Irving Mills

Irving Harold Mills, born Isadore Minsky on January 18, 1894, was a music publisher, musician, lyricist, and jazz promoter who also appeared on Broadway. His birthplace is a matter of some dispute among biographers, with some sources citing Odessa in the Russian Empire and others placing his birth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He died on April 21, 1985. Throughout his career he worked under the pseudonyms Goody Goodwin and Joe Primrose.

Mills came from a Jewish family. His father, Hyman Minsky, was a hatmaker who emigrated from Odessa to the United States with his wife Sofia. After Hyman's death in 1905, Irving and his brother Jacob, born in 1891, supported themselves through a variety of jobs, including bussing tables at restaurants, selling wallpaper, and working in the garment industry. By 1910, Mills was employed as a telephone operator.

His Broadway career included an appearance in 1923 in the musical Battling Buttler. In addition to his stage work, Mills pursued a wide range of activities in the music industry. In July 1919, his older brother Jack Mills founded Jack Mills Music, a publishing venture motivated in part by a desire to publish his own compositions. Irving joined the company shortly after as vice president, with Jack serving as president and Samuel Jesse Buzzell as secretary and counselor. The company was renamed Mills Music, Inc. in 1928 and went on to acquire the bankrupt firm Waterson, Berlin and Snyder, Inc. in 1929.

Around 1925, Mills visited a small club on West 49th Street known as the Club Kentucky, where he heard a six-piece band from Washington, D.C. led by Duke Ellington. He signed Ellington the following day and managed him from 1926 to 1939. Under the terms of their contract, Mills held a 50 percent stake in Duke Ellington Inc., which gave him a writing credit on several compositions that became enduring standards, among them "Mood Indigo," "(In My) Solitude," "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)," and "Sophisticated Lady." Mills also pushed Ellington to record for a wide range of labels, including Victor, Brunswick, Columbia, Banner, Romeo, Perfect, Melotone, Cameo, Lincoln, and Hit of the Week Records. He was instrumental in securing Ellington's engagement at the Cotton Club and formed the Mills Blue Rhythm Band as a relief act at that venue. Mills was among the first to record Black and white musicians together, pairing twelve white musicians with the Duke Ellington Orchestra on a 12-inch 78 rpm record featuring the "St. Louis Blues" on one side and a medley titled "Gems from Blackbirds of 1928" on the other. When Victor Records hesitated to release the recording, Mills threatened to withdraw his artists from their roster, and the label ultimately relented.

Mills founded the studio recording group Irving Mills and His Hotsy Totsy Gang, which featured Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Arnold Brillhardt, Arthur Schutt, and Mannie Klein. Other configurations of the group included Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Red Nichols, to whom Mills gave the billing "and His Five Pennies." In 1932, Mills established the Rhythmakers recording group as a vehicle for jazz singer Billy Banks. The ensemble was racially integrated at a time when such groups were legally barred from public theatres and included Red Allen, Jack Bland, Pee Wee Russell, Fats Waller, Eddie Condon, and Jimmy Lord.

One of Mills's notable contributions to recording practice was the concept of the band within a band, which he began developing in 1928 by arranging for members of Ben Pollack's band to record small group sides under various pseudonyms on dime store labels such as Banner, Oriole, Cameo, Domino, and Perfect, while Pollack remained under exclusive contract to Victor. Mills also printed small orchestrations transcribed from these records so that non-professional musicians could study how notable solos were constructed, a practice later adopted by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and others.

Among the songwriters Mills discovered were Zez Confrey, Sammy Fain, Harry Barris, Gene Austin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy McHugh, and Dorothy Fields. He also advanced the careers of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ben Pollack, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, Will Hudson, and Raymond Scott. Mills co-wrote "Minnie the Moocher" with Cab Calloway and Clarence Gaskill. In 1934, he formed an all-female orchestra headed by Ina Ray, to whose name he added Hutton, creating the ensemble known as Ina Ray Hutton and Her Orchestra. That same year, Mills Music launched a publishing subsidiary called Exclusive Publications, Inc., which specialized in orchestrations by songwriters including Will Hudson, who co-wrote "Mr. Ghost Goes to Town" with Mills and Mitchell Parish in 1936.

In late 1936, with involvement from Herbert Yates of the American Record Corporation, Mills founded the Master and Variety record labels, distributed through ARC's Brunswick and Vocalion sales staff. He also signed Helen Oakley Dance to supervise small group recordings for the Variety label, with 40 records issued on Master from December 1936 through September 1937. Mills had previously been involved in artists and repertoire work for Columbia between 1934 and 1936, following ARC's purchase of that label.

Irving, Jack, and Samuel sold Mills Music on February 25, 1965, to Utilities and Industries Corporation, a New York-based utility company, which restructured it as The Mills Music Trust. At the time of the sale, the catalog contained an estimated 25,000 compositions, of which 1,500 were still generating royalties. In 1964, the company reported royalties of 1.3 million dollars. Its top-earning titles at the time of sale included "Stardust," "When You're Smiling," "The Syncopated Clock," "Moonglow," "Sleigh Ride," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby," "Caravan," "Blue Tango," "Mood Indigo," and "Who's Sorry Now?" The company operated 20 music publishing subsidiaries and maintained publishing operations in Britain, Brazil, Canada, France, West Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 1969, Utilities and Industries Corporation merged Mills Music with Belwin to form Belwin-Mills. The catalog passed through several subsequent owners, including Gulf and Western, Columbia Pictures Publications, Filmtrax, and EMI Music Publishing, before ultimately coming under the management of Sony Music Publishing following that company's acquisition of EMI Music Publishing in 2012.