Chapter 17
The 1960s: A Folk Boom, a British Invasion,
the Soul Years and the Legacy of an Era
Like everything else in
post-war Britain, popular music was controlled by an ineffective establishment.
Rationing of consumer goods went on for many years after the Second
World War, as the British desperately tried to be polite to one another
rather than allowing the market to do its work. This contributed to
a continuing British drabness while the Germans and the Japanese were
well on the way to recovery.
Which musics would make
money in Britain was decided by this establishment through the BBC;
as a result, popular music was a mixture inherited from the British
variety tradition of music hall.
Pianist Winifred Atwell,
whose cheerful keyboard hits from 1952 included ‘Britannia Rag’, ‘Coronation
Rag’, ‘Let’s Have a Party’ and ‘Let’s Have Another Party’, was perhaps
typical of this. Venezuelan-born drummer Edmundo Ros had recorded with
Fats Waller in London in 1938; his Latin dance band, said to be one
of Princess Margaret’s favourites, had a hit in the USA in 1950 with
‘The Wedding Samba’. In 1952 Vera Lynn, the most popular British vocalist
during the war, reached number one in the USA with her British top ten
hit ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’. Arranger-conductor Frank Chacksfield’s lush instrumentals
‘Limelight’ and ‘Ebb Tide’ were hits in 1953, and David Whitfield’s
operatic voice reached the USA top ten with ‘Cara Mia’ in 1954, backed
by Mantovani. All of these were on the London label in America, aided
by excellent sound, but in general British pop music was not exported;
Alma Cogan had her own UK television show, but she is remembered as
much for her gowns as for her voice. American stars like Johnnie Ray,
Rosemary Clooney, Frankie Laine, Perry Como and the rest were so popular
in Britain that it was noteworthy when British vocalist Dickie Valentine
sold out the London Palladium.
The big band of trombonist
Ted Heath, formed in 1944 and one of the best of the post-war era, at
various times boasted such fine musicians as drummer Jack Parnell, trombonist
Don Lusher, trumpeter Kenny Baker and tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott.
Valentine was the band’s vocalist, and later a solo success: among his
biggest hits was a cover of Frankie Avalon’s ‘Venus’. Heath’s band had
a few hit singles in the early 1950s, but in general the Big Band Era
was over in Britain as it was in the USA.
British jazz fans had a
hard time of it, because until 1956 the British musicians’ union would
not allow American musicians to perform in Britain unless there was
a reciprocal opportunity in the USA for British musicians. Visiting
American stars might have made news and generated enthusiasm for the
music in general, home-grown British jazz musicians did not have much
work anyway, and wanted to see their heroes in action and perhaps get
a chance to play with them. But when Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins
and others toured Europe, they could not work in Britain, for the government
let the unions call the shots. It was only in instrumental music that
this discrimination was practised; as in the USA during the musicians’
union strikes, pop singers came and went freely.
As rhythm and blues began
to have its influence in the USA, it was not heard on the radio in Britain,
and few American blacks toured there at first, except for a small number
of bluesmen who were seen as folk artists. The British Isles are rich
in folk heritages, but unlike the rural musics of America, British folk
forms never became urbanized and commercial. This is part of the reason
why American country music has always had as big a following in Britain
as the indigenous folk music, if not bigger. While Americans sold their
popular culture down the river, Britain stood at the opposite extreme:
if there was any hint of payola on the BBC, the artist and the song
publisher would be banned for a year. But musical conservatism caused
pressure to build up. British kids were fascinated by rock’n’roll, but
they had to hear it on Radio Luxembourg or on pirate radio.
In the early 1960s the
BBC offered the Home Service (chat, public service and cosiness), the
Light Programme (entertainment) and the Third Programme, which was not
just classical music, like Radio 3 today: it was the BBC’s finest hour,
a showcase of all aspects of European high culture, a sort of university
of the air. The widest knowledge of American trends was found in seaports
such as Liverpool, where merchant seamen often brought home records
that were not played on the BBC, or in London, where a few shops had
imported records.
Then on Easter Sunday in
1964 Radio Caroline opened up. Caroline (named after President
Kennedy’s daughter by its operator, Ronan O’Rahilly) and her sister
ship, Mi Amigo, were anchored in the Channel at opposite ends
of Britain, and had an audience of 22 million on Sunday mornings. ‘They
took the music that only London hipsters were listening to,’ remembered
one old fan, ‘all those rare, imported records, and put them where spotty
little bozos like me could have their minds twisted.’
The Marine Offences Bill
of 1967 made advertising on pirate radio illegal, but by then BBC Radio
had transformed itself into Radio 1 for pop-rock, 2 mainly for chat
and drama, 3 for classical and 4 for news and chat, some drama and very
little music. (There are now also thirty-nine local BBC stations in
England, which play some music, and then Radio 5, which in the 1990s
was floundering.) Caroline’s more popular DJs found work on the BBC;
Caroline reopened in 1973 and limped along until 1989, but its work
had been done. Meanwhile it is hard for an American who grew up within
range of Dick Biondi on Chicago’s WLS to imagine how frustrating radio
was to a British kid in the early 1960s, and this goes some way towards
explaining the hysteria that eventually occurred.
Jazz in Britain was based
on the style of the Swing Era until a New Orleans revival began during
the Second World War; George Webb’s Dixielanders trained trumpeter Humphrey
Lyttelton, who later went more modern. In the 1950s the revival was
watered down (as in America) to become ‘trad’, which had a considerable
following. Lyttelton’s musical integrity, gigs and recordings with visiting
Americans such as Buck Clayton and Buddy Tate have ensured his influence;
his only hit single, ‘Bad Penny Blues’ (1956), however, is inane, repetitious
and unrepresentative of his work. Knowing how popular trad was in Britain
in those years, one is surprised to learn that there were so few hit
singles. It remained a cult until around 1960; American-born film director
Richard Lester later became famous directing the Beatles, but his first
feature was It’s Trad, Dad! in 1961. The Temperance Seven had
a number one hit that year with ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’ from 1930
(their trombone player was John R. T. Davies, also a transfer engineer
who has been responsible for an uncounted number of excellent transfers
to modern master tape of old 78s). Trumpeter Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen
had fourteen hits from 1961, perhaps because he led one of the worst
trad bands; ‘Midnight in Moscow’, a Russian tune, was also a success
in the USA. Trombonist Chris Barber and his Jazz Band had a big transatlantic
hit with ‘Petite Fleur’, written by Sidney Bechet in 1952, a pretty
record, mostly a solo by clarinettist Monty Sunshine, who seemed to
imitate Bechet’s vibrato but actually sounded more like Boyd Senter,
an American dance band leader of the 1920s.
Trad never became a force
in British pop, but soon gave rise to another genre that did. Anthony
Donegan, from Glasgow, changed his name to Lonnie in homage to bluesman
Lonnie Johnson; he played guitar or banjo in trad bands, and began appearing
on stage between sets playing what came to be called skiffle. The cheap
Spanish guitar, the washboard and the bass made out of a tea-chest and
a broom-handle created a do-it-yourself movement, causing countless
British schoolboys to take up the guitar.
The word ‘skiffle’ had
already been used in the USA to describe music played by those who were
too poor to buy musical instruments and used washboards, jugs and so
on instead; ‘Hometown Skiffle’ (on Paramount, 1929), one of the first
samplers, included the Hokum Boys and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Like rock’n’roll
in the USA, skiffle was a novelty at first, but it is impossible to
overestimate its importance. As one British writer put it, ‘A strange
bedlam was taking over which had nothing to do with anything we had
previously known.’ This would not be a bad description of the impact
of rock’n’roll in the USA. One of the skiffle hits was a portent of
things to come: both Donegan and the Vipers Skiffle Group had hits with
‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-o’, written by members of the Vipers, some
of whom later turned to electric guitars and became the Shadows, the
best-known British rock band of the early 1960s.
Another skiffle hit, with
an indefinably sweet sound, was ‘Freight Train’, by the Charles McDevitt
Skiffle Group and singer Nancy Whiskey. It reached the UK top five in
1957 on the Oriole label, an independent soon purchased by CBS to form
the basis of CBS UK, and also entered the top 40 in the USA. The song
had been written by Elizabeth Cotton as a child; Libba was a protégée
of the Seeger family. But Donegan was the first and most successful
skiffler; in early 1956 his ‘Rock Island Line’ beat Elvis Presley’s
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to the British charts by several months. The popular
British jazz singer Beryl Bryden played washboard on that record.
Skiffle was easy to satirize.
‘Rock Island Line’ was also a hit in the USA, where it was sent up by
Stan Freberg; in the UK Jim Dale recorded ‘Piccadilly Line’. The genre
plundered the American folksongs of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, some
of which had antecedents in Britain to begin with. Donegan’s over 30
UK hits included ‘Lost John’, ‘Stewball’, ‘Cumberland Gap’ and ‘Grand
Coolie Dam’, but also his own quintessentially British ‘My Old Man’s
a Dustman’ (or ‘garbageman’, as we said in the USA), and the 1924 hit
‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight’. Donegan
was another beneficiary of Decca/London’s excellent sound, which all
through the 1950s was a light-year ahead of RCA’s. When he recorded
the music hall material, he was accused by folk purists of selling out.
‘Freight Train’ had been
introduced to Britain by Peggy Seeger, whose husband, Ewan MacColl,
was born James Miller, of Scottish parents, in the English town of Salford,
and grew up there at a time when the social attitude of ‘us and them’
was the only realistic one to take. He learned proletarian songs from
his parents, and took the name of an obscure Scottish poet. In those
days what is still called the working class in Britain was inclined
to try to better itself; MacColl spent much time reading in public libraries,
joined the Communist Party and spent the rest of his life making a case
for the proletariat. With his first wife, Joan Littlewood, he formed
a theatre workshop in London in 1945, and became a highly regarded playwright.
He later turned to folk music with Seeger, his third wife; he wrote
some fine songs, among them ‘Dirty Old Town’, based on his memories
of Salford, which was covered by Rod Stewart, and ‘The First Time Ever
I Saw Your Face’, a love song for Seeger, which was a number one hit
in the USA for Roberta Flack in 1972 and has become a cabaret standard
(partly because it was included in Clint Eastwood’s film Play Misty
for Me). Through all his various activities and workshops, including
documentaries on radio about the working class and its music, MacColl
had become one of the most important British ‘folkies’.
MacColl and Seeger were
delighted with skiffle. Young people making their own music could be
influenced by the songs of their ancestors, and indeed a folk revival
seemed to be happening, in the USA as well as in the UK. Alan Lomax,
son of the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, lived in Britain during
the 1950s, and gave some encouragement. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a singing
cowboy from Brooklyn and Woody Guthrie acolyte, spent most of the 1950s
in Europe, especially England, where his guitar playing influenced folk
music. And in the 1950s some Americans still followed the peripatetic
fortunes of the Weavers.
Children always love folksongs,
which are easy to remember, easy to sing and seem to be about things
that matter. Such musicians as Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Oscar Brand,
Ed McCurdy and Win Stracke (‘Chicago’s Minstrel’) often worked for and
with children. Some of these artists were not taken in by the cranks
in the American communist party: Ives testified before the House Un-American
Activities Committee about the party’s attempts to co-opt folk music
for its own ends; Canadian-born Brand refused to testify and was not
subpoenaed. MacColl was chairman of the Pete Seeger Committee in London
in 1961 during the period when Seeger was being persecuted. It is a
nasty paradox for those who love both music and freedom that while the
USSR devoted resources to researching and preserving its multitude of
folk styles before they disappeared, the Library of Congress’s archive
needed private donations, and Pete Seeger, collecting songs around the
world, was blacklisted.
Folkish sounds had occasionally
been heard in US pop during the 1950s. Harry Belafonte’s cabaret-style
calypso was very successful; his 1956 album, which was number one for
31 weeks, included ‘Banana Boat (Day-o)’, of which there were half a
dozen hit versions. Since an increasing number of people from the Caribbean
were settling in Britain, and especially London, real calypso could
be heard there. One of the most attractive US hits of the period was
‘Summertime, Summertime’, by the Jamies, a quartet led by Tom Janison,
who wrote the song; its combination of bounce and almost medieval harmony
made the top 40 twice. Around 1960 Continental Cafe on Chicago’s Channel
9 regularly presented international folk dancers and singers, among
them the young Judy Collins.
Folk music goes in and
out of fashion; by the late 1980s it was in fashion once again, included
in ‘roots’ music. When folk music is not in fashion, it is always there
on obscure labels in specialist shops for those who want it, and those
who do not want it are people who have no souls. In October 1990 on
a BBC TV programme about MacColl, a year after his death, Peggy Seeger,
accompanied by her own autoharp and a discreet background guitar, sang
‘Thoughts of Time’: it was one of the most frankly and directly beautiful
musical moments I have ever seen on television.
The folk act that made
the biggest stir in the late 1950s was the Kingston Trio, three California
boys who deflected the left-wing taint attached in America to folksingers
by wearing matching shortsleeved shirts and short haircuts. Their whole
act was so slick that purists dismissed them, but their intent was honest
enough; their first and biggest hit, in 1958, was a real folk-song,
‘Tom Dooley’, about a man who was hanged for murder in 1866. When Dave
Guard, who wrote ‘Scotch and Soda’, later a cabaret staple, left the
group and formed the Whiskey Hill Singers with Judy Henske, he was replaced
by John Stewart, still a highly regarded singer-songwriter today. The
Kingston Trio eventually had six alumni, 17 Hot 100 singles and over
30 albums. They inspired the Brothers Four, the Highwaymen and other
such groups, including perhaps the Limeliters: Glen Yarbrough, Lou Gottlieb
and Alex Hassilev were good singers with an amusing cabaret act who
had only one minor hit single, but ten chart albums in four years from
1961. Clearly there was a market hungry for folk, even if it was urban
folk.
In 1959 the Kingston Trio
were booked for the first Newport Folk Festival, where they were outclassed
by the likes of Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee,
John Jacob Niles, Jean Ritchie, Brand and McCurdy. Niles, one of the
patriarchs of folk music, presented old songs in a formal style rather
than as early hillbilly music. Jean Ritchie was born in a Kentucky family
of fourteen. Her parents collected songs, and were visited by English
folklorist Cecil Sharpe in 1922, five years before Jean was born; in
the 1930s the family was recorded by John and Alan Lomax. Later Jean
was on the board of directors of the original Newport Folk Festival.
The sensation at Newport
in 1959 and 1960, however, must have been Joan Baez, whose first albums
on Vanguard, made in 1960-61, reached high in the Billboard chart,
and were followed by live concert sets which did even better. Born in
1941, Baez was a revelation for her own generation, playing acoustic
guitar and in a silvery soprano singing straight unfussy versions of
Child ballads (collected by Francis James Child in the nineteenth century)
and similar material, such as the Scottish border song ‘Mary Hamilton’
and ‘House Carpenter’ (from the ‘daemon lover’ genre). ‘Wildwood Flower’
was a Carter Family song, the melody of which Woody Guthrie had used
for his ‘Reuben James’ (about a disaster at sea). Baez’s contemporaries
also knew that the compilers of blacklists had had their day: she sang
Guthrie’s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’, and Malvina Reynolds’s ‘What Have They
Done to the Rain?’ Thus in popular music the new decade began with chart
success for Motown on the one hand, as black pop was coming of age,
and folk music which was not preserved in aspic on the other.
After fighting for democracy
during the war, Seeger had started People’s Songs, Inc., to publish
songs, which was taken seriously by the FBI. In May 1947 the United
States Army’s Weekly Domestic Intelligence Summary listed PSI as a communist
front. In September its tiny staff was joined by Irwin Silber, a left-wing
college kid who was sounder on radical theory than on compassion. When
Leadbelly died in 1949 he was on welfare, but Silber complained about
Seeger misusing Leadbelly’s music when the Weavers had their hit with
‘Goodnight Irene’ in 1950; Leadbelly’s widow was taking in laundry,
and no doubt did not misuse the money. (Review the story of Seeger and
the Weavers in Chapter 12.) The American far left had long been dominated
by people like Silber. With the American communist party marginalized,
its membership and its ties with the unions shrinking, Seeger drifted
away, hoping that the fundamental democracy implicit in folk music would
seep through to the people. This did not prevent him from being victimized
by paranoia on both left and right; while he was building a house with
his own hands during this period, living through the first winter in
New York State without any heat and feeding his family on beans, his
former comrades and others kept a rumour going that he had a lavish
estate on the Hudson. But his aim was to get America singing, and during
the 1950s he flitted from one meeting hall or college campus to another,
often coming and going before the local patriots could organize themselves
to keep him out. Whatever his views on communism, his musical instinct
was correct: when the Weavers sang ‘Rock Island Line’, the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee investigated them for sedition; when Lonnie Donegan
had a hit with the same song a few years later, the only result was
a Freberg send-up. The USA had survived the internal communist menace,
and also a tendency towards Stalinist show trials.
The songbook Sing Out!
was edited by Silber from 1951 to 1967. When Seeger visited England
in 1961, he was impressed with the number of topical songs being written;
he went home and formed Broadside. By then the coffee houses
of New York City were hothouses of folk-oriented singer-songwriters:
Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs, Eric Andersen, David Blue, Dave Van Ronk, Tim
Hardin, Eric Von Schmidt and Bob Dylan were soon joined by Tom Paxton,
Tom Rush, Arlo Guthrie, John Prine, Steve Goodman, Loudon Wainwright,
Canadians Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ian and Sylvia and scores more, many of
whom had songs published in Sing Out! or Broadside. The
greatest of all these was Dylan, who was introduced by Joan Baez at
the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.
Like almost everyone else
of his generation, Dylan had grown up cut off from the pre-war history
of popular music, listening to Little Richard and Buddy Holly; maybe
he really did play piano with Bobby Vee. He certainly valued Hank Williams
and Woody Guthrie; he made his way to New York and joined the folk boom
while still a teenager. The only category he could fit into was the
category of people who come from nowhere; his home town of Hibbing,
Minnesota, had no ‘other’ side of the tracks. The mainstream music business
that had tried to ignore Elvis Presley meant nothing to him at first;
he went to the East Coast because that was where Woody Guthrie was.
Some people thought that
Dylan had the solution to the banal hypocrisy of the post-war era. He
had a relatively small number of fans; of about thirty albums in the
twenty-five years from 1962, only two were certified as million-sellers.
But crazies picked through his garbage, urban terrorists named themselves
after a phrase in a Dylan lyric, college professors lectured on Dylan’s
words, and they all missed the point. One of Dylan’s intellectual predecessors
was a radical union leader early in the century, Eugene V. Debs, who
told a cheering crowd of railway workers that if they needed him to
lead them into the promised land, somebody else would lead them right
back out again. Dylan never intended to tell anyone what to think; the
only thing he understood was that there is nothing to be understood,
that there are no rules and no answers except those that come from within
us as individuals. That is what freedom ultimately means; but this was
not convenient for a generation who became consumers in the end, like
every generation, and wanted their politics off the shelf, like breakfast
food.
Dylan was ignored by Folkways,
Vanguard and Elektra, the primary folk labels of the early 1960s, but
was signed to Columbia by John Hammond. His first album in early 1962
was a straight folk album, described by a Columbia record salesman as
a ‘piece of shit’. (It should have included ‘Talking John Birch Society
Blues’, but Columbia would not allow it.) The second album, The Freewheelin’
Bob Dylan, consisted almost entirely of originals: ‘Blowin’ in the
Wind’, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ and a few others made him a ‘protest
singer’, though in retrospect were merely pithy observations. Everybody
was writing anti-war songs, like Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’, or ‘Talkin’
World War III Blues’. ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,’
Dylan wrote, and it still is. He changed nothing, but never said he
would.
Dylan did what Cole Porter
had done in a very different decade, and for a very different audience.
He combined cadences and catchphrases from everyday speech in such a
way that they re-entered the language, but instead of promoting escapism
into a world of penthouses and evening clothes, Dylan offered solace
to a generation living on a moral desolation row. We had grown up in
an era when many of America’s friends were butchers, all breeding chickens
which would come home to roost, from Trujillo, Batista and Samoza in
our own back yard to generals and potentates in the Middle East and
Asia; the threat of nuclear war was becoming tiresome and the Cold War
merely good for business. We were tired of it, but could only keep on
keepin’ on, in spite of the blood on the tracks.
Dylan continued to accompany
himself on harmonica and acoustic guitar. His third and fourth albums
contained much rich material, and then Bringing It All Back Home
(1965) included a whole side that seemed to top off Dylan’s acoustic
era: ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘Gates of Eden’, ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ were all masterpieces.
But on side one of the album he was backed by an electric rock band.
Rock’n’roll came of age with Dylan, just as its element of folk music
had been revived.
At a Newport Folk Festival
in that period the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was loud and electric,
and nobody was bothered, because few in the audience knew anything about
the blues anyway. But when Dylan’s electric set began, fans as well
as the Seegers and the MacColls were outraged, perhaps because they
knew that their time was over. Their best songs would live, but their
politics had been rendered absurd by history; we may not be able to
keep our politicians under control, but we don’t have to work on Maggie’s
farm if we don’t want to. Irritated by criticism of his new music, Dylan
said, ‘Folk music is a bunch of fat people.’ Some of the controversy
was caused by the endemic problem of electric rock that it is nearly
always unnecessarily loud; but for better or worse, among the influences
on Dylan were skifflers from Liverpool who spearheaded the British Invasion
of 1964.
The Quarrymen, one of countless
British schoolboy groups inspired by skiffle and/or rock’n’roll, was
formed in Liverpool in 1956 by John Lennon, who named it after his school.
Lennon sang and played rhythm guitar; Paul McCartney on rhythm guitar
and George Harrison on lead were added in 1957. In 1958 Lennon’s close
friend from art school joined; Stuart Sutcliffe could not play at first,
but he had money from the sale of a painting which he was willing to
spend on a bass guitar. As they evolved from skiffle to rock’n’roll,
the group’s name changed to Johnny and the Moondogs; for the next incarnation
Sutcliffe suggested Beetles, after Buddy Holly’s Crickets, and Lennon’s
predilection for puns finally made them the Beatles. Their first regular
drummer was Pete Best, whose broody good looks made him a heart-throb
among Liverpool fans.
Like many overnight sensations
they served a long apprenticeship, playing in tough seaside clubs in
Hamburg, Germany, for prostitutes, drunks and slumming tourists while
honing their stagecraft. Like a good number of show business folk, they
took amphetamines and other drugs to keep going; the squeaky-clean Beatles
of a few years later had little to do with the rough-and-ready English
rock’n’roll band that played covers of American hits. They also began
writing songs of their own.
In between their Hamburg
tours they played hundreds of gigs at the Cavern Club in Liverpool,
thereby building up a substantial local following. They had recorded
in Germany (produced by bandleader Bert Kaempfert), backing UK pop singer
Tony Sheridan on a few tracks which did nothing, but their fans in Liverpool
began asking for the imported record. Brian Epstein, manager of the
record department of his parents’ furniture emporium, was intrigued
to learn that they were a local band. He was a middle-class Jewish boy
and an unhappy homosexual (at a time when it was still illegal in Britain
to be a practising homosexual) and he preferred classical music, but
he literally fell in love with the Beatles, and became their manager.
The orthodoxy is that Epstein was a poor businessman, but that can only
be said with hindsight; nobody predicted the extent of Beatlemania,
and, as Lennon put it after Epstein’s death from an accidental drug
overdose, they never would have made it without him.
Sutcliffe was not a good
musician and did not get along with McCartney, who wanted to play bass.
He left in 1961 to settle in Hamburg with his German girlfriend, photographer
Astrid Kirchherr; he died of a brain tumour, possibly caused by a vicious
kick in the head from a hooligan after a 1961 gig in England. Kirchherr
had influenced the group’s sartorial style, including their haircuts,
which though seen as traditional English ‘pudding bowl’ cuts, were modelled
on what upper-class German boys had worn for decades. Kirchherr’s photographs
represent the beginning of the importance of visual style, which would
carry more weight in pop than the music. Her then boyfriend, Klaus Voorman,
was also impressed by the group, and became an influential designer
of record covers. Epstein forced the boys to sharpen up their act, nagging
them about deportment and reliability, and building their image on what
Kirchherr had started; then he began trying to get them a recording
contract. Decca, among others, turned them down, a mistake that lives
in history. Then came an audition with George Martin.
Martin deservedly became
one of the most famous producers in history, and was known as the fifth
Beatle. He had attended the Guildhall School of Music and worked in
the BBC music library before joining Parlophone as an assistant. Parlophone
had been an internationally famous record label; in the 1920s it issued
records by pianist Claudio Arrau, for example, and was the main British
source of jazz records in its Parlophone Rhythm Style series (which
included issues of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five) . But by the 1960s it
had become EMI’s repository for material that did not belong anywhere
else. Martin produced a Scottish dance band led by Jimmy Shand, and
the hit novelty ‘Experiments with Mice’ (1956) by Johnny Dankworth,
in which the British saxophonist led a group playing ‘Three Blind Mice’
in the styles of Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton and others. Martin made comedy
records by Peter Ustinov and Peter Sellers, as well as skiffle hits.
The Beatles recorded ‘Love
Me Do’ at an audition, and Martin, seeing something in their raw energy,
advised Epstein that Pete Best was not good enough. Best seemed to be
the odd man out anyway, unimpressed as he was by Kirchherr’s ideas,
so the group recruited Richard Starkey, alias Ringo Starr, from Rory
Storm and the Hurricanes, another Liverpool group which had shared the
Hamburg gigs. A recording of ‘Love Me Do’ by the new quartet reached
the top 20 of the British charts in October 1962. ‘Please Please Me’,
number two early the next year, was followed by three number ones; the
Beatles could not go anywhere in public without being mobbed, and popular
music would never be the same again: rock’n’roll began to change to
rock, which was no longer a fad, and in the decade of the 1960s the
music business was altered beyond recognition.
Philip Norman, in his Shout!
The Story of The Beatles (1981), described what Kirchherr had captured
in her photographs as their ‘would-be toughness and undisguisable, all-protecting
innocence’. For all Lennon’s cynicism, a blanket of self-protection
that came from his background as an orphan, and for all the high-jinks
they had got up to in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, they were still Liverpool
lads who could not believe their luck. They were greater than the sum
of their parts; Lennon and McCartney wrote the songs, Lennon’s acerbity
balancing McCartney’s tendency to sweetness, and their native cheekiness
was a sort of genuine bravado. The music of the British Invasion represented
a climax of a decade of pop jingles. It was British variety influenced
by the first wave of rock’n’roll, which was already over in the USA.
The Beatles did it better than anyone else, and should have been the
end of it, instead of inspiring generations of imitators. As long as
the baby boom lasted, there was an inexhaustible supply of children
who wanted either to be pop stars or to worship pop stars, so the business
accommodated itself to raking in increasing amounts of money, and there
was no reason to change anything, except that more accountants were
required. Meanwhile, Bing Crosby, American cinema and Broadway songs
had invaded and conquered Britain for decades, so now the British reversed
the flow for a time.
‘Love Me Do’ was a sort
of bouncy white blues which had the virtue of simplicity, and there
was something pleasant about their essentially folkish harmony. ‘She
Loves You’ was unremarkable, its ‘Yeah, yeah yeah’ chorus typical of
the trashiness of pop. ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was worse: one of
the most irritating aspects of pop was the growing tendency not to bother
writing a song at all; and the seven notes on the word ‘hand’ was a
good example of the use of a cheap white imitation of melisma to disguise
the paucity of the lyrics. This was a warning of the triumph of style
over substance that was already taking place in pop, but in the Beatles’
case better work was to come. They were tempted to follow Ringo around
with pencil and paper because of the way he talked: ‘That was a hard
day’s night,’ he said after one gig, which gave them the name of a song
and of their first film.
Capitol Records had been
sold to EMI in 1955 for £3 million. Joseph Lockwood was criticized for
paying so much, but by the end of the decade the label of Frank Sinatra,
Nat ‘King’ Cole, the Kingston Trio and others was said to be worth £85
million. The UK came up with rock’n’roll stars such as Tommy Hicks (renamed
Tommy Steele) who were pale imitations of the US product, until they
found Cliff Richard, who in thirty years had only 19 hit singles in
the USA, but a hundred in the UK. (Steele, not so incidentally, became
an all-round entertainer in the end, in the music hall rather than the
Presley tradition.) Billboard published an annual list of the
world’s best-selling artists based on charts in 34 countries, and suddenly
in 1963 the top four were Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley, the Shadows
(Cliff’s backing band) and Frank Ifield, an Australian-born pop singer
who specialized in old songs. All except Presley shared the same label
(EMI-Columbia), producer (Norrie Paramor), manager and agent. Number
seven on the list were the Beatles, also EMI artists, who the following
year went to the top. Capitol in the USA passed on all of them, quite
understandably; neither Richard nor Ifield became superstars in the
USA, while the Ventures, a guitar band from Seattle, were already the
homegrown equivalent of the Shadows. And who could have expected four
kids from Liverpool to become the biggest act of the decade?
Frank Ifield’s ‘I Remember
You’ (a top ten hit by Jimmy Dorsey in 1944) was a top five US hit in
1963 on Vee-Jay, the black-owned Chicago label which also picked up
the Beatles. After Motown in Detroit and Duke/Peacock in Houston (which
remained strictly R&B and gospel), Vee-Jay was the most important
black-owned label in the USA. It had been formed in 1953 by Vivian Carter
Bracken and James Bracken, who were joined by Vivian’s brother Calvin
Carter. Their biggest act was the guitarist and singer Jimmy Reed, who
also wrote songs and played a harmonica fixed on a wire bracket around
his neck, as street singers had done and as Dylan did later. Reed’s
blues had a sweetness that took the edge off the usual Chicago passion;
he began crossing over to the pop chart in 1957. Soul balladeer Jerry
Butler had fourteen Vee-Jay hits between 1960 and 1966, nearly all of
which dented the white chart; the Spaniels, the Dells and the El Dorados
were vocal groups who crossed over. Frankie Valli was lead singer and
Bob Gaudio (formerly of the Royal Teens) keyboard player and tunesmith
in the Four Seasons, a white group which had three number ones in the
pop chart in 1962 and 1963 on Vee-Jay before moving to Philips. There
were many more Vee-Jay hits by Dee Clark, Rosco Gordon, John Lee Hooker
and others; Gene Chandler’s ‘Duke of Earl’ was a number one in both
the white and black charts in 1962.
Ifield’s hit came from
left field to make a little money for Vee-Jay in 1963, more than a year
after it had been more successful in England. The label had also taken
a chance on ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’ back to back, the
Beatles’ second and third UK hits from early 1963, but they made no
mark in the USA at first. Vee-Jay lost interest, and ‘She Loves You’
came out on Swan in the USA; ‘Twist and Shout’ / ‘There’s a Place’ and
‘Love Me Do’ / ‘P.S. I Love You’ were issued in the USA on a Tollie
label. But Capitol was prodded into action by their head office in London.
As the Beatles flew to New York in January 1964 with an appearance on
Ed Sullivan’s show lined up, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ backed with
‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was screaming up the USA pop chart, narrowly
beating the Swan and Vee-Jay singles to the top. Vee-Jay had released
the first Beatles album in the USA in July 1963, and it suddenly reached
only number two in February 1964, because a Capitol album was already
at number one: hip fans sought out the imported Parlophone editions,
because they had seven songs on each side instead of six, owing to different
methods of calculating song royalties on albums. Adding further to the
confusion, two of the Tollie tracks appeared on the first pressing of
the Vee-Jay album, and had to be changed in later editions. And this
success was the beginning of the end for Vee-Jay.
Having suddenly to buy
truckloads of pressings of Beatle records meant that Vee-Jay was short
of cash, because distributors sat for up to ninety days on money needed
to pay for new pressings. But that was not the whole story; a label
that had already achieved so much in a decade should have been in a
better position. When Vee-Jay collapsed in 1965, there were recriminations
about financial dishonesty, but the truth was probably more prosaic.
Nelson George quotes an anonymous participant at a Vee-Jay party for
a dozen Chicago DJs that took place in Las Vegas in the early 1960s:
they were asked what they wanted, and they did not want free poker chips;
they wanted women; so the company flew a dozen tall blondes from Oslo
across the North Pole for the weekend, spending a good deal of money
that would have come in handy a couple of years later. Vee-Jay might
have been as big as Motown, but it did not have Berry Gordy watching
the bottom line.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
was murdered in November 1963; in early 1964 the Beatles helped cheer
up the nation. Music lovers had to withhold judgement until hearing
the records: the screaming on Sullivan’s show in February was insane.
If you went to the shopping mall to buy a Beatles album and they were
sold out, you could buy the Dave Clark Five instead; this was another
EMI act on which Capitol had passed, a beat group formed in London to
benefit a football club. All they could do was thump, but they sold
records.
Between 1963 and 1965,
the height of the British Invasion (so dubbed by Billboard),
fifteen EMI acts reached the chart in the USA, only six of which eventually
appeared on Capitol. Capitol mopped up what was left of Vee-Jay and
rode the gravy train for a few years: Nat Cole, whose Capitol albums
are also still selling decades later, telephoned one day to be greeted
by a cheerful ‘Capitol Records, Home of the Beatles!’ After the Fab
Four broke up in 1970 Capitol found itself with a rack-jobbing distributorship,
a mail-order record club and a bloated staff of hangers-on and their
girlfriends, all losing money. The once great label formed by Johnny
Mercer and his friends was managed no better than Vee-Jay.
Years later Bob Dylan (in
Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 biography) remembered driving across country
in 1964 with the Beatles all over the radio dial. ‘Their chords were
outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.
You could only do that with other musicians ... I knew they were pointing
the direction where music had to go.’ They were certainly pointing the
direction in which rock would go, and gave Dylan the excuse to do it
his way.
Another result of British
interest in American roots music was a blues boom. Guitarist and vocalist
Alexis Korner and banjoist turned harmonica player Cyril Davies had
been members of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, which they left in 1961 to
form Blues Incorporated. Despite visits from such bluesmen as Big Bill
Broonzy, playing the blues was not an economic proposition. Caught between
British imitation rock’n’roll and trad jazz, Korner and Davies played
once a week or so in any club that would have them, ending up at the
Marquee in London’s Wardour Street.
Davies left in 1962 to
form his own All Stars, taking over Screaming Lord Sutch’s Savages,
in which Nicky Hopkins played piano. When Davies died of leukaemia,
vocalist Long John Baldry stepped in and formed the Hoochie Koochie
Men, which included vocalist Rod Stewart. Baldry and Stewart went to
Brian Auger’s Steampacket, an interesting group that did not succeed;
Baldry took over Bluesology, whose keyboard player was Reg Dwight (who
later became Elton John). David Sutch was a rocker who never had much
commercial success; he imitated Screaming Jay Hawkins and Jack the Ripper
on stage, and later stood for Parliament for the Raving Monster Loony
Party. Hopkins played piano with most of the rock greats, while Baldry
eventually took his big voice to ballads, where he won some acclaim.
The British blues boom
was destined to be eclipsed by rock when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
met on a train. They had been close friends when they were small, and
they recognized each other and found something new in common: Jagger
had been sending away to the USA for Chess albums, and had a bunch of
them under his arm. They began to get together for private jams with
Dick Taylor, who later formed the Pretty Things, a band which ‘resembled
nothing so much as Spitting Image puppets of the early Rolling Stones’,
according to English writer Charles Shaar Murray. When Jagger and Richards
went to a gig at the Marquee, they heard a guest who sounded like Elmore
James on slide guitar: Brian Jones. After adding older men Bill Wyman
on bass and Charlie Watts on drums, they began performing.
‘Can you imagine a British-composed
R&B song? It just wouldn’t make it,’ said Jagger in 1963, before
somebody told him how much money the Beatles were making with their
own songs. Jagger was right; British R&B was and is a contradiction
in terms. The first Stones album included songs by Rufus Thomas, Willie
Dixon, Chuck Berry, Slim Harpo and even Motown artists (Holland-Dozier-Holland).
They had their first UK chart entry in mid-1963; an American edition
of their first album reached number eleven in the Billboard album chart
in 1964, but many Americans could not figure out why they should listen
to white English kids singing Chuck Berry when they could listen to
Chuck Berry. Giorgio Gomelsky, manager of London’s Crawdaddy Club, was
the first manager of the Stones; the bluesmen visiting London used to
get together at his home. He recalled, in Dixon’s autobiography:
I’ll never forget - it
was an afternoon about four o’clock in March of 1964 or something. There
was Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy [Williamson] and Willie Dixon, the three
of them sitting on this sofa ... Willie was just singing and tapping
on the back of the chair and Sonny Boy would play the harmonica and
they would do new songs ... These three grand viziers were sitting on
this thing and there’s like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and everybody sitting
at their feet ... I remember ‘300 Pounds of Joy’, ‘Little Red Rooster’,
‘You Shook Me’ ... We’d heard them really fresh, before anybody had
made a record of them.
In fact, a song called
‘Little Red Rooster’ had been an R&B hit by someone called Margie
Day in 1951, and Wolf had already recorded it. ‘Little Red Rooster’
was the first number one UK hit for the Stones, in November 1964. But
songs like that, when performed by blacks for blacks in Chicago, were
celebrations of the joy of sexuality; sung by spotty ex-schoolboys,
they conjured up only sweaty palms. Whether that is fair or not is beside
the point; there are social and economic as well as rhythmic reasons
for this. Songs such as Muddy Waters’s ‘Rock Me’ are pleas for comfort,
for sanctuary in a cruel world. When they were taken over by the rock
generation, they came to be about the domination of women, leading to
the heavy metal threat to ‘nail your ass to the floor’.
On the one hand, the Stones
were one of the few groups who gave proper credit and paid royalties
to the composer. As Jagger put in his letter to Melody Maker in 1964,
‘These legendary characters wouldn’t mean a light commercially today
if groups were not going round Britain doing their numbers.’ In the
early 1960s the US music industry was not admitting Willie Dixon to
any Hall of Fame. On the other hand, the Stones were being promoted
as opposite numbers to the Beatles: the Mop Tops were cute (however
outrageous their behaviour behind closed doors); the Stones were arrested
for urinating in public in 1965 and they refused to wave bye-bye with
the other stars at the end of a television pop show. The dirtier and
more surly the Stones were, the better. The credit ‘Nanker Phelge’ began
to appear on their songs; a ‘nankie’, said Brian Jones, is a little
man who thinks he represents authority; but it is an appropriate rock
joke that ‘nanker’ rhymes with ‘wanker’, one who practises the solitary
vice.
In any case, once the Stones
were convinced they could write songs, ‘Stupid Girl’ may have been about
a female who subscribed to social shibboleths which seemed to be going
out of date, whether we liked it or not; ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ was
about the drugs housewives took to get them through the day, while the
press screamed about marijuana; ‘Sittin’ on the Fence’ was about bitter-sweet
reluctance to join a new generation of baby-boomers, helping the economy
by tying themselves up in knots with mortgages and a new generation
of babies. ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ was their first number one
in the USA in 1965. Jagger couldn’t swing, and his execrable accent
and phrasing should have been a drawback, but his narcissistic image
was useful, and the band could swing. Watts was a jazz drummer who played
well behind the beat, Richards and Jones were very good musicians indeed,
and the band set Jagger off perfectly. Later, after Jones had left,
Jagger seemed to be the nominal leader, but their manager Andrew Loog
Oldham recalled years later:
Mick may have thought he was running
the show, but Keith was always in charge of the music. When I was remastering
one of the tracks for CD I came across something I had not noticed at
the time. There was a song where the key was easy for Keith’s voice,
but had caused Mick trouble and he could hardly sing it.
I
said to Keith: ‘Did you pick the key for that song?’ And he just looked
at me and smiled.
In 1964 the Stones paid
their respects in Chicago, where they made the EP 4 x 5 at the
Chess studios; but they had eschewed the purism of the blues and soon
garnered the title ‘The World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band’, and deserved
it. The decade of the 1960s cannot be understood without their albums
Beggar’s Banquet (1968) and Let It Bleed (1969); the horrors
of assassinations and war in Vietnam told us all too much about our
‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
After the Beatles and the
Stones, the two most successful British groups were the Who and the
Kinks; both remained bigger in the UK but had cult followings in the
USA. Pete Townshend’s ‘My Generation’ (for the Who) typified the blatant
self-indulgence of the era; their act made a fetish out of smashing
their instruments, and they graduated to the grandiose ‘rock opera’
(Tommy). Drummer Keith Moon died in 1978 of an overdose of a drug he
was taking to combat his alcoholism, and the survivors later realized
they should have quit.
The Kinks’ first hit was
‘You Really Got Me’ (1964), which resembled the Dave Clark Five’s thumpers,
but Ray Davies went on to create English music of his own. Even more
than the Beatles’ work, his was in the music hall tradition, and also
grieved for a disappearing England. The caustic weariness of his ‘Tired
of Waiting for You’ (1965) was followed by social commentary in ‘Dedicated
Follower of Fashion’ and ‘A Well Respected Man’, and vignettes such
as ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Davies was too bright to
turn to drugs like others of the era, and understood the nature of the
music business. (He went to the House of Lords to get himself out of
a terrible management contract.) His concept albums in the 1970s were
among the least grandiose of that genre, and the Kinks outlasted everybody
except the Stones.
The British Invasion carried
with it harmless pop and measures of fraud. The Small Faces had a fresh
sound, and recorded on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. in 1969
they re-formed as the Faces, from which Rod Stewart emerged to become
a generation’s favourite Jack the Lad. The first three singles by Gerry
and the Pacemakers, another Liverpool group produced by Martin, made
history by all being number one UK hits. Billy J. Kramer’s success was
due to Martin’s production and songs lent by the Beatles. Peter and
Gordon were a preppy duo; Gordon Waller later imitated Elvis in Joseph
and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Peter Asher became a
prominent record producer. Some groups were successful in the USA because
they were British, and remained virtually unknown at home, but the Strangeloves,
Myles, Gyles and Nyles, pulled off the best joke: putting on accents
and pretending to be British by way of Australia, they had hits in the
mid-1960s, but they were actually American music insiders Bob Feldman,
Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer.
The Strangeloves supported
the Beach Boys on tour, who were in on the joke. The Beach Boys were
an American act whose popularity was unaffected by the British; Brian,
Dennis and Carl Wilson and cousins Mike Love and Al Jardine had over
50 hit singles from 1962. They stole some of their tunes from Chuck
Berry, but their harmony was different; their clean-cut sound owed much
to decades of pop from Glenn Miller’s Modernaires to the Four Freshmen
and the Hi-lo’s. Dennis was full of alcohol when he drowned in 1983,
while Brian, the most talented of the group, had addled his brain with
drugs; yet what could be more innocent than their concern with surfing,
cars and pretty girls? The apparent divorce of their hedonism from its
consequences is a paradigm of their Californian lotus-land, and of rock
itself.
There are many reasons
why the 1960s still look like a golden age compared with the following
decades. It had already been several years since the successful use
of obviously black material by Elvis Presley, and the explosion of Chuck
Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard into the pop chart; the girl groups
were mostly black, and the Motown hit factory’s formula clearly appealed
equally to black and white fans. Furthermore, the civil rights era was
well under way: Americans were making a collective decision that second-class
citizenship for a large minority was no longer acceptable, if only because
they did not want to see southern police chiefs using dogs and firehoses
against black schoolchildren on television. Between 30 November 1963
and 23 January 1965 there was no R&B chart in Billboard:
for the first time in the history of popular music black and white fans
were following the same music to such an extent that separate charts
did not seem to be necessary, because rhythm and blues had triumphed
in the form of soul music.
Ray Charles had left the
Atlantic label for ABC-Paramount, where he made an unprecedented deal
for a black entertainer, retaining ownership of his own recordings.
His version of Hoagy Carmichael’s lovely ‘Georgia on My Mind’ was a
huge hit in both charts. He had already had a hit with Hank Snow’s ‘I’m
Movin’ On’ on Atlantic in 1959; for ABC he made two albums of country
songs, and his version of Don Gibson’s ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ was
even bigger than ‘Georgia’.
Charles was born in Georgia
but soon moved to Florida, where he went blind as a child. He performed
in the mid-1940s in Florida, playing piano with a white country band,
among others, and then went as far away as he could within the USA,
to Seattle, Washington. There he led a trio in a style similar to that
of Nat Cole, and had hits including ‘Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand’ in
the style of the West Coast R&B crooner Charles Brown. On his very
first recordings, made at the age of seventeen on a friend’s wire recorder
in Florida, although he was using the Nat Cole and Charles Brown trio
style, his honest moaning was that of a seasoned sufferer. (His mother
had recently died and he was extremely poor.) In 1951 he went on the
road with guitarist and vocalist Lowell Fulson, filling the shoes of
Lloyd Glenn, one of the most successful pianists in R&B. Jack Lauderdale’s
West Coast Swing Time R&B label was going out of business, and Atlantic
snapped up Ray Charles.
The guitar turned out to
be of the greatest importance - indeed it has been played to death by
countless white soundalike ‘guitar heroes’ in the last twenty years.
Aaron Thibeaux ‘T-Bone’ Walker was the prime mover behind rock guitar,
sharing the same teacher and influences as Charlie Christian and doing
for the instrument in R&B what Christian did for it in jazz: he
brought his intimate baritone and his guitar playing to a huge number
of tracks, nearly all of which were blues but usually had a jazz-flavoured
backing that reveals much about the origins of R&B, and which must
have been a big influence on the young Ray Charles. The slide guitar
of Elmore James and his somewhat rougher country blues style derived
from Robert Johnson. The four Kings, B. B., Albert, Earl and Freddie,
all unrelated, all played guitar and had black hits. Riley ‘Blues Boy’
King is the first of these in more ways than one, having become one
of the world’s best-loved entertainers after decades of working the
chitlin’ circuit, without changing himself or his act.
An extremely rich stew
of rhythm and blues had been bubbling in the early 1950s. Ray Charles
arranged and played piano on Guitar Slim’s ‘The Things That I Used to
Do’, a number one black hit for fourteen weeks in early 1954. (He was
the best known of several entertainers to use the name Guitar Slim and
one of the first to use a long lead on his electric guitar, so he could
move around the stage.) Ray Charles then brought to black pop one of
its most important ingredients: the music of the black church. In the
late 1950s he finally crossed over to the white chart, but by then he
was already a national institution; one of Bill Cosby’s comedy routines
had Columbus sailing to America so he could discover Ray Charles.
At his first Atlantic recording
session Charles allegedly wanted to stick to his Brown-style crooning,
but the label soon helped him change his mind. Tired of using pick-up
musicians, he was now successful enough to form his own band. His first
Atlantic hit was ‘It Should’ve Been Me’, a ghetto comedy which owed
something to Louis Jordan and was the sort of thing that might have
influenced Leiber and Stoller’s work with the Coasters. In later hits
he became completely himself, bringing the passion of religion to the
aches and pains of the secular world, and even using the melodies of
gospel music: ‘Talkin’ ’Bout Jesus’ became ‘Talkin’ ’Bout You’; Clara
Ward’s ‘This Little Light of Mine’ became ‘This Little Girl of Mine’;
‘How Jesus Died’ became ‘Lonely Avenue’; and ‘I’ve Got a Savior’ became
‘I Got a Woman’, his first number one in the black chart, which shortly
after was covered by Elvis Presley, who brought rockabilly urgency to
it. Charles added a preaching, commentating female trio to his act,
the Raelettes (sometimes spelled Raylettes), and there was even a touch
of feminism: black women are not famous for taking a lot of nonsense,
and the Raelettes carried ‘What Kind of Man are You?’ by themselves.
Later, on Percy Mayfield’s ‘Hit the Road, Jack’, Charles adds a man’s
patronizing puzzlement to the Raelettes’ lead: ‘Well, I guess if you
say so / I’ll have to pack my bags and go ... You can’t mean it!’
Religious blacks were scandalized
when one of their stars changed to secular music. Popular as Sam Cooke
had been with the Soul Stirrers, he was booed when he turned up at a
gospel meeting after having pop hits. Of Ray Charles, Big Bill Broonzy
said, ‘He’s mixing the blues with the spirituals. I know that’s wrong
... He should be singing in a church.’ The relationship between the
blues and the church was already well known to aficionados, and the
gospel recordings of Blind Willie Johnson (1927-30) and Rev. Gary Davis
(from 1935) were highly prized. Black gospel music, though a thriving
market, was not widely known in the white community; nevertheless, such
fine singers as Claude Jeter (with the Swan Silvertones) and Archie
Brownlee (with the Five Blind Boys) had a profound indirect influence
on popular music.
Continued........
