company hadn't happened to lunch at the Ambassador one day in 1920. Paul Whiteland was given a two-year contract to make Victor records, and that was the beginning of a psychronic series of happening. New York, and an engagement at the Folly Royal, the largest cafe in town. Pictures in the papers, theater engagement, fame. Paul Whiteland revolutionized jazz. It became a thing of beauty and charm, full of infinite variety. With it came a refinement of dance steps. The names that make music all flock to the Folly Royal to hear the new jazz. In 1920, people everywhere were rowing back their rugs and dancing to Paul Whiteland's famous phonograph record of whispering. It became steadily more musical and more interesting. Something was always happening. New rhythms and new dances were constantly springing up. Remember back in 1925? With individual styles, men such as Vick Spiderbeck and the trumpet, Eddie Lang and the guitar, and Jova Newdy and the fiddle, Miss Mole and the trombone, Frank Trumbauer and the saxophone, Jack Teagarden, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, our conductor, Don Voorhees, and many others, they brought forth and popularized a new kind of rhythm, elusive, yet fascinating. It was characterized by an easy swing and great spontaneity. Here's the way it sounded when the boys played, Nobody's Sweetheart. Rudy Valle and Adam Bartow arrived on the scene, and Ogie Carmichael's beautiful tune, Stardust, was the hit of the day. The recent graduate of the State Agricultural College is talking with his grandfather. You and your new fangled ideas about chicken raising. Well, all right, Grandpa. If you don't believe my ideas are practical and won't even realize that they've been worked out and proved at college experimental stations, well, let's have a contest. A what? Contest. You know, when I get the new hat from the loser. Well, now I couldn't do with a new hat. What's your idea, Billy? Well, look, you take 100 of those new chicks and cap them your way, say. The way you've always done. Yes, yes, I see. And I'll take 100 chicks and cap them the way I've been taught. Now, at the end of 12 weeks, we'll let a third person judge the chicks and decide who wins. You're on, Billy. And make a note of my hat size. Seven and a quarter. Grandpa did not win the hat. At the end of the 12 weeks, he had lost 18 of his chicks and the 82 still-living averaged only a pound and a quarter each and were unthirsty and poorly feathered. Billy lost only six chicks and the 94 still-living averaged about three pounds each. They were husky and well-grown. And Billy went right on with his new-fangled methods to win a fall and winter contest, too. Caring for 100 laying hens the way he'd been taught, Bill got an average of 14 eggs per hen per month while Grandpa got only seven. And a large part of Billy's success must be credited to chemical research. One of the modern scientific aids to poultry raising, which Billy used, is a nonbreakable semi-transparent window material made by coating wire screen with a plastic solution. DuPont's name for this product is celloglass. Unlike ordinary glass, celloglass permits the passage of ultraviolet rays from the sun, a vital factor in growth, health, and egg production. And that's why it is being used on well over a million farms today. But chicks aren't the only benefactors. If you have a garden of any kind, DuPont's celloglass can help you out with jack-frost either in the spring or fall and get earlier, dirtier plants. Celloglass is also widely used for decorative lighting effects and in electrical signs and displays both indoors and out because it diffuses light and takes colored decoration so readily. It comes in rolls, is easy to handle, can't break like glass, yet provides warmth and light and gives protection from rain and snow. In fact, it's ideal for storm doors and storm windows in farm homes. If you own a farm or just have flour or vegetable gardens to care for, we suggest that you ask your garden supply hardware or lumber dealer about inexpensive DuPont celloglass. This product is only one of the numberless contributions that chemical science has made in its making to give us all, as DuPont expresses it, better things for better living through chemistry. Next week at the same time, the Cavalcake America in Music presented by DuPont will bring you another program with Don Voorhees and his orchestra, this one to be the tuneful development of American musical comedy and opera.