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The obvious thing to say about the 1940s, the decade during which most of World War II was fought, is that it was a time of conflict. The war had a powerful effect on the music business, robbing it of manpower and materials, and making travel, a musician’s necessity, more difficult. (Not all of the effects were negative; when a G.I., at the end of the war, brought back from Germany an early tape recorder, it was the beginning of a major technological innovation in radio and recording.) But conflict was the constant of the industry in the 1940s not just because of the war, but also because of a series of contentions within various aspects of the business that helped alter its structure as well as the direction of popular music.