My late father liked to tell a story about the extraordinary talent scout John Hammond. At the dawn of the 1960s, my dad hung out a lot in the clubs of Greenwich Village, where he heard dozens of folk singers singing out of tune and accompanying themselves with a few chords (mostly wrong) on beat-up guitars. One of them was Bob Dylan, recently arrived from his native Minnesota. My dad ran into Mr. Dylan many times in 1961, but he saw nothing to distinguish the young singer from the other raggedy folkies on the scene. Not so Hammond, who signed Mr. Dylan to his record label, Columbia. As my father put it, “How John Hammond was able to pick Dylan out and say, ‘This guy is going to be something special’ always astonished me!”

Those who knew Hammond (1910-87) would have been less surprised. In addition to Bob Dylan, Hammond either discovered or helped establish the careers of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. How he did so is the subject of “The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 368 pages, $27) by Dunstan Prial, a reporter for the Associated Press.

Hammond was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in America, the Vanderbilts. He was drawn to black music and culture from a young age, and he also grew up with the belief, handed down by his mother, that it was his duty to help others. For Hammond, promoting good music was both a cultural and moral imperative. By raising the standard of the nation’s musical taste, he would simultaneously fight for the civil rights of the black people who made the music he loved.

By the late 1920s, Hammond was regularly traveling up to Harlem to hear the music he had discovered on records. After dropping out of Yale in 1931, he began to work his way into the record business, largely through his relationship with Benny Goodman. The two met in 1933 when Hammond offered the clarinetist the opportunity to lead an all-star band on a series of sessions for Columbia. Though Goodman was already an established soloist at the time, Hammond served as his musical conscience for a few crucial years in the mid-1930s.

Hammond helped Goodman put together the band that effectively launched the swing era in 1935, advising him on which musicians to hire and urging him to make his an uncompromisingly hot orchestra. At a time when it was taboo for white and black musicians to perform together, Hammond encouraged Goodman to work with great black musicians like pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian.

Hammond’s first major discovery was Billie Holiday, whom he heard singing in a small club in Harlem in 1932. The late vibraphonist Red Norvo, however, always insisted that he and his wife, the singer Mildred Bailey, had been with Hammond on that particular night, and that it was Bailey who first pointed out that the 16-year-old girl was a major talent. Mr. Prial briefly mentions this story in his footnotes, but it doesn’t take anything away from Hammond – nor does it matter much that Mary Lou Williams first told him about Charlie Christian. In both cases, it was Hammond who had the resources and presence of mind to give talented young musicians opportunities to make records.

By the mid-1930s, Hammond was regularly producing various sessions for Columbia while keeping an ear out for new talent. He first heard Count Basie on a long-distance broadcast from the Reno Club in Kansas City, and he took the necessary steps to set the pianist and bandleader up with an agent and re-tool his already remarkable orchestra. Hammond’s most vital contribution was discovering the outstanding rhythm guitarist Freddy Green, who proved indispensable to Basie for the rest of the pianist’s career.

When Hammond discovered talents he liked, he devoted all his resources to helping establish them. He wrote jazz criticism for various publications and, as Mr. Prial shows, had no compunction about lavishing praise in print on the very musicians whose careers he was steering. Similarly, he was known to take money out of his own pocket to promote musicians. But woe unto those who acted like they didn’t need his support or suggestions.

Basie was diplomatic enough to go as far as he could with Hammond’s suggestions, but the band’s star, Lester Young, resented the way Hammond tried to take charge and replace some of Young’s friends. Duke Ellington, whose more ambitious work Hammond attacked in print, claimed that Hammond saw to it that the Duke’s band was never given the choicest studios to record in during the late 1930s, when they were both at Columbia. Hammond also resented that when Harry James launched his first band, the trumpeter went and hired a boy singer without consulting him; as a result Hammond and Frank Sinatra were always at odds.

Hammond’s desire to be in the middle of everything explains why he was lukewarm to the sea change that occurred in jazz while he was in the Army between 1942 and 1946.When the bebop revolution occurred, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie did not make it their business to seek Hammond’s approval. Suddenly, there was a whole generation of free-thinking musicians who didn’t need his support.

Denouncing the entire modern jazz movement, Hammond said he heard more of the bluesy energy he loved in folk and pop music. After returning to Columbia Records in 1959, he proved his worth to the label by bringing in Leonard Cohen, Ms. Franklin, and Messrs. Dylan, Benson, and Springsteen. He found most of these later stars through agents, demo tapes, and other musicians – rather than sitting in a club and pricking up his ears. Just the same, he deserves credit for launching them professionally.

Mr. Prial has given us a fast-moving and very readable biography that complements Hammond’s excellent memoir, “John Hammond on Record” (1977). Mr. Prial uses Hammond’s book as the skeleton of his story, which he has filled in with other writings by Hammond and interviews with him. He has also cross-checked Hammond’s own accounts with the copious literature – biographies and autobiographies – attendant to most of the major musicians Hammond was associated with.

Mr. Prial is especially good in documenting Hammond’s extra-musical activities: his stint as a reporter covering the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial in 1932-33 and his often tempestuous involvement in the NAACP over three decades. As with musicians, he tended to get testy with NAACP officials – particularly with Roy Wilkins – when their ideas differed from his.

The book’s most egregious fault is overlooking Hammond’s relationship to Mildred Bailey. Hammond never claimed to have discovered Bailey, but he produced many of her best records, off and on over a dozen years, and they enjoyed a close personal friendship. Hammond regarded his work with Bailey as some of the finest of his career, yet she is barely mentioned here. But Mr. Prial devotes a whole chapter to Stevie Ray Vaughan, a forgettable bluesrock guitarist who was the last artist Hammond boosted.

Still, Mr. Prial also captures the essence of what allowed Hammond to succeed: his a complete and unswerving faith in his own instincts. He would boost any musician who pleased him, and had no fear of joining any left-leaning organization he chose. (He deliberately steered clear of the Communist Party, however, because he disagreed with its attitude toward blacks.) He would promote either a performer or a cause with the dedication of a true reformer.

By the 1960s, Hammond almost never actually produced the artists he discovered. By that time, he was leaving it to the other guys to make the records. John Hammond’s job, contrastingly, was to make careers.

10 Essential Hammond Sessions

SEPTEMBER 11, 1932: For his first recording session, John Hammond selected the Harlem-based pianist Garland Wilson; although the resulting records didn’t break down any doors for the producer or the pianist, they remain superlative examples of the stride style at its finest.

DECEMBER 9, 1932: Hammond took almost a paternal interest in Fletcher Henderson, often cited as the father of big band jazz. During a series of sessions in 1932 and ’33 (including some led by Fletcher’s brother Horace and sidemen Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins), Hammond produced some of the most exciting music ever associated with the Henderson bands.

NOVEMBER 24, 1933: This was Bessie Smith’s last session, and one of her all-time greatest. Hammond teamed the still-hot Empress of the Blues with some younger jazz upstarts, including Frankie Newton, Chu Berry, Jack Teagarden, and Benny Goodman, and gave her the great blues standard, “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)” and three other songs to sing.

NOVEMBER 27, 1933: Three days after the Smith session, Hammond was in the studio again, continuing his series of all-star recordings led by Goodman. These cuts – originally released in Britain – spotlight an all-star lineup including Hawkins, Teagarden, and Billie Holiday, making her recorded debut on “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law.”

JULY 2, 1935: Hammond brought pianist Teddy Wilson to New York from Chicago in 1933, and in these sessions Wilson led a series of amazing small-group sessions that co-featured Holiday. The Holiday-Wilson teaming, as successful as it would be for both the singer and the pianist, was strictly a Hammond innovation: Wilson later said that she was not his idea of a great singer – he thought Holiday was too much of a Louis Armstrong imitator.

DECEMBER 6, 1935: This was possibly the most amazing of Hammond’s sessions with the superlative swing singer Mildred Bailey. On this date, also originally released in the UK, Hammond backed the Rockin’ Chair Lady with the formidable foursome of Bunny Berigan, Johnny Hodges, Wilson, and bassist Grachan Moncur. They played a program of compositions mostly by Fats Waller.

OCTOBER 9, 1936: This date altered the course of jazz history. Here Hammond introduced the mature Count Basie and Lester Young, recording light but driving small-group swing under the pseudonym of Smith-Jones, Inc. No one had heard music like this before, and Young’s solos, especially on “Shoe Shine Boy” and “Lady Be Good,” would be memorized and replicated by thousands of saxophonists to come, including Charlie Parker.

DECEMBER 23, 1938, and DECEMBER 24, 1939: Hammond put all his resources behind an ambitious concert at Carnegie Hall entitled “Spirituals to Swing,” which attempted to document the whole history of African-American music. He started with blues and gospel, as demonstrated by Big Joe Turner, Sonny Terry and the Golden Gate Quartet, then worked all the way up to the smooth modern swing of the Basie big band. A follow-up concert a year later also featured the Goodman Sextet with its new guitarist, Charlie Christian. All the material captured on both dates was recently issued on a three-CD set from Vanguard Records.

AUGUST 1, 1960: This was the first of three sessions that resulted in Aretha Franklin’s eponymous first album for Columbia. Produced by Hammond and featuring pianist Ray Bryant, “Aretha Franklin” is among her best ever. Ms. Franklin’s Columbia sessions between 1960 and 1966 are often denounced for failing to produce huge pop hits, but this is brilliant music.

NOVEMBER 20 & 22, 1961: Bob Dylan’s first album was recorded over two dates, and captures a rough-hewn, forceful folk singer who sounds more like Woody Guthrie (honored in “Song to Woody”) than the future Dylan. Only one song, “Talkin’ New York,” hints at the singersongwriter to come, but Hammond had helped yet another legend-to-be get his foot in the door.

wfriedwald@nysun.com