2022 Jazz 75th Anniversary Reunion Program

‘Fessor Graham & the Aces perform at the Saturday Night
Stage Show in 1937. Professor Floyd Graham can be seen
standing to the left of the stage conducting his band.
Floyd Freeman Graham (1902 - 1974) was the
founder of the Saturday Night Stage Show. Born in
nearby Roanoke, Texas, Graham’s family moved to
Denton so that he and his brother, Wynne, could
attend school. Floyd Graham graduated from Denton High
School in 1919; in the 1920s he taught violin, appeared
in ensembles on Dallas and Fort Worth radio, and briefly
served as band director at Denton High. He joined the
faculty of North Texas in 1927 to teach band and orchestra,
having earned a teachers certificate from Chicago Musical
College. He continued his education with a bachelor of
music in violin from CMC in 1931 and a master of music
degree from the American Conservatory of Music in 1936.
While in Chicago, Graham studied with Leo Sowerby, and
he studied at Juilliard in the summer of 1939 with Ferde
Grofé and Fritz Mahler.
The combination of Floyd Graham’s entrepreneurial
spirit and musical achievements lent important context to
the Saturday Night Stage Show as an incubator of local
talent. Over the years, the show helped launch the careers
of Joan Blondell, Louise Tobin, Ann Sheridan, the Moon
Maids, and Pat Boone. The show’s Aces of Collegeland
stage band became the forerunner of the present-day Jazz
Studies program. It created a community of performers with
common interests, and the existence of that community
helped generate demand for expertise in jazz performance
and arranging. The stage show provided a venue for live
performance and also provided performance and income
opportunities during the Great Depression.
Even before the formal Jazz Studies program was
initiated, North Texas boasted a formidable assembly of
future jazz stars, including Herb Ellis, Jimmy Giuffre, Harry
Babasin, and Gene Roland, all of whom either graduated
or moved on around 1942. Many of them lived together
in a house that still stands at 204 Normal Street. Two
women’s vocal ensembles, the Moon Maids (first known
as the Swingtet, later joining Vaughn Monroe’s band),
and the Sunnysiders (first known as the Blue Notes, later
joining Sonny Dunham’s band), were also examples of early
excellence, featuring precise, close-harmony arrangements.
GENE HALL
AND THE EARLY DAYS
OF THE JAZZ PROGRAM
The opportunities to play and earn money at North Texas
attracted Gene Hall from Whitewright, Texas, as he was
scrambling in “panic bands” around 1934. He and some
other musicians had hoped to get into the fraternity circuit
for gigs. But Hall had trouble even scraping together the
$32 tuition and wound up touring with a band that got
stranded in Spain before eventually returning to Texas. Hall
later stated in an oral history that the demand for formal
training in arranging that arose out of the stage shows was
a prime motivator for curricular expansion, though one
collection donor has insisted to the Music Library that the
12 University of North Texas College of Music