Harris was a good entertainer
who deserved his success; among his hits in the 1940s had been ‘The
Preacher and the Bear’ and ‘Woodman, Spare That Tree’, both revived
from the acoustic era. Anton Karas wrote the music and played the zither
in the soundtrack of the famous Carol Reed film. ‘Rag Mop’, also regarded
as a novelty, had a strong beat and nonsense words; later it was speculated
that ‘Rag Mop’ had been the first rock’n’roll record, which was not
far wrong: hit versions of it included one by its co-author, Johnnie
Lee Wills, on Bullet. ‘Rag Mop’ was a country stomp, no different from
‘Osage Stomp’, recorded by Bob Wills in 1935, with Johnnie Lee on banjo.
The big hit version of ‘Rag Mop’ was less appropriate: the Ames Brothers
were a smooth vocal group.
‘Tennessee Waltz’ is a
good country song, written by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King in 1948
and a hit in the country chart that year. Page’s record was at number
one for thirteen weeks and sold six million copies. It provides an early
example of multi-tracking, and that gimmick, associated in the public
mind with new technology, may have helped establish the 45 rpm format,
though the 78 sounded exactly the same. (Mercury had been one of the
first to market 45s.) Red Foley began on the WLS National Barn Dance
in 1930; from the first Billboard country chart in 1944 until
1956 he had over fifty top ten hits, ‘Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy’ being
another country stomp, and Foley’s biggest crossover hit. But the most
interesting hit of 1950, and also the biggest, was a sleeper. An urban
folk scene had created itself, apparently, with no commercial possibilities
at all; then along came ‘Goodnight Irene’, by the Weavers.
This scene had been nurtured
by the American liberal left for many years. Josh White was a black
folk and blues singer and guitarist; as a child he was the eyes for
street singers such as Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but his
literacy and ambition took him to the smart Cafe Society Downtown in
New York, whereupon he was dismissed by purists. He was also well known
for his left-wing politics. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly,
was less lucky. He was jailed twice for murder, but was discovered by
John and Alan Lomax and sang his way out of jail for the second time
in 1934. He worked for the Lomaxes and made his way to New York, where
he was taken up by café society in an early example of radical
chic, but he was less able to take advantage of it than Josh White.
The modern era of folk music in the USA began with the meeting in New
York of Leadbelly’s country folk-blues, the itinerant dust-bowl troubadour
Woody Guthrie and the incipient urban folk of Pete Seeger.
Guthrie was born in Oklahoma
and became a legend in his own time. Entirely self-taught, he roamed
the country, having seen his father go bankrupt, his sister killed in
a coal-oil stove explosion and his mother committed to a mental institution.
He worked briefly with his cousin Jack Guthrie, who had country hits
on Capitol (‘Oklahoma Hills’ was number one while Jack was serving in
the South Pacific in 1945). Woody’s songs include ‘This Land Is Your
Land’ (written as a riposte to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’),
‘Pastures of Plenty’, ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’, ‘Roll On, Columbia’,
‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya’ and nearly a thousand more. A true
folk artist, he would put new words to an old tune as necessary, and
was opposed to copyright restrictions on any songs, including his own.
Guthrie’s guitar bore the
legend ‘This machine kills fascists.’ His politics were unreservedly
left and he wrote for communist newspapers, yet in the far-off days
of 1940 he was hired to write songs for the Bonneville Power Administration,
a little populism being allowed in the Roosevelt years. He joined the
US Merchant Marine and survived torpedo attacks with another folk singer,
Cisco Houston; from the mid-1950s Guthrie was seriously ill with Huntington’s
chorea, an inherited disease of the nervous system.
Pete Seeger’s father was
musicologist Charles Louis Seeger, who told him that a folksong in a
book is like a photograph of a bird in flight. His stepmother was composer
Ruth Crawford Seeger, whose string quartet (1931) is an American masterpiece,
and who was later an editor of songbooks. His half-sister and half-brother
are Peggy and Mike Seeger, also prominent folk musicians; Peggy married
the British singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl. Pete tried journalism
and painting before he realized he could not really do anything but
play the banjo; he designed his own five-string instrument, wrote a
manual on how to play it and became a sort of Johnny Appleseed of music.
He was described as America’s tuning fork.
Seeger had admired a mimeographed
collection of Guthrie’s songs, and when they met, they formed the Almanac
Singers in 1940, with playwright Lee Hays, actor Millard Lampell and
others. The group was managed for a while by the William Morris Agency;
during the time of the Popular Front it was not a sin to sing union
songs, but the FBI took an interest anyway. They sang at radical meetings,
sometimes narrowly escaping violence. Seeger came from a privileged
background, but saw injustice all around him and had only one way to
fight it. He was a member of the Communist Party, and sang for the rank-and-file
because they were idealists, the hardest-working and most honest people
in sight at a time when the world seemed to be going crazy. His politics
were naive, but his admiration was not for the party bosses, who suddenly
did not want anti-fascist songs during the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Seeger’s ancestors had
fought for American freedom in the eighteenth century, and he was not
the only premature anti-fascist in 1940. (The phrase ‘premature anti-fascist’,
by the way, was actually invented by the anti-communist brigade.) The
FBI went to RCA and asked them what the Almanac label was (actually
Keynote recordings): RCA told the FBI to read Variety and Billboard.
The Almanac era ended when Seeger went into the US Army and Guthrie
went to sea.
In 1948 Seeger formed the
Weavers, a quartet with voice student Ronnie Gilbert, reedy tenor Fred
Hellerman and Hays, who could sing a sepulchral bass and had a nice
line of gentle comedy. When they began an engagement at the Village
Vanguard, poet Carl Sandburg saw them and was quoted in the papers:
‘When I hear America singing, the Weavers are there.’ Gordon Jenkins
decided to record them at Decca, against the wishes of Dave Kapp. Their
first recording was ‘Tzena Tzena Tzena’, a 1941 Palestinian (then Israeli)
song sung in Hebrew; this attracted some interest, so they did it again
in English, this time with Jenkins’s orchestral arrangement. ‘Tzena’
reached number two in the pop chart; DJs turned it over to find Leadbelly’s
‘Goodnight Irene’ on the other side, which quickly became number one.
The two-sided hit sold two million copies and inspired an answer song:
‘Say Goodnight to the Guy, Irene’.
‘Tzena’ was great fun,
while Jenkins’s arrangement for ‘Irene’ began with a solo violin, like
front-porch music. The Weavers were a welcome new sound in 1950, and
had no competition. Was it folk? Country music? It didn’t matter; it
was American, straight off the prairie. Their close harmony was redolent
of the Sons of the Pioneers, for kids who liked cowboy movies. ‘Goodnight
Irene’ was a song that deserved its success, though it came too late
for Leadbelly to enjoy it. They had a few more hits, but then somebody
remembered they were lefties. They vanished from the airwaves, and the
Decca contract ran out. Hays later said, ‘First we took a sabbatical.
Then we took a mondical and a tuesdical.’
A New Year’s Eve concert
at Carnegie Hall was recorded by Vanguard at the end of 1955, and the
group sold albums on that label. Also in 1955, Seeger refused to answer
questions from Congress that should have been unconstitutional to begin
with; he was indicted for contempt and when the case was finally thrown
out in 1962, the court went out of its way to insult him. The informer
Harvey Matusow had testified that three of the Weavers were party members
(one had ‘quit’), but later admitted that he had made it all up, and
was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for perjury. Meanwhile the
drunks and crooks on the House Un-American Activities Committee (one
of whom was misappropriating taxpayers’ money while chasing communists)
had stored up trouble for their own country: a generation of kids that
had loved the Weavers was not best pleased when it discovered, many
years later, why they had suddenly disappeared.
What else was popular in
1950? ‘Music! Music! Music!’ was the first of Teresa Brewer’s many successes.
You either hate her squeaky but accurate voice or love it, but she was
an irrepressible entertainer; some of her later hits were produced by
Bob Thiele, who became her husband. The song is nothing but a jingle
(written by Stephan Weiss and Bernie Baum), the middle eight of which
is borrowed from a Hungarian dance; the lyrics reminded us that a nickelodeon
was also a jukebox (‘Put another nickel in / In the nickelodeon . .
.’).
‘If I Knew You Were Comin’
I’d’ve Baked a Cake’, written by Bob Merrill, is another jingle, like
‘Rinso White! Rinso White!’, which was a soap advertisement meant to
sound like a bird-call; there were also ‘Be Happy, Go Lucky!’ and ‘Brush
Your Teeth with Colgate!’ Radio had been abandoned to jingles, and the
pop records of the early 1950s were made to fit between them. Wage and
price controls had been abolished in 1946 in the USA; this was certainly
preferable to the maintenance of rationing which went on for years in
Britain, but it resulted in post-war inflation. Record prices went up;
if you didn’t have much money to buy records, and a new record player
for the plastic discs, you had to get most of your music from the radio.
And if you listened to the radio, the centre of popular music in the
USA seemed to be slick studio productions that were indistinguishable
from the jingles, and were themselves increasingly strident.
The orthodox view is that
sales of albums finally became more important than singles in the late
1960s; in fact, much spurious orthodoxy was later dictated by demographics,
or by who was buying the greatest number of records. It is evident in
retrospect that the new technology of the long-playing record had an
effect on the pop chart and on radio broadcasting right from the beginning.
The most interesting music was being made for albums, but album tracks
were as rare on post-war radio as live music. Things were better for
those who lived in big cities with numerous radio stations, but only
the most powerful AM stations could be clearly received 70 miles from,
say, Chicago, which made them the most profitable stations: that is,
the ones with the most jingles. In 1950 the few FM stations were all
in big cities, and FM was difficult to receive at any distance. For
a large number of listeners America was a musical wasteland: radio had
succeeded in creating the illusion that popular music was boring.
It was the era of the white
pop singer, who no longer travelled with a band playing one-nighters
around the country, but worked mostly in studios of one kind or another,
or in high-priced big-city clubs, so that most people never saw the
stars in person. It must be said that many of them were fine musicians,
whose roots lay in the Swing Era; without doubt the greatest of them
was Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra was hired in 1939
by Harry James, who had just formed his own band; his very first notice
(in Metronome) commended his ‘easy phrasing’. After only a few
months Sinatra was hired away by Tommy Dorsey, and became a bobby-sox
idol well before his solo career began. When he appeared at the Paramount
theatre with Benny Goodman, the band played after the film, and Goodman
said simply, ‘And now, Frank Sinatra.’ Goodman had experienced his own
stardom, but was so astonished by a wall of screaming that he blurted
out, ‘What the fuck is that?’ Some of the girls were paid to scream
(as perhaps their grandmothers had been paid to swoon for Paderewski
in the 1880s), but even more screamed for nothing, and modern pop hysteria
was born.
Sinatra had improved on
Bing Crosby. His baritone was even more personable and certainly more
vulnerable, and, like a jazz singer, he made each song his own by phrasing
it as he felt the words, often across the bar lines. Crosby had been
a boyfriend; Sinatra clearly wanted to be a lover. Musicians and critics
knew that he was a very good singer, yet by 1952 his career was in decline.
The pop music business had fallen on hard times; the golden age of songwriting
seemed to be over, and anyway the radio wanted only jingles; the boss
was now the studio A&R man rather than a bandleader who confronted
a live audience nearly every day. What in the world was ‘The Dum-dot
Song’, which Sinatra recorded in 1947? Should Sinatra have been covering
‘Goodnight Irene’ and ‘Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy’ in 1950? The idea
was not to present the vocalist at his best, but to share in the success
of somebody else’s hit. Sinatra was also singing the top spot on radio’s
Your Hit Parade, which required him to imitate Woody Woodpecker
for weeks on end in 1948.
Often a compulsively generous
man, Sinatra has helped a great many people anonymously over the years,
and has been willing to give praise where it is due. In Ebony
magazine he described Billie Holiday as a profound influence; he said
he learned about phrasing and breath control from Dorsey, and later
he commended his rivals, including Tony Bennett, and said that Vic Damone
had ‘the best pipes in the business’. In 1945 he had recorded with the
Charioteers, a black gospel group, and conducted an instrumental album
of music by Alec Wilder: he admired the music, and hoped that his name
would help to sell it. The same year he made a short film and a record
called ‘The House I Live In’, pleas for racial tolerance. But he had
a quick temper, a thin skin and a tempestuous private life, inevitably
conducted in public. He divorced Nancy in 1950 and married Ava Gardner
in 1951. ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, made that year, was honest and heartfelt
pop singing at its best (but it was backed with ‘Mama Will Bark’, a
novelty duet with Dagmar, an ‘actress’ famous for her mammary measurement).
Sinatra had been one of
the biggest stars in show business for a decade, and the knives were
sharpening. His television and radio appearances were flops, and he
was not being offered good film parts. On top of everything else, his
publicity agent and close friend George Evans died suddenly in 1950,
at the age of forty-eight, and Mannie Sachs, another close friend, left
Columbia to go to RCA, and Sinatra’s booking agency dropped him. It
did not occur to the tabloid mentality of the newspaper columnists and
fanzines that the pain in Sinatra’s private life might in the end make
him an even better interpreter of good songs.
In 1953 he landed the part
of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, for which he won an Oscar;
he also signed a new contract with Capitol Records, which required Sinatra
to pay for all his own arrangements. His first Capitol recording session
was with his long-time arranger Axel Stordahl, but the next was with
Nelson Riddle. ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’ from that session was
a good song from 1932, by Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen, and in the summer
of 1953 Sinatra’s recording of it seemed to inaugurate a new era in
pop: as the record came over the air on the radio, the singer was clearly
a man who really did have the world on a string, in spite of everything.
The lush, string-laden
sound of Stordahl and the rustle of spring provided by large numbers
of woodwinds had lent themselves to many fine Sinatra records; when
he left Columbia, Sinatra owed the label money, but before long his
hits of the 1940s, still selling, were paying him royalties. In any
case, the sound had been traded for the architecture of Riddle, who
knew that a song tells a story, and that the arrangement has to lead
up to it, with a beginning, a middle and an end. His unique touches,
such as using a bass clarinet or a bass trombone as a springboard for
a rhythmic phrase, made Riddle the most sought-after arranger of this
kind of music, and his work in this area has dated less than almost
anyone else’s. Sinatra worked with Riddle on In the Wee Small Hours,
one of the first concept albums, but also recorded with Gordon Jenkins
and Billy May, and later Sy Oliver and Quincy Jones. He made recordings
for grownups, who bought albums, and his status as the best male interpreter
of America’s best songs was never again in doubt. Of nineteen Capitol
albums from 1954 to 1962, most reached the top five on the Billboard
album chart; he then started his own Reprise label, and had several
hit albums a year throughout the 1960s.
Nat Cole formed his King
Cole Trio in 1937. He later became one of the most popular vocalists
of the century, and easily the most successful black entertainer of
the post-war decades. Much as the public loved his voice, and still
loves it, his singing has been underrated by critics; he swings without
anybody noticing. But he was even more influential as a pianist, and
at first was reluctant to sing. In mid-1944 his own composition, ‘Straighten
Up and Fly Right’, was a top ten hit, and his third number one (without
the trio) was ‘Mona Lisa’, an Oscar-winning film song and also one of
the most typical of a new era, in that it was very romantic but not
very easy to dance to. Cole’s phrasing and the unique beauty of his
voice kept him in the charts until he died of lung cancer in 1965, and
his albums are still selling.
Tony Bennett had landed
a Columbia contract; ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ revived a good song
from 1933, by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, and the record was highly rated
by critics, but no hit. At what would have been his last recording session
he was backed by Percy Faith on ‘Because of You’ (from 1940, by Arthur
Hammerstein and Dudley Wilkinson), which was number one for ten weeks
in 1951; then he did it again the same year with Hank Williams’s ‘Cold,
Cold Heart’. Bennett too was a singer’s singer, highly rated by songwriters,
musicians and critics alike, and soon sold albums.
Perry Como sang with Ted
Weems from 1936 to 1942, then signed with RCA as a soloist, and his
total number of hits up to 1955 was second only to Bing Crosby’s. His
hits included some junk, such as ‘N’yot N’yow (the Pussycat Song)’ and
‘Hoop-de-doo’ (between 1947 and that vintage year of 1950), but his
transparent sincerity and his respect for a song lent him a winning
way with a ballad. He was probably underrated by critics: being laid
back is a sneaky way of swinging. One of his hits was ‘Don’t Let the
Stars Get in Your Eyes’ (1954), a country song that crossed over; the
arrangement worked hard while Como made it sound easy. He was immensely
popular on television for decades; Val Doonican copied his style in
the UK.
Eddie Fisher, a strong
boyish tenor, was the teenagers’ heart-throb in the early 1950s. His
romance and marriage to Debbie Reynolds did his career no harm, but
leaving her later for Elizabeth Taylor did. His RCA recordings, backed
by Hugo Winterhalter, were good studio productions and were better than
some of the jingles on the radio, but Fisher was nothing like the musician
Sinatra or Bennett was. Frankie Laine was regarded as an emotional ‘belter’
in the context of the early 1950s rather than a crooner; his first hit,
‘That’s My Desire’ (1947), was well deserved, reviving a good song from
1931, but his belting was often deployed on novelties that quickly dated,
such as ‘Mule Train’, ‘Cry of the Wild Goose’ and ‘Jezebel’. Johnnie
Ray had a huge hit with ‘Cry’ backed with his own ‘The Little White
Cloud That Cried’; he too was an emotional performer and a heart-throb.
Guy Mitchell’s first hit was ‘My Heart Cries for You’ (1950), which
had been turned down by Sinatra; it was adapted from an eighteenth-century
French song by Percy Faith. Mitch Miller, however, backed Mitchell on
his hits, including ‘The Roving Kind’, ‘Sparrow in the Tree Top’, ‘My
Truly, Truly Fair’ and ‘Pittsburgh Pennsylvania’, all of which show
Miller’s distinctive instrumental jolliness (whooping French horns).
Nobody was better than Miller at competing with radio jingles.
Who do we regard today
as the best male pop singers of the era? The way the singles compare
with the albums in the Billboard charts provides a clue. Between
1950 and 1955 inclusive, Sinatra had seven hit singles (coming out of
a bad period), Nat Cole 21, Tony Bennett 11, Perry Como 25, Eddie Fisher
30, Frankie Laine 20, Johnnie Ray ten and Guy Mitchell nine. Now let
us look at best-selling albums: by 1985 Sinatra had 69 hit albums and
Nat Cole 30 (not counting albums by the trio, and bearing in mind that
he died in the mid-1960s). Tony Bennett had 24 hit albums, Perry Como
30 (not counting his perennial Christmas entries), Eddie Fisher nine,
Frankie Laine six, Johnnie Ray two and Guy Mitchell none. Sinatra and
Bennett were still making albums in the 1980s, and a point to note about
albums is that they stayed in print longer, like 78s in the old days.
As a measure of artistry,
even in the heyday of the pop singer, the singles chart had ceased to
matter as an indicator of quality as soon as grown-ups could buy albums.
If anything, there were
even more girl singers making hits in the early 1950s, but a direct
comparison with the males is difficult. To begin with, the list of hits
for each female artist is shorter on average, suggesting that they received
less promotion from their record companies and/or less attention from
the DJs; or perhaps they simply made fewer records. On the whole, the
women were more diffident about success, or less able to chase it for
personal reasons: Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney and Joni James each
retired from the music scene, for various reasons, while Peggy Lee seems
to have left it and come back as she pleased. As in the case of the
males, however, most had made their start during the Big Band Era.
One of the best, and best
loved, was Jo Stafford, a founder member of the Pied Pipers, a vocal
octet which became a quartet when it joined Tommy Dorsey in 1940. The
group left Dorsey in 1942 and Stafford began a solo career in 1944,
having sung lead and solo with Dorsey often enough to become known as
‘G.I. Jo’, a favourite of the soldiers fighting overseas. She had a
faultless ear (almost perfect pitch), and in many ways was a quintessentially
American singer: apart from her warm, distinctive tonal colour (incredibly,
some critics called her ‘cold’), she had a folksinger’s vibrato.
Taking into account jukebox
plays, radio plays and other listings, she had about seventy-five hits.
Most of these were on Capitol in the 1940s; in 1950 she went with Paul
Weston to Columbia, where she had several of the biggest hits of the
era: ‘You Belong to Me’ was written by Redd Stewart, Pee Wee King and
Chilton Price; ‘Make Love to Me!’ was based on ‘Tin Roof Blues’, an
old jazz standard. With a good beat but without stylistic flourishes,
Stafford invariably suggested swing in her music. Her last hit singles
were in 1956-7. Tired of the grind, she had stopped appearing in public,
and then entered a long and happy California retirement.
With Weston, by then her
husband, she created Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, a comedy duo in which
she sang slightly off pitch (harder than it sounds). Jonathan and Darlene
achieved separate identities of their own. Jonathan claimed that he
played stride piano better than Fats Waller, to which Darlene replied
‘Actually, 5/4 gives you an extra stride.’ The jokes convulsed musicians:
drummer Jack Sperling had to be replaced on a session because he could
not stop laughing.
Peggy Lee joined Benny
Goodman when she was twenty-one. The first hit typical of her style
was ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ (1943). She left Goodman, married guitarist
Dave Barbour and retired, but she could not stay away. She and Barbour
wrote ‘Manana (Is Soon Enough for Me)’, a huge hit on Capitol in 1948.
(The song has been accused in retrospect of belittling Hispanics, but
this is nonsense: white America in those years could have used the advice
to slow down and enjoy life; people who make such charges are themselves
patronising.) Lee went to Decca, and her material improved: her first
big success there, in 1952, was something that Capitol had not wanted
to record, Gordon Jenkins’s arrangement of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Lover’;
the surrealistically, almost frenetically, swirling orchestra was a
perfect setting for Lee’s deceptively laconic interpretation. In the
mid-1950s she went back to Capitol as an album-seller: her first hit
album on that label, The Man I Love in 1957, was conducted by
Sinatra. Her top ten cover of Little Willie John’s ‘Fever’ (1958) was
disappointing only for those who loved the R&B original. ‘Is That
All There Is’ (1969) was more suitable: written by Jerry Leiber and
Mike Stoller, by then famous for rock’n’roll songs, it was an example
of the less well-known side of their talent, and a vehicle for her combination
of resignation and sly humour.
Rosemary Clooney had begun
in a duo with her sister Betty and the Tony Pastor band in the 1940s,
then signed with Columbia, where her first smash hit was ‘Come on-a
My House’ in 1951. A greater contrast to Peggy Lee could not be imagined:
in lines like ‘I’m gonna give-a you a pomegranate!’ the sexuality was
joyously raucous. The recording was perhaps the first to feature Stan
Freeman’s amplified harpsichord (used the next year on Percy Faith’s
instrumental ‘Delicado’ and on two more Clooney records, ‘Botch-ame’,
from an Italian film, and ‘Too Old to Cut the Mustard’, a duet with
Marlene Dietrich). ‘Come on-a My House’ had been written by playwright
William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian in 1939 and used in
an off-Broadway play in 1950; its Armenian flavour was probably taken
for an Italian one by most Americans at the time. (Bagdasarian later
became David Seville, creator of the Chipmunks in the late 1950s.)
Joni James started out
as Joan Babbo, a dancer from Chicago; she had more than a dozen hits
on MGM (1952-4) with orchestral backing by Lew Douglas. ‘Why Don’t You
Believe Me?, ‘Have You Heard?’ and ‘Is It Any Wonder?’ were all questions
suited to her wistful little-girl style. The most ambitious was ‘Almost
Always’, which had a sort of soft rhumba beat. All four of these titles
had co-writers in common; it looks, in retrospect, like a clever put-up
job, and the hits still reek of nostalgia for anyone who went to junior
high school sock-hops in those years.
Ella Mae Morse sang with
Jimmy Dorsey in 1939, and had a big hit on Capitol with pianist Freddie
Slack’s band in 1942, ‘Cow Cow Boogie’; under her own name her hits
in the following decade included ‘The Blacksmith Blues’ (1952), which
required somebody in Nelson Riddle’s band to play an anvil. Georgia
Gibbs had a number one on Mercury in 1952 with ‘Kiss of Fire’, another
tango adaptation (‘El choclo’); she had a second chart career a few
years later. Kay Starr had been a superior yet unclassifiable singer,
sounding like a cross between country and jazz, but her hit singles
were multi-tracked material such as ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat’ (1950) and
‘Wheel of Fortune’ (1952); she came back on RCA in 1955 with ‘Rock and
Roll Waltz’, an unlovely combination of 3/4 time and kling-kling-kling
piano which was number one for six weeks.
Stan Kenton’s female singers,
Anita O’Day, June Christy and Chris Connor, were much too good for the
singles charts. Jeri Southern was a pianist and singer in an intimate
cabaret style, which is to say too good an interpreter for the hit parade.
(She was more popular in Britain, which did not even have charts then.)
On the whole the female singers were badly mishandled by the music business
of the period. Kay Starr did some attractive album work, and her 1953
duet with herself on ‘Side By Side’ was a treat, but ‘Wheel of Fortune’
was not much of a song, and was over so fast it could hardly be called
an arrangement (another excellent example of something designed to fit
between the jingles). Ella Mae Morse probably had more talent than we
knew at the time: Capitol’s A & R man Voyle Gilmore had her singing
junk like ‘Seventeen’ and ‘Razzle Dazzle’, while Dave Cavanaugh was
braver, with ‘Greyhound’ and ‘Jump Back Honey’. Her version of ‘Smack
Dab in the Middle’, however, a song which became something of a jazz
standard in other hands, had a lame white-bread vocal-group backing.
The white R&B of which she may have been capable never really got
out of the studio.
The nadir of the whole
business was plumbed in 1953. Displaying attractive vocal colour, a
professional attitude and not much in the way of style, Patti Page (Clara
Ann Fowler, from Oklahoma) had over eighty chart hits in the twenty
years following 1948, with everything from country songs to show tunes:
‘Tennessee Waltz’ was a record breaker, ‘I Went to Your Wedding’ was
another big hit and in 1953 ‘The Doggie in the Window’ was number one
in the USA for eight weeks. It would be unfair to call this a nursery
rhyme; it was childish rather than childlike. Nobody knows how many
music fans stopped listening to the radio after hearing ‘Doggie in the
Window’ too many times. And who wrote ‘Doggie in the Window’? Bob Merrill,
the same fellow who wrote ‘If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a
Cake’ .
The chart album history
for the women singers is similar to that of the men. The best stylists,
O’Day, Christy, Connor and Lee, have been selling albums to the cognoscenti
for decades; Stafford and Weston leased or purchased their material
from CBS so they could reissue it on their own Corinthian label, since
the fans are still out there; Southern’s work has been mostly out of
print for years. Clooney made admirable albums, including duets with
Bing Crosby; after resolving problems in her personal life, she came
back to record for Concord Jazz in the 1980s, her tasteful singing of
standards backed by good jazzmen. In a touring Christmas show in December
1990, with her vocalist daughter-in-law, many children and the Minnesota
Orchestra (formerly the Minneapolis Symphony), Clooney had more warmth
and stage presence than everyone else in the room put together. Doris
Day, one of the biggest cinema box office successes of the century,
had talent that shone through the dross, but her advice was poor; some
of the records and most of the films have dated badly. Georgia Gibbs,
Patti Page, Joni James and others, for all their successful singles,
never did anything much in the grown-up market.
There were occasional pearls
among the muck. The experienced Kitty Kallen had a lovely number one
(for nine weeks) in 1954 with ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’, and Dean Martin,
who had the virtue of not taking himself too seriously, did some charming
work: ‘Money Burns a Hole in My Pocket’ was an unpretentious film song,
on the other side of which was ‘Sway’ (a Mexican song called ‘Quien
Sera’); both did well in 1954. And his ‘Memories are Made of This’ the
next year, with gentle, appropriate vocal backing by Terry Gilkyson’s
Easy Riders, was a more appealing than usual number one (for six weeks).
None of these recordings was overproduced. Martin had more hit singles
during the following decade, but eventually seemed to parody himself.
In the early 1950s the
major labels sometimes shipped 100,000 copies of a new record by an
unknown artist on a 100 per cent return basis, hoping for lightning
to strike. This was later described by a Capitol executive as ‘throwing
a lot of shit at the wall to see if anything sticks’. They put their
big stars on television, but these were just radio shows with pictures,
and did not necessarily help to sell records. Sachs at RCA offered his
big stars very expensive contracts, luring Dinah Shore back from Columbia
in 1950; she was a success with a television variety show, but no longer
a big pop star.
Before leaving one of the
most dismal periods in the history of popular music, one more phenomenon
deserves mention. Lester Polfus, the ‘Wizard of Waukesha’, was born
in that suburb of Milwaukee in 1916 and changed his name to Les Paul.
Inspired by Gene Autry, he taught himself to be one of the best guitar
players that ever lived, having begun as a teenager on the radio. He
could and did play everything from country music to jazz, and probably
did not see much difference, concentrating as he did on musicianship.
He made himself an electric guitar as early as 1929, by fixing a ceramic
record-player cartridge under the strings in order to play through the
amplifier and speaker. Later it took him a dozen years to convince Gibson
to market his solid-body guitar, whereupon in the dozen years after
1954 the ‘Les Paul model’ became one of the most famous instruments
ever made.
He recorded with Art Tatum
around 1944, and was the best guitarist Tatum ever played with. On Decca
he accompanied Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters with his own trio.
In 1949 he married country singer Colleen Summer, who changed her name
to Mary Ford; meanwhile, he had been one of the first to experiment
with tape recording and multi-tracking: his solo hits on Capitol included
‘Brazil’ (1948), on which he played six parts. His hits in a duo with
Ford began in 1950, and they had an average of four or five a year for
most of the decade. After hearing Anita O’Day singing ‘Vaya Con Dios’
on the radio, they recorded it as a B side and persuaded DJs to turn
the record over: ‘Vaya Con Dios’ was number one for eleven weeks. A
song by Larry Russell, Inez James and Buddy Pepper, the title literally
means ‘Go with God’ (more idiomatically, ‘May God be with you’). Les
Paul and Mary Ford’s Mexican-flavoured waltz treatment at just the right
tempo was a hit for so long that you grew tired of it, but it holds
up better today than almost anything else of the period.
In any case, the applecart
was about to be kicked over. In the same year as ‘Doggie in the Window’
and ‘Vaya Con Dios’, a truck driver made a custom recording in Memphis
for his mother. But before discussing Elvis Presley, we will examine
the other things that were going on in the early 1950s. For it was as
true then as it is now that there was a large amount of good music being
made.
