Chapter 14
Rock’n’roll; or, Black Music to the Rescue
(Again)
Jazz and blues, or black
urban music and black country music, were treated as separate, if related,
genres in earlier decades; the saying was that the blues was not jazz,
but jazz had the blues in it. But that had altered by the 1950s. While
jazz effectively became the art music of the urban black (and some whites),
the strands of black pop had come together. The blues had come to town,
and rhythm and blues was big business.
Historically, black recording
artists had often been given Tin Pan Alley tunes that white artists
had already turned down. When Red Allen and Coleman Hawkins together
led small-group dates in 1933, of eleven titles from three of the sessions,
nine were pop songs of the day, only two of which had any currency:
‘The Day You Came Along’ was recorded by Bing Crosby and ‘You’re Gonna
Lose Your Gal’ by the Casa Loma Band. All had probably been shoved at
the record producer by song pluggers; ‘Shadows on the Swanee’, ‘My Galveston
Gal’ and the rest have not been heard of since.
Some of the Tin Pan Alley
and Broadway songs were so good that jazzmen improvised lovingly on
them. ‘How High the Moon’ became a bop standard, and countless riffs
were composed on its chords. As late as 1960 Mingus did something interesting
with ‘Girl of My Dreams’, a waltz from 1927. Plenty of black tunes were
big hits for white bands. The success blacks and whites had with each
other’s tunes and arrangements was not a fair trade-off, but black bands
were never going to get the best jobs anyway, and there was money in
black tunes that were hits. Joe Garland was no doubt happy to have ‘In
the Mood’ recorded note for note by Glenn Miller.
By the early 1950s, however,
everything had changed. Blacks were doing their own thing in a new era,
for labels created especially to sell to the black market; and good
white songs were becoming scarce. The Berlins, Gershwins and the rest
had died or retired, and the classic songs they had written could not
be imitated. What with Hitler, atomic bombs and a new Cold War mentality,
perhaps something had been lost which made it impossible to accept songs
in the style of a more innocent era. In any case, other changes in the
music business meant that new, younger composers did not get a chance
to build on what Kern’s generation had done. The ballads still played
by jazzmen were now standards, the airwaves were filled with jingles
and the Broadway musical was beginning to disappear.
In the 1949-50 season the
new shows included Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I,
Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam and Frank Loesser’s Guys and
Dolls. (The latter included ‘If I Were a Bell’, soon to be played
by the Miles Davis Quintet.) But in 1950-1 only nine new productions
were offered, the lowest number since well back in the nineteenth century.
Some were revivals, like Pal Joey from 1940, and two were Yiddish-American
shows which in earlier times would not have found room on Broadway.
All the new shows of that season lost money, including Top Banana,
with lyrics by Johnny Mercer (and starring Phil Silvers), and Lerner
and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon. Musical shows were increasingly
expensive to mount, while television and other social changes meant
there were smaller audiences on the Great White Way, as Broadway used
to be known. The hit shows of the 1950s, such as The Pajama Game
(1954) and Damn Yankees (1955), both by Richard Adler and Jerry
Ross, occasionally produced above-average pop songs, for example, ‘Hey
There’ and ‘Whatever Lola Wants’, but not of the quality of earlier
decades. West Side Story (music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics
by Stephen Sondheim) and The Music Man (Meredith Willson) were
both huge hits in 1957, and great in contrast, the one about racial
strife in New York, the other, through rose-tinted glasses, about a
small town. Gypsy (1959) was probably a masterpiece in every
respect: it was Ethel Merman’s last big role, it effortlessly revived
all the ‘shtick’ of Broadway tradition, and the songs were by Jule Styne
and Stephen Sondheim. But among the most interesting events on Broadway
in the 1950s were Bernstein’s failure Candide (1956, lyrics by
Lillian Hellman) and the emergence of Sondheim as a major talent.
Broadway shows were not
what they used to be and were trying to become something else; no longer
would they provide a central strand of America’s pop culture. Nowadays
the only shows certain to be profitable, indeed to set records for making
money, are those of Britain’s Andrew Lloyd Webber; even his third marriage
in early 1991 got columns of space in British newspapers. Yet Lloyd
Webber’s music is perfect FM fodder, of no lasting value at all, in
my opinion. Stephen Sondheim is acknowledged to be the most important
composer for the stage today, even by the same critics who find something
wrong with every show. All the same, even his Into the Woods,
which received better reviews from the British critics than any of his
previous works, lasted only five months in London. The musical theatre,
once at the centre of popular music, is now well outside it.
It is impossible to say
how much was lost on account of the low standards of American broadcasting.
Harold Arlen’s House of Flowers and many another show may simply
have been too good to survive at a time when people went to a Broadway
show despite the increasing price of the tickets only because their
neighbours had seen it. Cabaret singers such as Bobby Short, Mabel Mercer
and Blossom Dearie have had a huge repertory of songs that were almost
totally unknown to the general public, raising the question of whether
that sort of songwriting disappeared or is living in the garden shed
on reduced rations. The big bands and the late-night live radio broadcasts
that once promoted such songs no longer exist. It is tantalizing to
imagine television’s having taken over the function of the Broadway
musical, but that was not to be. It did not take television long to
descend from the live drama of the 1950s to the banality of today’s
assembly-line mini-series; there is no original music drama on television.
Polly Bergen was a good actress as well as a good singer, but there
was no place for her to work; similarly, Maureen McGovern has an excellent
voice, a musical intelligence and is a first-class modern actress, but
the genre in which she would have been a household name has disappeared.
Music on television’s variety
shows was almost exclusively ASCAP music, partly because there were
few black faces to be seen, and radio DJ shows reflected this at first.
But as the name of the Billboard ‘race’ chart was changed to
rhythm and blues in 1949, a revolution was already brewing.
We have seen that Woody
Herman had covered Louis Jordan’s ‘Caldonia’ in 1945, that one of the
biggest hits of 1950 was an inappropriate version of a country stomp,
‘Rag Mop’, and that Buddy Morrow covered the jump band hits of Jimmy
Forrest. Along the way an historic court case settled the question of
whether musical arrangements could be copyrighted, and the answer was
that they could not. ‘A Little Bird Told Me’, a song by Harvey O. Brooks,
was recorded by Paula Watson on a Supreme label; Decca copied not only
the arrangement but also the vocal style to the last inflection, and
had a big hit in 1948 by Evelyn Knight (whose other most successful
hit, the same year, was ‘Powder Your Face With Sunshine’, a Lombardo
song). Supreme sued, and lost. The Watson original sold well, but she
had only one more minor hit, and there was now nothing to keep anybody
from copying another’s hit right down to the backbeat.
By 1954 there were at least
four radio stations in New York aimed at the black market exclusively,
and over 250 stations around the country. The number of black DJs had
increased from only a few to over 700, and they were joined by a handful
of hip whites, such as Art Leboe in Los Angeles, Dewey Phillips in Memphis,
Gene Nobles and John Richbourg in Nashville, Zenas Sears in Atlanta,
Bob Smith (known as Wolfman Jack) in Shreveport, Ken ‘the Cat’ Elliott
in New Orleans and Alan Freed in Cleveland. Several elements were at
work: television forced non-network radio to turn to specialized programming
to find an audience, while many sponsors found television too expensive,
and could still reach large numbers of black families, who had fewer
television sets than whites, and perhaps found it hard to relate to
white sitcoms. But even with regard to black pop, the famous DJs were
white: they were the ones that had the effect on the white market. And
even today the black market is simply not valued in the marketplace.
In 1953 $15 million worth
of R&B records were sold, more than the entire record industry’s
sales of fifteen years earlier. Ruth Brown’s contract was so valuable
to Atlantic that it was renewed with an advance of $100,000: having
been recommended to Atlantic by Duke Ellington, she had 21 top ten hits
in the black chart from 1949 to 1960, five of which reached number one,
and was the only female star under contract at Atlantic until LaVern
Baker, whose first hit was in 1955. The Clovers, a vocal quartet and
guitarist, also on Atlantic, had fifteen top ten black hits in four
years; one of them reportedly sold two million copies (probably ‘Fool,
Fool, Fool’, which was number one for six weeks in 1951).
Most new releases by the
major labels never broke even, for they had to sell 40,000 copies to
do so in 1953. The independent labels selling R&B, however, had
lower costs and their own distribution, and new releases by artists
like Amos Milburn on Aladdin and Little Esther (Phillips) on Savoy regularly
sold 150,000 copies, and sometimes much more than that. A Texas-born
pianist and barroom crooner, Milburn had nineteen top ten black hits
(1948-54); his first, ‘Chicken Shack Boogie’, was number one for five
weeks. Esther Mae Jones, also from Texas, was barely fourteen years
old when her ‘Double Crossing Blues’ was number one in the black chart
for nine weeks in early 1950. (Her career was interrupted by drug problems
but she came back in 1962 as Esther Phillips.)
The major labels formed
subsidiaries for R&B - Decca had Coral, and later Brunswick, while
Columbia revived Okeh - but the product was too slick, and the independent
producers of R&B had the DJs in their employ, while the big companies
were making a late start in black radio. In order to do more business
they began to cream it off the top, covering R&B hits with white
artists.
The Orioles, a seminal
black doo-wop quartet (plus a guitarist) from Baltimore, had black hits
almost every year from 1948. Their ‘Crying in the Chapel’ (on Jubilee,
1953) was a number one black hit, but there were cover versions by Ella
Fitzgerald, country singers Darrell Glenn and Rex Allen, former Benny
Goodman vocalist Art Lund and (the biggest hit, on RCA) June Valli.
White vocal groups were
big business in the early 1950s. The Ames Brothers were a quartet, with
a sweet, pretty sound, led by Ed, who is still a popular balladeer today.
But the other groups all used the same conventional white harmony, and
after decades of beautiful black, country and folk vocal groups, most
white pop groups of the early 1950s sounded like they were working too
hard. The Four Lads were from Toronto; their voices blended well, but
they sounded overwrought. They began by backing Johnnie Ray on ‘Cry’
in 1951. (Significantly, it was released on Okeh: Ray had help and encouragement
from LaVern Baker and her manager, and his emotional delivery was seen
as appealing to black audiences.) Like Ray, the Four Lads then transferred
to the parent Columbia label, where their hits included ‘Moments to
Remember’ (1955), a perennial college prom song for decades, ‘No, Not
Much’ (1956), a good pop song by the same writers, Robert Allen and
Ray Stillman, and ‘Standing on the Corner (Watching All the Girls Go
By)’, which at least was supposed to be sung by a group. (It came from
the Frank Loesser show Most Happy Fella.) The Four Lads had hits
throughout the 1950s, according to Billboard, but I don’t remember
any of them.
The Four Aces, from Pennsylvania,
were worse. Their biggest hit was ‘Love is a Many-Splendored Thing’,
a soupy film song in 1955, and the way they belted out the word ‘luuuuuve’
with their patented slow shuffle beat made you want to cry with boredom.
There were also the Four Coins, the Four Esquires and so forth; the
sound of the Hilltoppers on Dot was not too obnoxious (the group included
Billy Vaughan, who became the label’s music director and house bandleader).
The Four Freshmen and the Hi-lo’s were good singers who used adventurous
harmonies and arrangements, and sold mostly albums. Few white groups
had learned anything from the essential sweetness of the doo-wop tradition.
The Crew-Cuts were the
worst of all, another quartet from Toronto, where they had all been
choirboys. Their first hit on Mercury in 1954 was a white novelty, ‘Crazy
’Bout Ya Baby’. Meanwhile, a black Bronx group called the Chords, on
the Cat label, had covered Patti Page’s hit ‘Cross Over the Bridge’,
basically a country song; the B side was ‘Sh-boom’, their own rhythm
novelty with a fast shuffle beat. DJs turned the record over and made
‘Sh-boom’ number two in the black chart. The Crew-Cuts, however, had
already copied it: their ‘Sh-boom’ was a number one novelty hit for
nine weeks in the pop chart, and is still described as the first rock’n’roll
record, which it certainly was not. Their next and lesser hit, ‘Oop-shoop’,
was written to cash in on the success of ‘Sh-boom’. In 1955 a Los Angeles
group, the Penguins, had a number one black hit on DooTone with a pretty
doo-wop ballad written by the group’s bass, Curtis Williams, called
‘Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine)’; the Crew-Cuts’ version was a national
number three. Gene and Eunice had a rhythm hit with ‘Ko Ko Mo’ in 1955,
originally on Combo, soon picked up by Aladdin; there were several white
covers, and the Crew-Cuts’ was beaten in the charts by that of Perry
Como.
Georgia Gibbs, who recorded
on Mercury, the same label as the Crew-Cuts, was born Fredda Gibbons
in 1920 and was a band singer of many years’ experience, having worked
with Hudson and DeLange, Frankie Trumbauer and Artie Shaw. She had a
unique vocal colour, always an advantage in a pop singer, and could
set up a rocking beat. In short, she was not as offensive as the Crew-Cuts,
and might have deserved something better than to go down in history
as a rip-off artist. She had one of the hit versions of ‘If I Knew You
Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake’ in 1950 and a huge hit in 1952 with
an Argentine tango retitled ‘Kiss of Fire’. (Mike Stoller ‘I frankly
believe that a lot of those songs were bullshit and funny at the same
time because they were so terrible.’) ‘Seven Lonely Days’ was a good
rhythm tune in 1953, a cover of a country hit by Bonnie Lou on King.
In 1955 LaVern Baker had a top five black hit on Atlantic with ‘Tweedle-dee’;
Gibbs’s version reached number two in the national pop chart. (There
is a story that Baker and Gibbs, both on tour, met in an airport, and
Baker asked, ‘Did you buy flight insurance on me?’)
In 1954 Hank Ballard and
the Midnighters had an R&B hit called ‘Work With Me Annie’, which
stayed at number one for seven weeks; the composer credit included Ballard,
Johnny Otis and Etta James. The hit was slightly suggestive, in that
the work assignment in question was meant to be horizontal. It was covered
by James, who was only seventeen in February 1955 when her answer version,
‘The Wallflower’, was a black number one for four weeks, and this became
the most flagrant swindle of all: Georgia Gibbs’s ‘Dance With Me Henry
(Wallflower)’ was a pop number one for three weeks. The Midnighters
had already followed up with ‘Annie Had a Baby’ and ‘Annie’s Aunt Fannie’,
but Mercury passed on those.
The kids who cared about
music and who knew that what they heard on the radio were cover versions
were curious about the originals. In fact, stations in the South that
catered for blacks were aware that 20 or 30 per cent of their listeners
were white youngsters, who had already discovered that black was best,
and that most of the covers were very poor compared with the real thing:
the Crew-cuts’ ‘Sh-boom’ was an irritating novelty; in the Chords’ original
the rhythm was the whole point, yet the singing was sweeter. LaVern
Baker’s ‘Tweedle-dee’ reached the top fifteen in the pop chart and her
‘Jim Dandy’ (1956) was a number one black hit and a top twenty pop hit.
The white covers of these artists cheated them of greater success, and
in any case was a mistake on the part of the major labels.
Despite the success of
Nat ‘King’ Cole, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald and a few other black
artists in the white market, there was an unthinking knee-jerk racism
working in the music business. Eckstine had been the first black man
to appear on the cover of Life magazine, which dubbed him ‘the Sepia
Sinatra’. He was seen to some extent as aping the dominant white pop
style of the late 1940s, as though blacks should not be singing the
best love songs for their own sake, which rankled Eckstine. Black pop’s
rhythm tunes were clearly gaining in popularity, and were thought to
be more acceptable in their sterilized white versions, but the large
minority of young white people who were listening to black radio and
to the original black hits were ultimately the taste-makers, the most
influential segment of music fans, and they were not fooled by any of
this. They lost respect for the music business and for business in general,
disgusted by the mindless greed for short-term profits, while the music
business had no idea what was going on.
By 1955 the Platters, a
black vocal quintet from Los Angeles, had already had their own national
hits. Buck Ram had worked as an arranger for Mills Music and had managed
the Three Suns, a sweet white vocal and instrumental trio who had hits
in the 1940s; he then turned to black music. He managed the Penguins
and saw their big hit ripped off; he wrote ‘Only You’ for the Platters,
and it was recorded by a quintet for Federal, which did not want to
issue it. Having made a personnel change and added the beautiful Zola
Taylor, he took a sextet to Mercury and remade ‘Only You’, which reached
the top five, followed by ‘The Great Pretender’, a national number one
for two weeks. The next year ‘My Prayer’ (a revival of a French and
English song recorded by Glenn Miller in 1939) was number one for five
weeks. Furthermore, the Platters had staying power; they had hits every
year until 1967, including two more number ones in 1958: ‘Twilight Time’,
a lovely song written in 1944 by Ram and the Three Suns, and ‘Smoke
Gets in Your Eyes’.
Another factor in the burgeoning
success of R&B was that the live shows on tour were cheaper to produce
than those of big-name white acts. Promoters in the South and the Midwest
found that they could get two top R&B acts for the cost of a white
one, while the audience for R&B shows was already integrated and
sharply increasing. After some years as a classical and record-request
DJ, Cleveland’s Alan Freed began playing R&B at the suggestion of
a sponsor, a record-shop owner who saw the white kids buying the records.
In March 1952 a dance at the Cleveland Arena offered Charles Brown,
the Dominoes with Clyde McPhatter (one of the most influential of lead
vocalists), the Orioles, the Moonglows and the jump bands of Tiny Grimes
and Jimmy Forrest. Seventeen thousand fans of Freed’s Rock’n’roll House
Party radio show bought tickets (according to Russell Sanjek). Unfortunately,
the Arena held only ten thousand people, and Freed almost went to jail
after the resulting melee, and before everybody realized that the whole
thing had been an accident: the huge ticket sales had been unexpected.
Freed later packed dance halls with such shows, and the audiences were
never less than one-third white.
Freed was not the first
white DJ to play R&B from choice; that may have been Art Leboe in
Los Angeles, who made his station the most popular in the Hispanic community.
But Freed knew a good thing when he saw it, and borrowed the term ‘rock’n’roll’
to describe it. To call it rhythm and blues would have been to point
out that white people were listening to black music, and few people
knew that rockin’ and rollin’ was a black euphemism for sexual intercourse.
In any case, the term was not new: the Boswell Sisters had recorded
a film song called ‘Rock and Roll’ in 1934, and there were many more
song titles and lyrics that used the phrase.
It is possible to excuse
various music business practices over the years on the grounds that
that was the way it was, and it was not up to individual promoters or
record industry moguls to try to change things. But there can be only
one reason why the Chords, Penguins, Clovers and the rest did not do
better in the lily-white pop chart; why Baker’s own ‘Tweedle-dee’ was
not as widely played on the air as Gibbs’s version; why ‘Dance With
Me Henry’ had to have its lyrics cleaned up. But the white man’s racist
fear, not only of the black man’s supposed sexual prowess but of the
power of sex itself, could not keep down the pressure that had built
up by the mid-1950s. Black pop records could no longer be confined to
‘race’, ‘sepia’, ‘ebony’ or R&B charts. White pop was boring and
black pop was not, and the floodgates soon opened.
Chuck Berry had grown up
in St Louis, where he played guitar and led a trio including pianist
Johnnie Johnson, whose importance has long been overlooked: Berry’s
songs and his guitar style were influenced by Johnson’s keyboard, which
gave them an unusual sound. Berry took a demo tape to Chicago, where
Muddy Waters introduced him to Leonard Chess; one of the tunes on the
tape was an adaptation of ‘Ida Red’, a country stomp recorded, for example,
by Bob Wills in 1938. Its name was changed to ‘Maybellene’ and Berry
recorded it in May 1955, with Johnson on piano, Willie Dixon on bass
and Jasper Thomas on drums; Alan Freed promoted the song and took a
co-writing credit; it entered both charts in August, and was number
one for eleven weeks in the black chart, reaching the top five in the
white. A fast, swinging blues about cars and a girl, it inaugurated
a new era. That month, with a few other kids, I was on my way across
country (in a 1951 V-8 Ford, in fact) for a week of camping out, the
car radio blasting out ‘Maybellene’ (‘Nothin’ outrunnin’ my V-8 Ford’),
and none of our lives was ever the same again. On the other side was
‘Wee Wee Hours’, a slow, midnight blues with fine piano playing from
Johnson, which also changed a few heads. Berry’s singing, his guitar
and his lyrics still perhaps represent the essence of rock’n’roll. With
his songs the genre became fully the music of a younger generation:
‘School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)’ added high school to the list
of teenage obsessions, while ‘Rock and Roll Music’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’
and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ all became anthems.
His ‘Brown-eyed Handsome
Man’ and ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ never reached the white chart, nor
did Bo Diddley’s ‘Bo Diddley’, ‘I’m a Man’ or ‘Diddley Daddy’, but by
now more and more kids were checking out the black charts. Diddley was
another transplanted Chicagoan; his records (on Checker, a Chess sister
label) were weird, mysterious and slightly scary, known for the bags
of echo on the guitar and his ‘shave-and-a-haircut, six bits’ beat.
He has been copied by rockers ever since, but only had one top twenty
pop hit: ‘Say Man’ (1959), listed by Billboard as a novelty.
The same year Chuck Berry
broke through, New Orleans also got into the act. Lew Chudd had been
the producer of the Let’s Dance radio show that helped Benny Goodman
to fame in 1935. In 1947 he formed Imperial Records to record top ten
hits in Spanish-language covers for that market in the Southwest, and
used the profits to expand into square-dance records, kiddie records,
country music and R&B. Slim Whitman was a country success on Imperial,
and his ‘Indian Love Call’ was a huge hit; he played in London in 1952
and became a bigger star in the UK than in the USA.
Chudd’s R & B talent
scout and producer was a New Orleans trumpeter and bandleader, Dave
Bartholomew, who as a freelance produced Lloyd Price’s ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’
for Specialty and Shirley and Lee’s ‘I’m Gone’ for Aladdin (both hits
in 1952), as well as his own ‘Country Boy’ (1949, DeLuxe). He recorded
other R&B songs in leftover studio time: ‘Preachin’ and Teachin’’
(Ace, 1952), like ‘Country Boy’, used the excellent session drummer
Earl Palmer; ‘Who Drank My Beer While I Was In The Rear’ that year was
on Imperial. But Bartholomew had more success producing others, such
as Fats Domino.
Pianist and singer Domino
was born in New Orleans; his first language was French. The New Orleans
piano style can be traced directly from Jelly Roll Morton through Joseph
Louis ‘Red’ Cayou (born around 1905) and Isadore ‘Tuts’ Washington (born
in 1907, finally recorded in 1983), through Professor Longhair (Henry
Roeland Byrd), who worked for Bartholomew in 1949, to Fats Domino, Huey
Smith, Allen Toussaint and Mac Rebennack (Dr John, the Night Tripper).
Professor Longhair’s imposition of fast triplets on a syncopated rhumba
beat is directly descended from Jelly Roll’s ‘Spanish tinge’.
Domino was compared to
Fats Waller by the bone-headed musical press when he later had a hit
with ‘What’s the Reason I’m Not Pleasin’ You’; he was not a stylist
of the calibre of Waller or Jelly Roll, but he did what he did extremely
well. His warm personality transcended any question of race, and the
music had a lilt, as well as a beat, that could only have come from
New Orleans. Domino’s smoky, laid-back voice, with just a trace of a
French accent, together with the songs and Bartholomew’s band, made
history.
His first recording session
yielded ‘Hey La Bas’, a coming together of strands of New Orleans history,
including voodoo and French and Catholic influences. ‘The Fat Man’,
a cleaned-up drug song recorded the same day, was his first R&B
hit. His fifth release, ‘Every Night About This Time’, was a hit the
same year; it incorporated the keyboard triplet which became a trademark,
and may have been influenced by Little Willie Littleheld as well as
Longhair. (Blues pianist Littlefield had a hit with ‘It’s Midnight’
on Modern in 1949.) Domino’s R&B hits ‘Goin’ Home’ (1952) and ‘Goin’
to the River’ (1953) were as good as national top thirty hits, they
sold so well and got so much airplay, but they were not allowed on the
white chart.
Randy Wood operated an
appliance repair shop in Nashville in 1946, and dabbled in radio. He
bought several thousand remaindered R&B records and sold them over
the radio at six for a dollar; with some of the profits he formed Dot
Records in 1950. He produced country records, but the demand for R&B
was such that he began covering the songs with a squeaky-clean college
student named Pat Boone, who was twenty years old when he had his first
hit in 1955 with ‘Two Hearts’, an R&B hit by the Charms. Boone’s
second hit was a national number one version of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t
That a Shame’ the same year, which helped pull Domino’s own record out
of the R & B ghetto into the pop top ten.
Domino’s seventeenth and
eighteenth top ten R & B hits were back to back, ‘Bo Weevil’ and
‘Don’t Blame It On Me’. In the first, an irresistibly rocking folksong,
the melody is played tremolo by guitarist Ernest McLean, who floats
over the backbeat, making the whole thing a timeless country stomp.
‘Bo Weevil’ reached number thirty-five in the pop charts, while the
slick cover with much less style by squeaky Teresa Brewer entered the
top twenty. The other side of Domino’s record, ‘Don’t Blame It On Me’,
was not covered and didn’t make the pop chart, but kids discovered it:
the playing of Clarence Ford (alto), Herb Hardesty, Buddy Hagans and
Lee Allen (tenors), McLean (guitar), Frank Fields (bass) and Cornelius
Coleman (drums) sounded so good on jukeboxes after so many years of
pap that we couldn’t believe our luck.
In the same year, 1956
Domino’s ‘I’m In Love Again’ was a number three national hit. Altogether
he had over sixty Hot 100 Billboard entries in less than ten years.
The New Orleans backbeat was rock solid, yet is like a happy afterthought
compared with the noisy banging on today’s pop records, and the riffing
saxophones and Domino’s laid-back style combine to make these some of
the best party records of all time.
Also in 1956, and in New
Orleans, the totally impossible, irrational and outrageous became reality;
the inmates left the asylum, never to be recaptured, with a cry of (my
transcription) WOMP-BOMP-A-LOO-MOMP ALOP-BOMP-BOMP! Little Richard was
bisexual, he wore make-up, he was a tornado on stage and he passionately
shouted dirty songs in a sanctified style, screams and all:
Long Tall Sally she’s
Built for speed
She got everything
That Uncle John needs . . .
In two minutes Richard
Wayne Penniman used as much energy as an all-night party.
He came from a large, poor
family in Macon, Georgia. He was influenced by Billy Wright, who wore
loud clothes, curled his hair and performed a gospel-shouting R&B
style, and was encouraged to play piano by Esquerita (who was also known
as Eskew Reeder, SQ Reeder, the Magnificent Malucci and so on, and later
imitated Richard, recording in New Orleans in the mid-1960s). Little
Richard recorded for RCA with Wright’s band in 1951 and 1952 after winning
a talent contest; DJ Zenas Sears helped make the deal and the sides
were recorded at WGST in Atlanta: ‘Every Hour’ was a local hit, but
Richard’s persona was not yet let loose. He recorded for Peacock in
1953 in Houston, at the second of the two sessions using Johnny Otis’s
band. But he was washing dishes in an Atlanta bus station when stardom
beckoned. He had sent a demonstration tape to Specialty in Hollywood.
Art Rupe dispatched his
assistant, Bumps Blackwell, to New Orleans to make records; and Cosimo
Matassa’s J and M Studio was primitive by today’s standards, or even
by the standards of the time: Blackwell placed his microphones by trial
and error, going back and forth into the next room to listen to a two-track
Ampex tape recorder on headphones; the bass player was on the other
side of the room and the drummer was outside the door. But both Richard
and Fats Domino made their classic hits at Cosimo’s.
The band on Richard’s first
sessions, like Domino’s band, included New Orleans’ best: Melvin Dowden
(piano), Justin Adams (guitar), Lee Allen (tenor saxophone), Alvin ‘Red’
Tyler (baritone saxophone), Frank Fields (double bass) and Earl Palmer
(drums); Huey Smith was present part of the time and probably played
some piano, and Richard himself played on ‘Tutti Frutti’, an outrageous
song from the club scene. Blackwell heard him playing around with it
during a lunch break - the nearby premises had a piano, and Richard
could not resist showing off. Dorothy La Bostrie was asked to clean
up the lyrics: ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty / if it don’t fit, don’t force
it / You can grease it, make it easy’ became ‘Tutti Frutti, awrootie
/ I got a gal, named Sue / She knows just what to do’, which at least
left something to the imagination.
‘Tutti Frutti’ reached
number two in the R&B chart and the top twenty of the pop chart,
and - incredibly - Pat Boone’s cover went higher than Little Richard’s.
(Bible student Boone later claimed he had not known what the song was
about.) This was a bit like June Allyson having a hit with ‘Jazz Me
Blues’, and it was the end of the cover era: white kids were by now
sorting each other out according to who bought ‘Baboon’ and who bought
Richard. Later the same year Richard tried to record ‘Long Tall Sally’
as fast as possible so that Boone would not be able to sing it; they
both had hits with it, but this time Richard’s record went higher than
Boone’s, and the rest of Boone’s hits were mostly Hollywood ballads.
A new kind of cover era immediately began: Blackwell and John Marascalco
wrote ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Ready Teddy’, a two-sided hit for Richard; both
were covered by Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, but more appropriately
and out of admiration for the songs: ripping it off was out, but ripping
it up was definitely in.
Some of Richard’s records
were too frenetic to dance to. The master of ‘Keep a Knockin’’ was only
fifty-seven seconds long, and a single was made of it by means of repetition.
Others were better: ‘Lucille’ is one of the finest, inexorable at exactly
the right tempo, while ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’ and ‘Can’t Believe You
Wanna Leave’ are actually slow. One of Richard’s biggest contributions
was his personality. His live act was like nothing anyone had ever seen.
He wore his hair in a huge pompadour with marcelled waves on top; he
wore the loudest clothes in the business and cosmetics to match. At
the beginning of a set his band never knew what direction he would come
from. When producer H. B. Barnum first saw Richard, Barnum was about
fourteen years old, and playing saxophone with touring R & B shows:
He’d just burst onto the stage
from anywhere, and you wouldn’t be able to hear anything but the roar
of the audience ... We might vamp that first number for four to five
minutes before he even got to the piano. He’d be on the stage, he’d
be off the stage, he’d be jumping and yelling, screaming, whipping
the audience on ... Then when he finally did hit the piano and just
went into di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di, you know, well nobody can do that
as fast as Richard. It just took everybody by surprise ... That’s
the first time I ever saw spotlights and flicker lights used at a
concert show. It had all been used in show business, but he brought
it into our world.
At the end of a set Richard
was covered with sweat, and it was not long before girls started throwing
their underwear on to the stage.
For the second time New
Orleans permanently altered the course of the world’s popular music.
Huey ‘Piano’ Smith had a hit in 1957 with ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia and the
Boogie Woogie Flu’, and the next year with ‘Don’t You Just Know It’.
He had played piano on Bartholomew’s wonderful ‘I Hear You Knockin’’,
an R&B classic by Smiley Lewis which had not made the pop charts
in 1955 (but was covered in a dull but successful version on Dot by
actress Gale Storm). Smith’s band, the Clowns, included lead singer
Bobby Marchan, as well as Red Tyler and Lee Allen. Another seminal figure
was pianist and bandleader Paul Gayten, whose R&B hits in 1949-50
included ‘I’ll Never be Free’ (with vocalist Annie Laurie), and who
wrote ‘For You My Love’, on which he backed Larry Darnell for a number
one. (The song was also a hit duet by Nat Cole and Nellie Lutcher.)
Later he backed Clarence Henry on ‘Ain’t Got No Home’ (1956), which
became a pop hit, and took a co-writing credit for the amusing ‘Troubles,
Troubles’ on the reverse side. Gayten’s own instrumental jukebox hits,
such as ‘Nervous Boogie’ in 1957, were tossed off during leftover studio
time, like some of Bartholomew’s. Tenor saxophonist Lee Allen wrote
his 1958 hit ‘Walkin’ with Mr Lee’ while working as a Gayten sideman.
But while rhythm and blues
was breaking through to the pop charts and washing away the cover merchants,
rock’n’roll was also coming from another direction. Among those white
kids listening to R&B in the early 1950s were the hillbilly cats
who invented rockabilly; in fact, it was at first called ‘cat music’.
For decades the excellent
playing of a great many instrumentalists in country music had been directly
influenced by black music. There was the lingering effect of the country
jazz, or western swing, of Bob Wills, and the important folk poems of
Hank Williams, with their swaggering beat and their true-to-life concerns.
‘Country boogie’ had been gaining ground. The Delmore Brothers had recorded
‘Hillbilly Boogie’ as early as 1945, and then ‘Freight Train Boogie’,
‘Blues Stay Away From Me’ and ‘Pan American Boogie’ were hits. Jack
Guthrie, Woody’s cousin, had a hit with ‘Oakie Boogie’ in 1947, and
Hawkshaw Hawkins’s ‘Dog House Boogie’ and guitarist Arthur Smith’s ‘Guitar
Boogie’ were successful in 1948.
‘Guitar Boogie’ may have
been recorded much earlier, in 1945, on a Super Disc label; an instrumental,
it was played by a string band, with a gently amplified guitar and no
drums. It continued selling for years. The chart hit, perhaps a new
recording, was on MGM, and it was issued on that label in England. It
had a 4/4 feeling but with a backbeat. (Compare it with the other side
of the British 78, for example, called ‘Bebop Rag’: despite the title,
its two-beat style is corny.) Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Shotgun Boogie’
was a big country hit in 1950; Webb Pierce’s band had hit after hit
from 1952 with a honky-tonk backbeat. Meanwhile, Bill Haley and his
Saddlemen, billed as the Cowboy Jive Band, mixed yodels, polkas and
western swing.
Haley was born in Michigan
and grew up in Pennsylvania; he began as a yodelling cowboy on radio.
His Downhomers first recorded in 1944, and his various groups included
the Four Aces of Western Swing. He started covering R&B hits like
Jackie Brenston’s 1951 ‘Rocket "88"’, which sold fairly well,
then ‘Rock the Joint’, a 1949 hit by Jimmy Preston, which sold even
better. The country covers were not selling at all, so he threw caution
to the wind: he changed the name of the Saddlemen to Bill Haley and
his Comets and recorded his own ‘Crazy Man Crazy’ for the tiny Essex
label (whose most popular star was the mood music conductor Monty Kelly,
whose ‘Tropicana’ was the label’s biggest hit). Haley suddenly reached
the pop top fifteen in 1953. The tune was just a stomp, like ‘Rag Mop’,
with words that were not up to much, but seemed at the time to borrow
from jazz: ‘Man, that music’s gone, gone!’ This already sounded trite
then, but Haley’s ‘jive’ slang was as much a part of the act as the
relentlessly slapped string bass. The hit was covered on Mercury by
dance band leader Ralph Marterie, who, with his bigger name (and vocal
by the Smarty-aires), almost caught Haley in the charts with his own
tune.
After a couple of similar,
lesser hits on Essex, Haley moved to Decca, where he was produced by
Milt Gabler. Haley could not read music, according to Gabler, so he
had to hum the riffs to him: ‘It was like recording a barbershop quartet
or the Mills Brothers, you have to woodshed it and learn it by rote.
They’d work out the harmony among themselves.’ Gabler had recorded not
only Louis Jordan, but the jump band of Buddy Johnson, with vocalist
Arthur Prysock. Johnson’s drummer, and also Lionel Hampton’s, had to
be kept from playing too loud for the recording technology of the time,
Gabler said, but Haley’s band was recorded in a disused ballroom, which
had a high ceiling, curtains hanging from the balcony and a live wooden
floor. This acoustic, together with up-to-date recording equipment,
allowed Haley’s drummer to play his tinny rim-shot backbeat as loud
as he liked, and the steel player to bang his bar on the strings until
sparks flew. Gabler put reverb on the master tape and overdubbed Haley’s
weak voice.
‘Rock Around the Clock’
was a Tin Pan Alley rhythm novelty, and similar tunes and lyrics had
been around for years. It barely made the top twenty-five. But the next
hit, still in 1954, reached the top ten. It was a cover of ‘Shake, Rattle
and Roll’, a number one R&B tune recorded by Big Joe Turner, originally
a singing bartender from the roaring days of Kansas City. (The tune
was written by Jesse Stone under the name Charles Calhoun.) By the mid-1950s
Turner was a seasoned blues shouter; after his R&B hit ‘Chains of
Love’ (1951) on a Freedom label, Turner moved to Atlantic and had big
hits in the black chart every year until 1958. He was too big, too old,
too black and too powerful to become a pop star, but hits like ‘Corrine
Corrina’ and ‘Lipstick Powder and Paint’ (both 1956) made him a more
deserving father of rock’n’roll than most. ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’,
with its three-chord tune and the lines ‘Get out in that kitchen / And
rattle those pots and pans!’ was an archetypal rock’n’roll song.
Then came the film The
Blackboard Jungle, released in 1955, starring Glenn Ford and a very
young Sidney Poitier. Gabler makes the point that film soundtracks were
usually ‘pinched’ at the top and bottom of the frequency range, to save
the ears of the people in the front rows from the noise of the huge
speakers and amplifiers used in big cinemas; but The Blackboard Jungle
soundtrack was processed wide open. It was a realistic film (for the
time) about a rough high school (‘juvenile delinquency’ had been a media
theme for years), and its music director was said to be the publisher
of ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Haley’s record dominated the soundtrack
and shot to number one more than a year after it was first released,
and also reached number three in the R&B chart.
Haley had sixty USA chart
hits in seven years, but ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was his only number
one. It might be named by many as the first number one rock’n’roll record,
and therein lies part of the music’s tragedy. Bill Haley did for rock’n’roll
what the Original Dixieland Jazz Band did for jazz in 1917, establishing
it in the public mind as a noisy party music, but the ODJB was at least
an innovation at the time. Haley was an unlikely pop star, a chubby
married man and almost thirty years old when he came to the fore; he
was far more popular in the UK, where he had no competition, than in
the USA. By all accounts he was a pleasant man, modest and grateful
for his success. It is a pity that the music was so bad. It was worse
than bad; it was a major environmental hazard. The bass had to be slapped
all the way through every record, and the drums had to be tinny and
loud, and nobody showed any understanding of time. The closest to musical
excitement the Comets ever came was ‘Rudy’s Rock’, an instrumental in
which Rudy Pompilli plays a decent jump band saxophone style; it moves
at a faster tempo than the band’s usual clock-ticking, so the rhythm
section may have had to concentrate on what it was doing. Haley and
his group starred in several rock’n’roll films of the period, such as
Rock Around the Clock in 1956 (the song was endlessly recycled).
The films were mostly dreadful, but this particular Freed epic had at
least the virtue of integrating the music, featuring the Platters as
well as Haley. Haley was soon reduced to a nostalgia act, eclipsed by
more talented hillbillies.
Sun Records, in Memphis,
Tennessee, would have more influence on popular music in the 1950s than
all the major labels put together.
Radio engineer Sam Phillips
formed the Memphis Recording Service in 1950, and taped a session with
jazz pianist Phineas Newborn for RPM/Modern. He soon launched a Phillips
label, with local DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation). The idea was to record
local black R&B talent, but masters continued to be leased to other
labels. B. B. King worked at the local black radio station, and his
hits on RPM began appearing in 1951, some of them recorded in the Sun
studio.
Guitarist and bandleader
Ike Turner was a talent scout for RPM/Modern, and saw to it that B.
B. King remained an RPM artist, but some of the other records were leased
to Chess in Chicago. Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett) became an R&B
legend. He had a double-sided hit, ‘Moanin’ at Midnight’ / ‘How Many
More Years’, in 1951, the same year Turner scored a massive number one
under the name of his saxophonist and vocalist: Jackie Brenston and
his Delta Cats were Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. ‘Rocket "88"’
is often described as the first rock’n’roll record; it sounds tame today,
but its four-wheeled subject-matter beat Chuck Berry by four years.
Rosco Gordon had a top
ten hit on RPM, then a number one in 1952 that had been leased to Chess.
RPM/Modern decided that they had Gordon under contract and successfully
got ‘Booted’ back from Chess. Walter Horton, Earl Hooker, Bobby Bland
and Joe Hill Louis were other blues artists who recorded for Phillips,
but this was almost too much success. Some of them moved to Chicago.
James Mattis and Bill Fitzgerald formed the Duke label in Memphis in
April 1952 and leased some tracks from Phillips, but sold Duke to Peacock
in Houston only a few months later; Duke squabbled with RPM/Modern over
Gordon, and in December Lester Bihari, of the entrepreneurial family
that had founded RPM/Modern and Flair, came to Memphis to form the Meteor
label. With all this activity the obvious thing for Phillips to do was
form another label, and the first Sun records were released in March
1952.
Sun limped for a while
because Phillips was still leasing masters to others, but in 1953 it
made a distribution deal with Nashville’s Jim Bulleit, who had sold
his Bullet label and now operated Delta and J-B Records; Sam Phillips’s
brother Judd came in, bringing his promotion experience. The new label’s
first success was ‘Bear Cat’, by Rufus Thomas, Jr, an answer song to
Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ on Peacock, using the same melody. (Don
Robey’s Lion Music sued and won.) ‘Feelin’ Good’ and ‘Mystery Train’
by Little Junior (Parker) and his Blue Flames were hits, and Billy ‘The
Kid’ Emerson and Little Milton were doing well.
Phillips was also recording
country music: the Ripley Cotton Choppers, Earl Peterson (‘Michigan’s
Singing Cowboy’ doing ‘Boogie Blues’), Doug Poindexter and his Starlite
Wranglers, Malcolm Yelvington and his Star Rhythm Boys (who performed
a hillbilly version of ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spodee-o-dee’, which had been
the first big R&B hit for the Atlantic label in 1949, by Stick McGhee).
And there was Hardrock Gunter. Sidney Louie Gunter may have been the
first rockabilly; he growled ‘We’re gonna rock’n’roll’ on ‘Gonna Dance
All Night’ on the Bama label in 1950, and recorded for Bullet, Decca,
MGM, King and his own labels, but without much luck. A new version of
‘Gonna Dance All Night’ came out on Sun 201 in 1954, but it was too
late: Sun 209 was Elvis Presley’s first record.
Phillips knew there was
a bread-and-butter country market out there, and he was doing well with
R&B, but his secretary, Marion Keisker, remembered his saying that
if he could find a white boy who could sing like a black he would make
a million dollars: all the musical fusions in the world would not do
any good if the talent could not appear on network television or reach
the pop chart. When Judd Phillips was peddling the records out of his
car in the early days, ‘even then it occurred to me that people were
really digging the music that was on our R&B records ... But there
was so much prejudice and division that they couldn’t idolize the artist
that was delivering the song.’ Marion remembered the truck driver who
had come in one day in 1953 to make a record for his mother’s birthday,
and suggested getting him in to see what he could do.
In July 1954 bass player
Bill Black and guitarist Scotty Moore, who had already played on Sun
sessions, got together with the nineteen-year-old truck driver in the
studio. It was apparent from the beginning that Elvis Presley had no
idea who he was or what he wanted to do. An only child, he had been
haunted all his life by a twin who had died at birth; his father was
a lazy failure and his mother a doting monster. He had certainly heard
spirited singing in church and was steeped in country music; B. B. King
said he had seen the kid hanging around the black part of town, but
in any case Elvis heard black music on the radio. He played with a guitar
and had the makings of a good voice; in fact, he had an enormous natural
talent, and the flowing juices of any horny nineteen-year-old, but no
confidence to go with it. His life was to be the tragedy of a born loser,
yet he became a cultural artefact.
They tried ballads, because
Elvis basically wanted to be Dean Martin, but none worked. ‘Casual Love
Affair’ was a tune written and given to Phillips by an inmate at the
Tennessee state prison, and years later a version of ‘Harbor Lights’,
such as you might hear in any threadbare small-town supper club, was
discovered in Sun’s vault. Then, as with Little Richard in New Orleans
the following year, the magic happened during a break, fooling around
with ‘That’s All Right (Mama)’, a blues by Arthur Crudup. There were
no drums, but it didn’t matter; the bass was slapped, but with style
and urgency, and country jive finally became the fusion known as rockabilly.
Bill Monroe’s ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ was worked over until it too became
something new. A white kid could sing the blues, and a bluegrass tune
could yield rockabilly heat.
As soon as the record was
played on local radio a few days later, orders for seven thousand copies
came in. Elvis was interviewed on the radio, and the name of his high
school established that he was white. But the legendary success did
not happen overnight. Marty Robbins covered ‘That’s All Right’ on Columbia,
adding a fiddle, and the Presley record was the nearest thing to a national
hit that Phillips had had since Junior Parker’s ‘Feelin’ Good’, but
the market was confused: pop stations thought the record was so country
that it should not be played after 5 a.m., while country stations did
not know what to make of it either. Elvis was a flop on the Grand Ole
Opry, who told him to go back to driving a truck, but found a regular
spot on the Louisiana Hayride, and played at county fairs and dance
halls for anybody who would have him.
Sun persisted in releasing
a country song and a black song back to back: the only way to crack
the market was to take it head-on. ‘I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine’,
written in 1949 by Mack David and recorded by Presley’s idol, Dean Martin,
became a country boogie, backed with ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, a Wynonie
Harris R&B hit in 1948. ‘You’re a Heartbreaker’ was a bore, backed
with ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’, credited to Kokomo Arnold and complete
with some badly dated jive; this was Presley’s worst record on Sun.
With the fourth single the recording quality improved: ‘I’m Left, You’re
Right, She’s Gone’ was a good country song with a beat, and a kid named
Jimmie Lott on drums; ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ on the flip had been an
R&B hit in 1955 on Excello, the only hit Arthur Gunter ever had
(not Hardrock Gunter, as Albert Goldman reported). This side of the
record did not need the drums; the primitive plea was right up Presley’s
alley and his first national hit, top five in the country chart. The
fifth and last Sun release was ‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget’ backed
with Junior Parker’s ‘Mystery Train’. The former was a number one country
hit for five weeks in 1955, and in November Presley’s contract and Sun
masters were purchased by RCA.
The effect that Presley
had on women did not go unnoticed in the music industry. The fact that
he looked and dressed like white trash went with his excess of hormones:
like Hank Williams a few years earlier, he had only to twitch a leg
to make all the females scream. He enjoyed himself on stage; for the
first and last time in his life he did as he pleased, and the girls
loved it. He was managed at first by Scotty Moore, then by Memphis DJ
Bob Neal, and they were all snookered by ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, who also
snookered his business partner at the time, country star Hank Snow.
Parker was a carnival huckster who had managed Eddy Arnold for a while,
but Arnold probably had too much self-respect to be handled for long
by such a man. Phillips offered Presley’s contract to Nashville producer
Owen Bradley, who turned it down; Columbia’s Mitch Miller made an inquiry,
but would not pay the price, allegedly $20,000 and going up. Snow had
alerted the industry to the new sensation, and RCA executive Steve Sholes
was instrumental in the final gamble. Parker secured Presley for RCA
for $35,000, of which $5,000 went to Presley for unpaid royalties on
the Sun records, and which he spent on a Cadillac. This was a large
amount of money for an artist who was still a cult, but Phillips knew
he could not promote Presley properly, and had more rockabillies waiting
in the wings.
Presley’s first RCA recording
session, in Nashville in January 1956, yielded covers of Ray Charles’s
‘I Got a Woman’, a big R&B hit a year earlier, and ‘Money Honey’,
by the Drifters with Clyde McPhatter, which had been at number one for
eleven weeks in 1953. Presley’s young voice sounded strained on country
ballads: ‘I’m Counting On You’ is a decent song by proven hit-writer
Don Robertson, but the dreadful ‘I Was the One’ was chosen as the B
side of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
