The Swing era (sometimes referred to as the "Big Band Era") was the period of time (1935–1946) when big band swing music was the most popular music in the United States. Though swing music was most popular during this period, the music had actually been around since the late 1920s and early 1930s, being played by black bands led by such artists as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Benny Moten, Cab Calloway, and Fletcher Henderson. Musicians and arrangers with the white bands from the 1920s like Russ Morgan, Isham Jones, and after 1932 most historians believe that the Swing Era started with Benny Goodman's performance at the Palomar Ballroom on August 21, 1935, bringing the music to the rest of the country.

Music experimentation has always been popular in America. The many avenues of black, white, Latin, American, and European music influences merged when Swing arrived. In 1932, early in the jazz, and the sweet music styles of the American music scene - they worked on new, often unheard of musical arrangements that were emphasized toward a more polished song with a bounce. Recordings by Isham Jones, the popular jazz/blues bandleader, and his orchestra which sometimes included Benny Goodman recorded for RCA Victor. The swing era also was precipitated by spicing up familiar commercial, popular material with a Harlem oriented flavour and selling it via a white band for a white musical/commercial audience.

Swing or swinging may refer to:

An era is a commonly used word for long period of time. When used in science, for example geology, eras denote clearly defined periods of time of arbitrary but well defined length, such as for example the Mesozoic Era from 252 Ma–66 Ma, delimited by a start event and an end event. When used in social history, eras may for example denote a period of some monarch's reign. In colloquial language, eras denote longer spans of time, before and after which the practices or fashions change to a significant degree. When era is extended to a calendar system, it is known as a calendar era. In Sanskrit or Indian culture eras are known as Yugas.

In chronology, an era is the highest level for the organization of the measurement of time. A calendar era indicates a span of many years which are numbered beginning at a specific reference date (epoch), which often marks the origin of a political state or cosmology, dynasty, ruler, the birth of a leader, or another significant historical or mythological event; it is generally called after its focus accordingly as in Victorian era.