I think as you listen to swing music and let your tastes grow you can start out liking stuff like CPD (which I think is mostly crap, but that's just me), then BBVD (who I like tremendousely live, and find perfectly satisfactory DJ'd) on down to RCR and Indigo, slide right into Lavay Smith and Lily Wilde and Swing Session, visit Bill Elliott, and then take a quick little Hop to Jordan and before long you're enjoying Basie, Bachet, Ella and Armstrong.
I think it's really important to remember you don't HAVE to like every song on a record, find a few you like and run with them. I have tons of Ella and Billie that I think are beautiful, talent-filled songs that make me sleepy and I definately don't want to DJ, and rarely want to listen to. On the same note, I have CDs full of Calloway and Jordon that get my blood pumping, but if I throw in a full CD of either one by the third song I'm totally lost on how many songs have gone by, because they sound so similar. Mix them in a set though, and they're wonderful, it's up to me to define that contrast.
In case you're curious, I wasnt' allowed to listen to anything but Gospel and Elvis till I was 12 or so, then I discovered and forced my parents to let me listen to Pop and some Rock, since then I've been a huge fan of some Pop and Rock, a bit of Punk, quite a lot of "alternative" Rock (talk about fuzzily defined musical terms), a bit of classical, and for the last few years a ton of swing.
(which, oddly enough, one of my favorite sub-genre's has become Gospel, leading me full circle.)I'm in the quite unusual position of DJ'ing a weekly "social dance" night, so I've had to learn to appreciate a wide variety of music (Pop and Blues for Westies, Latin for Cha Cha, Merengue, Salsa, etc, Disco for hustle, bad 80s love songs for Nightclub, and swing for the Lindy and East Coast/Single Time crowds). The one true-ism I've discovered is that the more music you listen to, the more you can appreciate, and the more you can define why bands suck, or why bands don't suck. There are plenty of notes on my MP3s like "Band is mediocre, fun lyrics, nice breaks, usually goes over well for novelty song" or "band is superior, great recording, perfectly executed, boring as hell". My point is, depending on what you're listening FOR and what you want out of a song, songs can be great, horrible, or both at once. It's kind of a quantum physics thing, the position you're in determins the value of the song in question, not the song (or genre) itself.
