These days, with the proliferation of music blogs and sites like Last.fm, everyone’s an A&R man. Almost no one in the history of the music industry, however, has the track record of producer and scout John H. Hammond, the focus of Dustin Prial’s book “The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music,” which producer Jerry Weintraub (“Ocean’s Eleven”) has just acquired the rights to, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Hammond was born into a wealthy family in New York in 1910, and quickly developed an interest in music, particularly that which he heard sung by his servants. He started listening to jazz in Harlem, and in his early 20s, became the U.S. correspondent for the U.K. paper Melody Maker. Through that, he started working for Columbia, and his influence grew and grew in the jazz world — he was responsible for convincing Benny Goodman to hire black musicians for his band, and discovered Billie Holliday and Count Basie.
In the 1950s, he returned to Columbia after a long absence, and quickly signed the likes of Pete Seeger and Babatunde Olatunji, as well as discovering and signing both Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan; he was a particular champion of the latter, producing his early records. Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan were also among his discoveries, and he was almost entirely responsible for the reissue and rediscovery of the work of blues singer Robert Johnson.
Clearly, Hammond’s influence on 20th century music is virtually unmatched, so there’s plenty of potential here, although we hope Weintraub has an angle beyond a “Cadillac Records”-style parade of famous singers. It’s clearly a personal project for the producer, who started out in the music industry, managing the likes of John Denver, The Carpenters and Frank Sinatra. He’s hired Stanley Weiser (“Wall Street”) to write the script, although no director or cast are currently attached.