In the wake of the Black migration to northern cities during and after World Wars I and II, the blues morphed into rhythm and blues, an urban evolution stirring the blues together with elements of gospel, jazz, country and western, and big band jazz. The name came about because Jerry Wexler, a reporter for Billboard Magazine, was tired of segregationist marketing terms like “race music”[1] and “sepia series.”[i]
[1] “Race records” had originally referred to the
pre-1920 positive use of the term “Negro race”
in discussions of Blacks’ rising status.
The demise of the big bands in the forties produced, alongside bebop, a pared down, charged up modernization of swing called jump blues (Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Count Basie’s smaller bands, etc.), which intersected with revved up Chicago-style urban blues (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Guitar Slim, Big Mama Thornton, T-Bone Walker, et al), giving birth to rhythm and blues and presaging rock and roll.
Of course I would never want to inject politics into a discussion of culture…but, if there were any two events that caused rock and roll, they were both World Wars. The glut of war industry jobs in Chicago—along with the collapse of the European cotton market in World War I—was largely responsible for the exodus of five million African-Americans out of the South. The largest number went from Mississippi to the south side of Chicago, where they created the new blues that would become the Big Beat.
And not to inject technology into a discussion of taste, but let us return briefly to the persistent question of the juke box. This little wonder surfaced in the thirties; within seven years there were 100,000 in operation. It became the best source of folk music, White and Black—much more reliable and democratic in those days than the radio. In the early days, when juke boxes were musically segregated according to neighborhood, one might search out tunes from across the tracks at the border: Decca Records’ founders had a shop at the edge of the African American community in Chicago, and White folks plunked down many a nickel there.[2]
[2] The famous Rock-Ola box, by the way,
was not named after Rock. It was named after
the company’s founder, David Rockola.
And what were those records made of? My grandfather used to sell shellac, a wood finish made from bug secretions in Asia, for a living. At the time, it was also a crucial ingredient in musical discs. With World War II came a shellac shortage, and the record companies scaled back on their Country and blues discs. This created a big vacuum for the record-buying public, and 400 independent companies eventually sprang up to fill it: Savoy in ’42, Apollo in ’43, King in ’44, Specialty in ’46, Atlantic and Chess in ’47, and on and on. This boom of independent production and distribution helped boost the new urban musics to success—after the war. By then, grandpa was out of business.
While we’re talking tech, let’s pause for a quick look at radio and related boxes. Radio had been the national instantaneous medium until the late forties, when television eclipsed it, as far as the big money and exposure went. One result was an explosion of local radio stations, with local programs and local advertisers, thanks to lowered prices. Because African Americans were earning more than before, there was a market for Black advertisers on Black programs. The most famous example was King Biscuit Time, a 15-minute live blues show from Helena, Arkansas featuring Sonny Boy Williamson, which started in 1941.
Another result was that Whites started to hear Black music. This process got a push from the 1941 national boycott of radio by composers, organized into ASCAP as mentioned earlier. Their feud over royalties resulted in the formation of a new group, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), which collected the “folk” folks, the semi- and non-professionals, from outside the Tin Pan beltway. This gave a big push to White and Black folk-type and popular musicians, and it was the first time recorded Black music had really been aired on the waves. Black music stations were critical not only for the formation of Black urban culture, but also for its spread to White youth—20% of Atlanta’s WERD listeners, in the early days at least, were White.[ii] And over in Memphis, one E. Presley listened to WDIA, the first station in the nation with an all-African American music format.
All this tech change led to changes in the charts. Louis Jordan, who had played with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and Ma Rainey and sung with Chick Webb’s big band, topped the charts in 1946 with “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” and stayed on top of both Black and White charts for ten years. He incorporated White country music influences and produced a combination that, like Chuck Berry’s, was appealing to White as well as Black youth. His music was cousin to rockabilly and also became known as one of the several birth-points of rock and roll. Milt Gabler, who produced both the Louis Jordan and Bill Haley versions of “Rock Around the Clock,” named Jordan as his choice for father of rock and roll.[iii]But Jordan was bitter about his offspring:
I’ve had white musicians hang around me twenty-four hours if I would let ‘em, hang around until they learned something from me. And then I couldn’t go to hear them play![iv]
Sam Phillips declared the first Rock and Roll record to be 1951’s “Rocket ‘88,” sung by Jackie Brentson in 18 year-old Ike Turner’s band, the Delta Cats (and recorded in Phillips’ studio). Bill Haley’s cover of that tune led to his contract with Decca, where he bounded into position as the “inventor” of rock and roll.
Of course, the differences between established and newer music genres are partly a matter of perception, both at the time and in hindsight, resulting partly from the mode of packaging for sale. Thus rock ‘n’ roll is not any more entirely new than jump blues as a stripped down big-band variant was. Speaking of which, let’s digress briefly back to 1937, when Ella Fitzgerald sang a song about swing, but using some now-startling lingo:
It came to town, a new kind of rhythm
Spread around, sort of set you sizzlin’
Now I’m all through with symphony
Oh, rock it for me….
It’s true that once upon a time, the opera was the thing
But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme,
So won’t you satisfy my soul with that rock and roll![v]
And so, back to R&R: once again, an innovation from Black musicians became the mainstream of American youth music.[vi] In New Orleans, Professor Longhair mixed mambo, rumba, and calypso as only a port city pianist could do, and the effects slithered through rhythm and blues and its later variations. From Macon, Georgia came Little Richard, whose combination of boogie woogie with jump blues makes him another contender for the title of first rock and roller. So too Joe Turner, who had been playing similar music in Kansas City since the thirties. Likewise Wynonie Harris, who cut “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in 1948. He had played in Lucky Millinder’s band, which segued from the big band era to jump blues and then R&B. They featured Dizzy Gillespie, and later Ruth Brown. In 1938 they recorded as the backup for a rare female electric guitarist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe,[3] who came from and remained in the gospel world, though she was oft-expelled for her profaning of it with, let’s face it, rock and roll. She influenced Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
[3] Inducted, belatedly, into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. She should have been first.
♬substitution: Listen to small groups from the swing era, then to jump blues. Not so much difference. Especially the blues-heavy Kansas City sound from Basie et al—it links the old southern rural blues to the fifties big beat.
The developing scene in Los Angeles was especially diverse. In 1948, the bilingual “Pachuco Boogie” featuring Chicano street slang, scat, and blues sold two million records. And in 1956, bandleader/producer Johnny Otis recorded L’il Julian Herrera, who turned out to be Ron Gregory on the lam from his probation officer, or as George Lipsitz summed it up: “The first L.A. Chicano rock and roll star turned out to be a Hungarian Jew, produced and promoted by a Greek who thought of himself as Black!”[vii] Wholly multicultural, Batman.[4] Then came Ritchie Valens (Valenzuela), who put La Bamba on the charts with the help of gospel, R&B and jazz backing musicians. I never knew that the flip side, “Donna,” my favorite record when I was eight, was about a girl whose dad told her to stop going out with “that Mexican.”[viii]
[4] “Black by persuasion,” Otis called himself, much as L’il Julian was Chicano by affiliation.
But L.A. night spots hosting R&B shows that drew mixed audiences were shut down by the city, and various government and private forces combined to thwart the live venues, radio stations and small record companies. The music industry controlled the distribution of the music, and had the power to decide what to disseminate, guarding the nation from the reckless anarchy of cultural diversity.
And the new sound? Some called it jungle music, as they had called jazz before. Some White kids loved it; some White parents didn’t. By the early fifties some non‑African Americans were starting to play the new sound. But when White musicians played R&B it was called, and sold as, rock and roll. Compared to what Louis Jordan and Joe Turner played, it ranged from a bit lighter to a lot lighter. Black artists were not particularly marketable in the suburbs—correction: record companies didn’t want to market them. The assumption was that you couldn’t, therefore you didn’t. But radio broke this down: in the fifties I listened to Fats Domino and Lloyd Price on the same station that played Pat Boone and the Purple People-Eater. They really had no choice but to play at least some Black records, if they wanted to keep their audience from transferring its attention to Black radio.
Middle class White kids of the suburbs were a breed apart from southern or even urban Whites, who had at least some contact with Black folks and industrial working class life. We were the first generation to be cut off so completely from our history, our roots, and the histories and roots of our less privileged fellows. We had no clue. We didn’t know that our very neighborhoods were created by discriminatory lending practices and linked to downtown jobs by new subsidized freeways built through (and destroying) Black neighborhoods. This was White society’s response to the influx of Blacks to the northern cities.
So even today, when we see photos of impoverished lowland folk in the South fleeing hurricanes, some of us feel it must be in some foreign country. We were so isolated from these cultures that when we received their music, in any of its many mutated forms, there was no way for us to feel the meanings it had collected over the generations. No wonder we treated it as a rootless commodity and assumed that whatever White band was playing it that week was the one that invented it. When I listen today to the music of my teen years, I marvel at how little I knew about what I was hearing and—as a musician—replicating.[ix]
And no wonder we grabbed on for dear life. It was as if our parents had taken us away from the playground and put us far away in a place where there was no playground, and not even a bus to get on to go back to the candy store. That is in fact what happened. And when we got to a certain age and started looking to define ourselves as different from our parents through own youthful culture, small wonder we grasped for what had been taken away. We wanted it, although often we simply knew not what we heard—or at least, where it came from.
Meanwhile, in the uneasily multi-racial working class schools, the racial divide was maintained by counterinsurgency-minded apparatchiks. In a Muncie, Indiana school rec room the jukebox blared White cover versions of Black artists’ tunes, while White kids danced and Black students cooled their heels. The Coasters, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry were banned by the principal, on principle: “too suggestive.”[x]
How much has changed in the decades and generations since? Lots, but…what remains of that ignorance? What do we not know now, and what did I not know then? Well, take rock and roll. There are two competing definitions of the original rock and roll: one, that it was rhythm and blues under another name; two, that it was a new merger of Country with rhythm and blues. Jimmy Meyers, co-writer of “Rock Around the Clock,” took the latter position, claiming that “rhythm and blues is playing a 4/4 beat and rock and roll is an “ump chuck” beat, [emphasizing the] 2nd and 4th beat.”[xi]Meyers said this backbeat emphasis came from Country music. Lionel Hampton disagreed:
I was brought up in the Holiness Church, the Sanctified Church, [where] they always used that 2-4 beat. I brought it into jazz that way, and it left my jazz and went into rock and roll. And that’s the miracle of the beat today…It came from the black roots.”[xii]
Music professor Eddie Meadows concurred: “The 2-4 beat is an African concept…All rock musicians basically got the two-four beat from blues.”
Milt Gabler, having produced recordings of the same songs in Black and White versions, felt the main difference was in vocal quality. That would be, for example, the difference between Mick Jagger and Muddy Waters or, for a more extreme example, between Little Richard’s and Pat Boone’s versions of “Long Tall Sally.” Said Pat Boone, “It was rhythm and blues I was singing.”[xiii] Sort of. Muddy praised White guitar players and added, “but they cannot vocal like the black man.”[xiv] Why is that? Imagine taking a liking to Congolese music, and journeying to the Congo to join up with the native singers. “If you didn’t grow up in that culture,” wrote Robert Palmer, “your singing is going to sound like what it is: an imitation.”[xv] And not just an imitation of someone’s singing style. “Blues vocal style,” as Larry Sandberg and Dick Weissman point out, “is inextricably derived from Black speech, phrasing, and stress and intonation patterns.”[xvi]When you try to duplicate someone’s life experience—their culture—it’s worse than theft, it’s impersonation. Carbon copying can only lead to blackfacing. Also, it doesn’t work.[5]
[5] What does work? As folks would later say: Do You.
Another difference was instrumentation: The big bands had downsized to a few horns, then to a single sax. Early rock records have that sax, but many of the rockabilly tunes use the guitar instead.
♬substitution: Listen to one of each, guitar and sax, substituting the two instruments for each other in your innermost ear. Listen to an early rock and roll song with acoustic bass; the same song becomes “rock” with electric bass.
Further support for the “another name” argument is found in Billboard Magazine, which in 1956 referred to rock and roll as “a popularized form of r&b.”[xvii] This, after renaming “Race music” to “R&B” (1949-58), after switching to Race music (1945-49) from “Harlem Hit Parade” (1942-45). And Merle Travis called fifties rock and roll “not much more than the black man’s twelve-bar blues sung at a highly spirited pace, actually a cousin to boogie-woogie and the spiritual.”[xviii] Stephen Calt calls the very idea of rock and roll part of a shell game, one euphemism piled on top of another: race music becomes R&B becomes R&R, all for reasons of marketing, colored by race.[xix]
But rock, like jazz, is more a way of playing music than it is a form. This gets more true all the time; it’s attitude, not chord structure; manner, not matter, that makes the difference. Ditto Country. Just as Eubie Blake showed that anything could be ragged, likewise anything can be rocked, or countrified, or blues’d, or bluegrassed, etc. etc. Large numbers of early rock songs were recycled Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes, from “I Only Have Eyes For You” and ”Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “My Blue Heaven,” or old folk and blues tunes like “Rock Island Line” and “Stagger Lee.”[xx]
This leads to a third view of rock, combining the first two and more: musical genres are always evolving, sometimes slowly, sometimes radio-fast or like internet lightning. There weren’t only two musics merging, but all kinds of influences. Vocal groups that sprang from old barbershop traditions as well as the Black church, White church, boogie woogie piano, honky-tonk, rockabilly—a generally stepped up, harder driving mutation of Country traditions. All these were evolving through crossover, cross-pollination, technology-driven amping up, and the general ramping up of life in the city. The urbanization and industrialization of life made everything, including music, faster and louder.[xxi]
Pop music radio DJ Alan Freed had played both Black and White records on his Cleveland radio show as early as 1951,[xxii] and organized package concerts across the color line. He refused to play cover versions, preferring to pull the covers back. His “Rock and Roll Dance Party” was pulled off CBS TV when a camera caught Black singing star Frankie Lymon dancing with a White girl.
It was Freed who named rock and roll (this time): he was playing R&B for White teenagers, but couldn’t call it by its name, so he just pulled a common phrase out of the blues lyric storehouse.[6] We might say more accurately that he’s the one who made the name stick, kind of like Columbus made “discovery” stick. The rock and roll handle was common at the time, and had been for a while; Langston Hughes cited a 1920s blues: “Rock me all night long, Daddy, with a steady roll,”[xxiii] and the Boswell Sisters recorded a song called “Rock and Roll” in 1934.[xxiv] The phrase goes back much further, though, as documented by Stan Hugill, writing about Black influence on sea chanteys of the 1800s:
The phrase “rock ‘n’ roll”…was a very common cry among shantymen—a shout of encouragement when hauling or heaving—and of course it emanated, just as the name for “rock ‘n’ roll” dancing did, from the American Negro.[xxv]
[6] Freed credited the idea to his mentor, record store owner Leo Mintz.
So Freed didn’t so much name the music as simply choose an obvious bit of slang that already had many uses under its belt. When the music came under attack, Freed defended it:
To me, this campaign against Rock and Roll smells of discrimination of the worst kind against the great and accomplished Negro songwriters, musicians, and singers who are responsible for this outstanding contribution to American music.[xxvi]
Another important development leading to rock and roll was doo-wop, that often-trivialized object of nostalgia that reigned on top 40 radio in the fifties. It drew its name from syllables commonly used by the vocal groups on the street.[7] Coming out of Black vocal improvising traditions (remember Barbershop?) and forties groups like the Ink Spots, the nonsense-syllable choristers blanketed the air waves starting in 1948: the Orioles, the Dominoes, the Coasters. Doo-wop, like Motown after it, was just smooth enough to cross the color line; Alan Freed unleashed it on his White audience. The formula had been found: gospel-derived harmonizing with just enough passion strained out to bring it in under the radar of White radio deejays, if not Indiana school principals. So I grew up on Black gospel, Trojan-horsed through top 40 radio? Who knew!
[7] These groups were also very popular among Italian-American kids.
The various streams leading to rock and roll coexisted and coalesced, as had ragtime and blues before, as would rock and reggae after, to name only two examples. Mergers and mutations are always happening. They’re happening as you read this. One 1952 concert put together by Alan Freed in Cleveland featured doo-woppers the Orioles and the Dominoes, R&B from Charles Brown, and jump bands led by Tiny Grimes and Jimmy Forrest.[xxvii] Everything was there, save rockabilly, which was just about ready to come out of the oven.
From Jimmie Rodgers to Chet Atkins to Western Swing to Bill Monroe, Country music has never been any more pure White than blues was pure Black. Less so, in fact. In form, they’re both fairly European-derived. But in feel, the blues is an African, micro-tonal moan, and Country music, White as it’s alleged to be, has never been able to shake the swing, the syncopation it got from Black musicians. You can take Country out of the country, but you can’t take the swing out of it. It’s long too late.
In the late forties, with Western swinging, jump blues jumping and country blues going Rhythm &, a series of Country “boogie” tunes came out, including “Freight Train Boogie,” “Oakie Boogie,” and “Guitar Boogie.” Hank Williams’ honky-tonk music, so despised at the Opry, thrived on the back-beat circuit. His important innovations included the mid-note changes in tone discussed in the jazz section and a mix of Country with Dixieland and Cajun that revved up Country for the new era. His fiddlers were closer to Western than Country. It was hopped up, and it was hybrid—something we often forget, as we have too often been raised on simple Black and White views. And then…
Then came rockabilly: Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, even Chuck Berry (bringing a sort of guitaristic boogie-woogie), and finally Elvis Presley.[8] It was southern, working class, White, and Black. The slow tunes were more Country, the fast ones more R&B. They were close cousins anyway, as Ray Charles pointed out: “They’d make them steel guitars cry and whine, and it really attracted me.”[xxviii] Lots of Black artists were influenced by White country music, including Lowell Fulson, who learned from one of Jimmie Rodgers’ back-up boys. And Brother Ray himself, having grown up on Country music along with gospel, issued two records of Country tunes.
[8] Donald Clarke says “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…”
Whether Whites were attracted or frightened by Black music, somewhere between Elvis and Pat Boone they found a way to come to terms with the new sound. Sam Phillips, Alabama-born and raised, was looking for these terms. He founded Sun Records in Memphis to make recording technology available locally to the many Black and White musicians in the area. (Non-southerners might want to check a map to see how close Memphis is to the blues-drenched delta of Northern Mississippi.) He recorded B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and James Cotton, along with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, and Roy Orbison. With an eye on the evolution of Black city music, he mused immortally, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”[9] In a more philosophical mood he elaborated:
I hate imitations. But having grown up in close proximity to the black man, I thoroughly believed that a white man, a Southern white man, could approximate the same sound and feeling. There was still a lot of hatred between the races in the South, but music was the one area where black and white were closer than people realized. The young whites loved the black music they got to hear. So I felt that if only I could find a white artist who could put the same feel, the same touch and spontaneity into his songs, who could find this total abandon of the black artists in himself, then I would have the opportunity, the means by which to give others the sound I had heard.[xxix]
[9] According to his secretary, Marion Keisker, cited in Clarke, 384, and in these exact words elsewhere. However, also cited in many variations, e.g. “I always said if I could find a white person that could sing with the feel, the essence, and the naturalness that a black person could convey,
that I could make a billion dollars…Elvis Presley fit that mold.”
The dollar chase is well understood to be the prime motivator for the industry in purveying White imitators of Black culture. But for Sam, there was a possibly more controversial motivating factor: the dearth of innovation at that time in what were understood to be White music genres: “It seemed to me that Negroes were the only ones that had any freshness left in their music.”[xxx] Greil Marcus felt that the problem with “White country music” was that
…it so perfectly expressed the acceptance and fatalism of its audience of poor and striving whites, blending in with their way of life and endlessly reinforcing it, that the music brought all it had to say to the surface, told no secrets, and had no use for novelty. It was conservative in an almost tragic sense, because it carried no hope of change…it was a way of holding on to the values that were jeopardized by a changing postwar America. [xxxi]
Sam found Elvis.[10] Here was a poor Mississippi-born White kid who grew up on gospel music in the Assemblies of God Church in Tupelo, Mississippi, and then while living in a housing project near Beale Street in Memphis.[11] He also encountered blues players in Tupelo, and again in Memphis, and listened to Country music on the radio.
[10] More precisely, Elvis found Sam, and secretary Marion Keisker badgered Sam to pay attention.
[11] This church was one of many denominations of the Pentecostal movement,
which was known for mixed Black and White congregations,
something unheard of in other churches in the early twentieth century.
The music of the church reflected this mix.
See for example the Gaither Hour TV gospel music show.
Elvis’ music was exactly what Phillips was after:
It wasn’t a matter of taking a piece of material and bleaching it white and removing all nutrition the way Pat Boone did.[xxxii]
Elvis studied the style of Calvin Newborn, a guitarist on Beale Street, who later said of him:
His success actually broke the ice for civil rights…the fact that he sent the black idiom all over the world with his music.[xxxiii]
In fact, people listening to Elvis’ first record thought he was Black (remember Peggy Lee and the Allen Brothers), so a Memphis disc jockey gave out the name of his high school, a sure-fire racial clarification. This “Not to Worry” harkens back to an earlier minstrelsy, when audiences watched blackfaced White imitators rather than Blacks playing some version of themselves. Publishers arranged for minstrel sheet music covers to show the performers both in and out of costume, so consumers would know they were getting the genuine imitation.[xxxiv]
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MEMPHIS
The musical meeting ground on the Mississippi: Into the late forties there was a Thursday night show on Beale Street featuring Black artists—for White audiences, like the Friday show Connee Boswell went to in New Orleans and the Cotton Club in New York City. Whites also came to Beale for the all-Black Jubilee parade. Meanwhile, Blacks couldn’t go to the zoo or the fair. They eventually got a Black day at the fair, to match White night on Beale. The “Black and White Department Store” was integrated: it had both Black and White lunch counters.[xxxv]
______________________________________
But as it happens, Elvis had first been played on a program geared to Black listeners, and his encore performance of Arthur Crudup’s 1946 hit “That’s All Right, Mama”—note for note, just for fun during a recording session break—set the phones and cash registers ringing—among Blacks, not Whites.[xxxvi] Sam Phillips released five singles by Elvis before selling him to RCA, and each one had an R&B song on one side and Country-billy one on the other.
Of course, Elvis’ ancestors were not enslaved, didn’t suffer lynchings, and probably didn’t work and sing on penitentiary chain gangs. But he came from an impoverished southern family and did live in a tenement in the Black ghetto of Memphis for a time. In fact, like Jerry Lee Lewis, he grew up in the Pentecostal Church; he enjoyed the Black “Spirit of Memphis Quartet” as well as Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Texas Swing, and practiced guitar to WDIA, Memphis, the nation’s first Black radio station, which began airing R&B in 1948.[xxxvii] As Sam Phillips pointed out, it is the southern White who is most likely to be able to relate to the Black odyssey.[12] Jerry Lee Lewis heard Black gospel in Louisiana, picking up more of the music than the message. Mississippian Conway Twitty grew up on blues and the Grand Ole Opry. Key rockabilly guitar player Carl Perkins grew up on a plantation:
The coloured people would sing, and I’d join in, just a little kid, and that was coloured rhythm and blues, got named rock’n’roll, got named that in 1956, but the same music was there years before, and it was my music.[xxxviii]
[12] Or, alternatively, the least likely.
His first guitar influence was an African American farmer named John Westbrook, who taught him “a lot of string pushing and choking” that he later poured into his renditions of country tunes.[xxxix]
Finally, an Alabama DJ named Sam and a Mississippi truck driver named Elvis, both raised around Blacks, joined the formula to the face, the voice, and the hips—the hips that brought on the screams and were banned from TV screens. In the days of black and white TV, some hips were just too loose. But we might note here, in the “Things are Not What They Seem” category, that Elvis’ hip moves, like his lip grooves, were often lifted whole cloth from elsewhere. The famous vocal quirks on his early records can be found in the demo records by African American writer/singer Otis Blackwell, whence came “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and other hits.[13] Elvis’ second single, a cover of Wynonie Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” opens a window on the Elvis style. Nick Tosches reports:
The pelvic jab-and-parry, the petulant curlings of his lip, the evangelical wavings of his arms and hands—these were not the spontaneities of Elvis, but a style deftly learned from watching Wynonie Harris perform in Memphis in the early 1950s.[14]
[13] Tosches 1996, 55. Blackwell also wrote “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis.
[14] Tosches 1999, 45. “Good Rockin’” was written by Roy Brown
and first recorded by him, in 1947. Elvis once tried to sneak onto
the stage at a Brown gig (op. cit., 77). Brown was crushed
by the industry for demanding his royalties
– an unseemly thing to do in those days.
In fact, said Harris’ producer, “When you saw Elvis, you were seeing a mild version of Wynonie.”[xl] Another mild thing about Elvis was his backup singers, the Jordanaires; actually a White gospel quartet, they backed up loads of pop and country acts. Later, in Vegas, when it had become the norm, Elvis used Black backup singers as well as the White gospel singers The Stamps, seen in this video.
The record producers played no small part in the filtering of wild and mild, as critic Robert Palmer points out in his film Bluesland. They decided who got to record and, to some extent, what they would sound like. So the Chess brothers’ experience in producing Black musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf was brought into play and helped define the sound of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. And Sam Phillips had been recording Delta blues artists since 1950—a wealth of experience that in turn influenced the Elvis sound.[xli]
Rock and roll boomed its way into the northern suburbs, where the guitar pickers played their axes without ever having chopped with one. They lacked a background in work songs; rock persists as an expression of youth angst, but makes a mockery of its blues origins, since most Whites don’t know much about Black history.
Just as bandleader Paul Whiteman had put a White face on jazz for White audiences, so too rock and roll was transformed into the relatively white pill that suburbia could swallow. The White artists and their handlers didn’t just adopt the style, they “adopted” the songs, watering them down enough to be palatable (saleable) but retaining just enough of the risqué to tantalize. This practice was facilitated by a late 1940s court decision that musical arrangements could not be copyrighted, opening the way to the lifting of entire styles of singing, instrumentation, and riffs, enabling the production of virtual carbon copy records.
As with Jump Jim Crow, so with rock and roll.[15] With a White singer, White sales were assured (though in this case the White Sale is not advertised as such). The very first R&B song to make the top 10 in the pop charts, 1954’s “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, was immediately covered by the Crew Cuts and went to Number One. Patti Page buried Ruth Brown’s “Oh What A Dream,” Bobby Darin dittoed Louis Armstrong (“Mack the Knife”); Ricky Nelson counterfeited Fats Domino (“I’m Walkin”); Georgia Gibbs transformed Etta James’ “Roll With Me Henry” to “Dance With Me Henry” and eclipsed LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle-dee.” For the latter, the record company brought in all the musicians on the original version; the original engineer declined the honor. The inimitable Pat Boone denatured Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”
[15] And jazz, barbershop, western swing…
Elvis copied Big Mama Thornton’s version of Leiber and Stoller’s (“Hound Dog”). He likewise borrowed from Little Richard (“Tutti Frutti”), Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris (“Good Rockin’ Tonight”), Kokomo Arnold (“Milkcow Blues Boogie”), Lloyd Price (“Lawdy Miss Clawdy”), Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) Arthur Gunter (“Baby Let’s Play House”), Smiley Lewis (“One Night”), Little Junior Parker (“Mystery Train”), and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (“That’s All Right, Mama,” “So Glad You’re Mine,” “My Baby Left Me”). For his contribution to history, Crudup was paid a grand total of zero. Mama Thornton received $500 for her efforts on “Hound Dog.”[xlii]Songwriter Otis Blackwell sold “Don’t Be Cruel” for $25.[xliii].
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WHITE WRITERS, BLACK SINGERS
“Hound Dog” was performed by a black singer, then lifted by Elvis. The song’s authors were two Jewish guys, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote hits by the dozen for Black groups like the Coasters, and even one for Peggy Lee (“Is That All There Is?”). They also wrote for the “girl groups,” like New Orleans’ Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”), and the Shangri-las, two sets of sisters from Queens (“Leader of the Pack”). After Elvis hit it big with their Hound Dog, they wrote many more tunes for him. Leiber and Stoller were the rock and roll reincarnation of Harold Arlen, who wrote for the Cotton Club. In fact Stoller studied piano with James P. Johnson in Harlem, and later played with the Blas Vasquez band in L.A., doing Chicano versions of Black and White forms of popular music.[16]
[16] Stoller: “By the fall of 1950, when both Mike And I were in City College,
we had black girlfriends and were into a black lifestyle.”
(Lipsitz 1990, 140) A daring lifestyle indeed.
Another outstanding pair of White musicians working hip-deep in Black styles were the Righteous Brothers, who personified “blue-eyed soul.” They recorded Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “You’ve Lost that Loving Feelin” (1964) and blasted up the Black charts.
Barry Mann’s lyric, “Only in America, land of opportunity, do they save the seat in the back of the bus just for me,” was rewritten, at the behest of Atlantic Records, to “only in America can anybody become President.” The Drifters recorded it, but R&B DJs wouldn’t play it. It was a hit for Jay and the Americans. Go figure. James Brown wasn’t there yet, so you had to be White to be proud.[xliv]
Producer Phil Spector created the sound of most of the girl groups. He wrote “Spanish Harlem” with Leiber.
Gerry Goffin and Carole King liked the dance their 17 year-old babysitter Eva Boyd did to their piano playing. They authored “The Loco-Motion,” which became a hit for the girl who became Little Eva. They also composed “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for the Shirelles—the first girl group. After them, the Black girl groups were created by the business, especially by Spector.
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Bill Haley’s promotion people had a special hand in obscuring rock and roll’s origins. Haley covered Louis Jordan (“Rock Around the Clock”), Little Richard (“Rip It Up”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle and Roll”); he also made a movie called “Rock Around the Clock,” in which Haley and his Comets are portrayed as the originators of a new type of music. Hollywood’s distribution power tilted the playing field; R&B slid out of sight as R&R was given a world-wide leg up.[xlv]
This leg-up cover-up was the main dynamic of the fifties R&B/R&R scene, but there were other angles as well. For one, there were Black artists covering records by Whites: in 1949 Bull Moose Jackson copied “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” from Country singer Wayne Raney; Wynonie Harris got his 1951 “Bloodshot Eyes” from western swing singer Hank Penny; The Orioles “Crying in the Chapel” was lifted from Darrell Glenn’s version.[xlvi] For two, there were White pop artists covering White Country tunes, often leaving the Country singer as deep in the dust as they left the Black artists. Elvis covered Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” a case of big rockabilly swamping small same. For three, sometimes the release of a new version elevated the original in the charts, giving the originator a boost or even a career, as with Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame.” And then there was all of the above, and more: “Crying in the Chapel,” first recorded by White singer Darrell Glenn in 1953, was a hit for the Orioles the same year, and was covered by Eddie Arnold, Ella Fitzgerald, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis Presley, and about 50 others.[xlvii]
All of this must be acknowledged and understood in order to grasp the whole messy enchilada. Complexities abound throughout this story—remember minstrelsy—but the overriding issue is who gets to ride up front and who gets ridden over. White cover artists rode to fame, recording companies got rich, and Black innovators ate their dust. When R&B singer Charles Brown tried to get his record royalties, he was told to chill out or they would just get someone who sounded like him.[xlviii] Decades later, record exec Dan Charnas would sum it up:
To me, what makes something appropriative is what gives White supremacy its fangs. The gatekeepers of the radio stations and record companies who have less investment in Black people and culture are more likely to elevate an Iggy Azalea over an Azealia Banks.[xlix]
Part of the problem with being an innovator is that you’re ahead of your time. That can mean you don’t get to reap the rewards of your contribution, because it’s too early for most folks to appreciate you. Some of those resistant folks might be the gatekeepers in the industry, who can’t figure out how to market something that combines strands of adjacent cultures, but which a few years later will be all the rage. For some innovators, the result will be a lack of recognition. For others, there could be recognition in their community but not beyond it—no White audience, for instance. So when we think of Elvis or the Beatles as the beginning of something new, we might want to pause and rethink them as the culmination of a process, the ones lucky enough to arrive when the industry people had already been educated enough to know how to market them.
In the sixties, covering of R&B tunes was continued apace by the British bands: The Animals did Ray Charles; the Stones did Marvin Gaye and Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters[17] and Robert Johnson, and studied Ike and Tina Turner and Little Richard. These groups, however, were open about their influences. Mick Jagger wondered “what’s the point in listening to us doing “I’m a King Bee” when you can listen to Slim Harpo doing it.”[l] Of course the point was that the Stones got hyped. Eric Clapton never denied the source of his music, but meanwhile, as Chapple and Garofalo point out, “the bluesmen whose licks he copied are starving to death.”[li]
[17] Both the Rolling Stones and Rolling Stone Magazine
were named after Muddy’s 1954 song of that name.
The Beatles, who had begun as a skiffle band (see section on Lonnie Donegan, below), listened to Chuck Berry and tried to write like him. They covered Little Richard, the Shirelles and the Isley Brothers, and toured with Little Richard before their big break. John Lennon explained,
The only White I ever listened to was Elvis Presley on his early music records and he was doing Black music. I don’t blame him for wanting to be part of that music. I wanted to be that. I copied all those people (Black singers) and the other Beatles did, and so did others (Whites) until we developed a style of our own. Black music started this whole change of style, of attitude…rock and roll is Black. I appreciate it, and I’ll never stop acknowledging it.[lii]
Little Richard didn’t blame Elvis either—at least, not out loud: “He was an integrator. Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.”[liii]
Mitch Miller was not so sanguine about the British invasion, though, saying “I’m sick and tired of British-accented youths ripping off Black American artists and, because they’re white, being accepted by the American audience.”[liv]
These sentiments of woke White entertainers appeared in a popular Black magazine, where unfortunately they escaped notice by White fans. But at least a few earlier White R&B fans knew the score. Ken Goodman laid it out:
We learned from the black people. They taught us how to dance. They taught us what rhythm was. They let their hair down when they danced. They touched. They’d bump their butts together. They’d do things that we’d never seen before.[lv]
In other words,
Boy, you ain’t lived unless you been black on Saturday night.[lvi]
Similar thoughts were expressed by an African American observer of the music scene:
It is quite amazing to me to hear the joyful rhythms, which I found time to enjoy as a youth here in Atlanta years ago, coming back across the Atlantic with an English accent, or to see the Senator Javits and the Senators Kennedy lost in the dances which we created.[lvii]
That from Martin Luther King. He also noted that
School integration is much easier now that they [pupils] share a common music, a common language, and enjoy the same dances.[lviii]
Confirming the worst fears of Henry Ford, King lauded the spread of Black music and dance as “a cultural conquest that surpasses even [that of] Alexander the Great and culture of classical Greece.”[lix]
Elvis opened the door, and in flew the influences: Bob Dylan named Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Leadbelly as foundations; Paul McCartney mentioned Fred Astaire and Little Richard and said “I’d much rather have an American colored group doing one of our songs than us. Cause they’d do it better.”[lx] (Think of “She Loves You,” one of their first records, with the falsetto “ooo” refrain. McCartney dedicated practice time to copying that Little Richard riff.) Mick Jagger said of the Stones, “We started out simply to be a good R&B band.” Well, a good R&B band that sells. From Jolson to Bolton, Black music seemed to sell better to White folks when White folks made it: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Sting. Much as I like him.
♬SUBSTITUTION: Listen to White singers when they use back-up singers, soul style (i.e., gospel).[18] Close your eyes, forget who you’re listening to, and replace the lead singer, in your mind’s ear, with the Black vocalist of your choice. Presto: same music, but credit redistributed.
[18] OK I confess, I’ve done it too.
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LONNIE DONEGAN
The immediate predecessor to rock and roll in British popular music was skiffle, sometimes called jug band music. It was a survival and update of plantation corn-husking music, via minstrel shows and ragtime[lxi]—improvised music on improvised instruments like jugs, washboards and spoons.
Skiffle started in the American South: enslaved Africans had played the washboard, a replacement for the African jawbone, and other “found instruments” that imitated what they had lost. The style was widespread in the 1920s and was transported to Chicago, where it was played at parties held to raise enough money to pay the rent. Skiffle was blues, jazz, Country tunes, anything anybody knew or sort of knew, all thrown in together. The musicians often weren’t even musicians.
The man who brought skiffle to Britain was Lonnie Donegan. “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight” was his American hit; he had thirty big ones in Britain. He was a one-man compendium of underclasses: an Irishman from Glasgow, Scotland’s gritty working-class city, who moved to the East End of London—Cockney turf—and made African-American rent party music. Born Anthony, later Tony, he re-named himself for bluesman Lonnie Johnson.[lxii]
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Once the roots had been bleached, the marketing could begin. Elvis was packaged by Hank Saperstein, the same guy who sold us Lassie and the Lone Ranger.[19] When Elvis was drafted in 1958 and other top artists died in a plane crash,[20] TV dance show host Dick Clark turned to Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, and Fabian, temporarily derailing the rock and roll rebellion into cute White teen idols with the guts—and Black cultural aspirations—taken out.
[19] This ultimate icon of the West may have been inspired by 19th-century African American marshal Bass Reeves, who worked “lone” and used disguises, detective skills, and horsemanship to capture over 3,000 criminals. https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/sport/lone-ranger-african-american-reeves/
[20] Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. February 3, 1959.
Dick Clark had a dress code on his show, a strictly enforced clean culture: no scruff allowed, no rebellion. Clark and his crew later admitted that most of the dance steps popularized on Bandstand originated with Black youngsters, but were performed on his program by White ones.[lxiii]
Clark took a liking to “The Twist,” recorded in 1958 by an R&B group called Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. He recruited squeaky-clean, smiling, teenaged Black singer Ernest Evans, who was renamed—by Clark’s wife—Chubby Checker (a “twist” on Ernest’s idol, Fats Domino) to clone the song and dance. Checker covered it with precision and is still a household name. Here we have a White industry mogul choosing a user-friendly singer, bleaching within the race. Hank Ballard at last report (1994) was still not too happy about it.[21]
[21] Not to hit the nail again when it’s already in,
but one of the guys who chose Checker for Clark was Bernard Lowe,
who had led the band for Paul Whiteman’s Teen Club TV show.
Clark saw a teenaged Black couple on his show doing a new dance, and the rest was history. The Twist caused parents to recoil in horror; sex and race, though politely packaged, were still a potent brew.
Meanwhile, Black R&B artists had trouble getting recorded and distributed nationally. Black musicians have often been forced overseas to achieve recognition, but in this case overseas came to them. The first national company to record rhythm and blues artists, Atlantic Records, was founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of the Turkish ambassador to the United States. Ertegun, a long-time jazz fan, jump-started the careers of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and dozens more.
Ertegun was supremely dedicated to the music and the musicians. He told a Columbia Records rep he was paying his artists three percent in royalties:
And he said “You’re paying those people royalties? You must be out of your mind.” Of course he didn’t call them “people.” He called them something else.[lxiv]
Atlantic had an African-American arranger named Jesse Stone, who started out playing with the Blues Serenaders in the 1920s. He arranged for Jimmy Lunceford and Earl Hines, then became musical director for the International Sweethearts of Rhythm in their peak period. At Atlantic he arranged “Tweedle Dee” for LaVerne Baker, “Sh-boom” for the Chords (soon covered by the Crew Cuts), and “Chains of Love” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for Joe Turner. He wrote “Money Honey,” the Drifters first hit, and later worked with Elvis and Ray Charles. You could say, as they did of Irving Berlin, that he was American music.
Barbershop researcher Lynn Abbott says that “musical trends and phenomena tend to integrate far more readily than the people who create them.”[lxv] In early rock and roll, even the audiences were integrated. This is partly because the apartheid demographics of the record industry were not quite functioning. The young people coming up in R&B and Country music environments found a new music that defied those categories by blending them, and the races flocked together until the industry got it together to pull them apart again with more efficient demographic marketing. Radio, after it recovered from Alan Freed, played an important role in this re-segregation.
In the South, the core of musicians playing the new music was also in some cases integrated. As R&B incorporated gospel and was re-christened “Soul Music,” Stax Records in Memphis and the FAME studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 150 miles away, produced Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and many more. In an ironic twist, teen buyers were mostly unaware of the White studio musicians and writers on these records—they were in the background for a change.[22] At Stax they included bassist Duck Dunn, guitarist Steve Cropper, Jim Dickinson, and Spooner Oldham, along with Duane Allman, who put licks on discs by Aretha and Wilson Pickett before he formed his own White Southern Blues Country Rock band.
[22] Even the back office was multiculti:
Stax President Jim Stewart was White,
Vice President Al Bell was Black.
Who were these guys? They were southern Whites who grew up hearing, then playing, music that was Black, White, and shades in between. Cropper’s high school band was even called the Royal Spades, since they were after all a White band covering Black hit tunes. Why did all this happen? Jim Dickinson gave some credit to Memphis radio DJ Dewey Phillips:
Dewey would jump from blues, to gospel music, to country, to rock ‘n roll – it all tied together in his weird mind and he could sell it to the audience as if it were all the same thing. So people in Memphis think it is![lxvi]
When the White soul bro’s wrote and played with Black singers, it was soul music with Country in it, not Country with soul. When they played with rock bands like the Allman Brothers, it was some other shade. When Dunn and Cropper joined with Black keyboardist Booker T. Jones and drummer Al Jackson, they became Booker T. and the MGs, the Memphis Group that was the house band for Stax and all its soul output. Cropper co-wrote “In the Midnight Hour” and “634-5789”[23] for Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” and Otis Redding’s “Mr. Pitiful” and “Dock of the Bay.”
[23] As distinct from “Beechwood 4-5789,” a 1962 hit for the Marvelettes.
Remarkably, nobody sued for the five common digits.
Whites and Blacks often play the same sub-genres of music, but the feel of the rhythms, the nuances, and certainly the vocals are just different enough so that most folks don’t notice that it’s more the same than different. I went to a Stones concert in 1995 with a 19 year-old who couldn’t hear the blues in their music. He was growing up slightly unawares.
From Georgia came James Brown and Little Richard, along with Otis Redding. These three are emblematic of the constant Black-White interchange in the South. You can hear a lot more Country in Otis than in James Brown. In a duet with Carla Thomas, Carla hurls an insult: “Otis, you’re country!” To which he responds, “That’s good!” Little Richard, like Chuck Berry, mixed Country influences with R&B. Nobody of either race is closer in style to Little Richard than Jerry Lee Lewis—a great example of Southern commonalities.
Ray Charles was a key player in the infusion of gospel into rhythm and blues. He had a simple device, and not an entirely new one, for this infusion: writing secular lyrics to sacred songs. “This Little Light of Mine” became “This Little Girl of Mine;” “My Jesus Is All the World To Me (“I’ve Got A Savior”) was born again as “I Got A Woman;”[lxvii] “Talkin’ ‘Bout You” replaced Talkin’ ‘Bout Jesus” and “Lonely Avenue” started as “How Jesus Died.”[lxviii]
Another bearer of the gospel to the pop charts was Sam Cooke, reared in a Baptist family and pirated away from his gospel singing group by record executives; he smooth-as-silked his way up the White charts. And then there was Aretha, a Cooke acolyte who took it in another direction.
Berry Gordy was the flip side of Sam Phillips: he found Black singers who could sound just White enough to sell to Whites. More accurately, he made them, and together they made smooth dance pop—no Muddy, no Howlin’. It was a brilliant and finely crafted exercise, built on an understanding and finessing of race and gender in early 1960s America. Early album covers even omitted photos of the singers, so you could think they were White if you wanted to. At Gordy’s Motown Records, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, and Stevie Wonder joined the Vandellas, Four Tops, Marvelettes, Isley Brothers, Jackson Five, Temptations, Miracles and Supremes to change the face of pop music. They reigned supreme in the days just before the British invasion.
The Beatles,[24] Rolling Stones, Who, Animals, Yardbirds, and later groups were all playing variants of rhythm and blues, but young White Americans who had never been permitted to hear the originals just thought it was some new kind of British music.[25] No roots, no routes. By the time we were eventually introduced to the source, it was a decade late and several million dollars short. Case in point: the old blues tune “C.C. Rider,” which Elvis used to open his shows with. Go to your parents’ CD collection, or your grandparents’ LP collection, and pull out The Animals; now go to the library or the internet and get Big Bill Broonzy doing the same tune. Play the Animals first, then Broonzy. You just saved your college tuition.[lxix]
[24] I remember my first Beatle records – they were on Vee-Jay. I didn’t know it was a Black-owned label; they had Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker. But they had no success with the fab lads and so lost interest. They did, however, release their first US album, but didn’t have the capital to promote it. They also released, in the fifties, “This Could Be the Last Time” by the Staples Singers – later adapted by the Stones.
[25] See Roots of Rock and Blues Originals in the discography.
College tuition was out of reach to the children of the originators. The British invasion had two ironically paired and historically repeating results: it knocked Black musicians out of the top rungs of the business, and it made a variant of the Black community’s music into the sound of America and the world.
A stellar participant in the second wave of the invasion was Jimi Hendrix, originally a bluesman from America who burst upon the world as an English rocker—Black to Brit and Back Again, only this time all in one musician. He was yet another African-American who had to go to Europe for recognition; he found yet another musical middle ground that appealed to the White bucks—and their dollars.
As Whites drifted further from the sources of their new pop music, they transformed it into styles that got further from rhythm and blues. Heavy metal, a voice of alienated youth beginning in the seventies and eighties, was louder and harsher than fifties and sixties rock; it abandoned the rhythmic subtleties that derive from African rhythmic practices, retaining mainly the backbeat, and hitting it hard. This was rock with the roll extracted, a new variant that offered a means of self-expression unique to a community, but didn’t communicate so well across the color line. But punk and new wave musicians and fans, reveling in a hard, fast, stripped down style, would soon discover a surprising affinity to the latest Black street music to shake up the scene: Hip-hop.
Meanwhile, other purveyors of what would become “classic rock” were evolving their styles through new tools in the studio, new drugs, and new changes in the sales patterns of the industry. The Steve Miller Blues Band became the Steve Miller Band, the Grateful Dead birthed the era of jam bands, and the Beatles ceased performing and began incorporating styles from many eras, including the future, in their experimental but still commercial recordings. The new experiments, often incorporating old elements, were mostly not something to dance to. These were album cuts by performers who were becoming artistes. Some would say they wanted to do something that was really their own, rather than purvey poor imitations of Black artistry, as several of them have been quoted here as saying they had done. Others might emphasize their advancing age (no longer 22), college-heavy audience, or the cash cushion of the top-grossing acts.
In any case, a significant effect of this turn was a turning away from current Black popular styles. Elijah Wald argued that the Beatles et al “led their audience off the dance floor, separating rock from its rhythmic and cultural roots, and…split American popular music in two.” [lxx] In the decades since, we have seen both separation and interplay, segregated tastes and increasing knowledge and honesty about the key role of Black culture in creating the culture, the fabric, of America.
And then what happened? Disco, a boon to the dance club industry, bubbled up in the 70s through Black and gay communities and exploded with the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. You can hear its pulses in varieties of electronic dance music (EDM). It was essentially a simplification of funk, minus some syncopation and plus some polyester. The bass drum plays on all four beats; the hi-hat cymbal adds stresses in between. There is still stress on the backbeats (two and four) from the other drums.
Disco was a link in the chain of musics bubbling up from the fertile swamps of popular innovation and dispersing through the paved neighborhoods. The Bee Gees in fact journeyed from their British/Aussie pop rock style to disco soul via producer Arif Mardin, who worked with Aretha and other rhythm and blues acts. Mardin squeezed the soul to the surface, breathing new life into the band and the style.
How many White singing stars have borrowed heavily from African American style? I mean besides Janis Joplin, Lyle Lovett, Rod Stewart, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Winwood,[26] Joe Cocker, the Righteous Brothers, George Michael, Sting, Amy Winehouse, Adele, Robin Thicke, Iggy Azalea, Pink, and the Justins Timberlake and Bieber? And they get the kudos, at “The Whites-Trying-To-Sing-Like-They’re-Black music wards, otherwise known as the Grammys.”[lxxi]
[26] “I fancied myself black and I fancied myself poor.” – Winwood to Albert Goldman,
reported in 1968 speech, “Musical Miscegenation.”
No wonder Goldman called New York’s Fillmore Auditorium “The Apollo Downtown.”
How about Black singers who perform in Whiter styles? Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr. broke through the Black ceiling mainly because their style was so smooth as to be inoffensive to the racially-minded. Nat had been wilder, but he toned it down before making it big. Motown, of course, was consciously constructed just so. Josh White blanched the blues to reach a lighter-toned audience. And Roberta Flack. But what’s the essential difference here? It’s the direction the culture is headed, and has always been headed.
In addition to the cycle of Black musicians and fans getting fed up with artistic and financial “borrowing,” there’s another reason that African American music keeps changing, and pulling everything else along with it. African Americans are engaged in a protracted struggle, a long, uncertain ascent from the bottom of society. The story of America is in large part the story of the transformation of its oppressed groups, and their march toward real equality, and the resistance along the way.
But there’s a big difference between the fifties and the now, and that’s reflected in the music. The music will keep changing as underclasses climb out from under. Whites may get nostalgic for older music, “simpler times”: Swing or dulcimers or Motown or Old School Rap. But it could also be they don’t want to deal with real African Americans, and their music. They prefer the safety and certainty of the old days, good or otherwise. African Americans, though, while retaining the pride and pleasure of past innovations, tend to move on and express something new, something now. Sometimes there’s a commercial motive for that; other times it’s just the expression of evolving identity, and that identity retains a sense of separateness. Now as before, as it was expressed on the language front,
blacks invented new terminology so they could communicate without whites understanding them. Therefore, as Africanisms entered the speech of whites they left black speech.[lxxii]
John Edward Philips speaks here of specific words or expressions. And so it goes, musically too. The specifics may be left behind, but not the manner, nor the process of innovation, nor even the relationship to the dominant culture.
[i] Clarke, 271.
[ii] Barnouw 1966, 289.
[iii] Redd, Lawrence N., “Rock! It’s Still Rhythm and Blues,” The Black Perspective in Music, Spring 1985, 44. The discussion here of the definition of rock and roll is taken from this article.
[iv] Shaw 1978, 74.
[v] Kay and Sue Werner, “Rock It For Me.”
[vi] Grendysa, Peter, liner notes for Blues Masters, Vol. 14, Rhino Records, 1993.
[vii] Lipsitz, George, introduction to Otis, xxvii.
[viii] Lipsitz 1990, 144-5.
[ix] ibid., 120.
[x] Williams, 159.
[xi] Redd, op. cit., 44.
[xii] ibid., 45.
[xiii] ibid., 46.
[xiv] Palmer, Robert, 125.
[xv] ibid., 126.
[xvi] Sandberg, 102.
[xvii] Chappel and Garofalo, 234.
[xviii] Cited in Douglas Green, 1976, xi.
[xix] Calt, 68.
[xx] ibid., 79-80.
[xxi] Lipsitz 1990, 118.
[xxii] Perry, 68.
[xxiii] Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, New York: Knopf, 1940, 254.
[xxiv] Clarke, 373.
[xxv] Hugill 1961, 301.
[xxvi] Downbeat, April 20, 1955, 41.
[xxvii] Clarke, 373.
[xxviii] Rolling Stone, Jan 18, 1973.
[xxix] Palmer, 171.
[xxx] Marcus, 17.
[xxxi] ibid.
[xxxii] Stanley Booth, in the film Why Elvis?
[xxxiii] Calvin Newborn, op. cit.
[xxxiv] Lott, 1991, Note #31, 250.
[xxxv] Cantor, 11.
[xxxvi] Charters, 191.
[xxxvii] Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, 13-part radio special, Radio Smithsonian, 1996.
[xxxviii] Lydon, Michael, Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon, New York:Outerbridge and Dientsfrey, 1971, 25-26.
[xxxix] Forte, p. 68.
[xl] ibid.
[xli] Palmer, Robert, Bluesland; see videography.
[xlii] Chapple & Garofalo, 235.
[xliii] Clarke, 389.
[xliv] Clarke, 438.
[xlv] Redd, op. cit., 39.
[xlvi] Lipsitz 1994, 320.
[xlvii] Clarke, 369.
[xlviii] That Rhythm…Those Blues, PBS, 1988.
[xlix] http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/fade-to-white-black-music-white-artistsbig-money-504
[l] Rolling Stone, Oct 2, 1968.
[li] Chapple and Garofalo, 253.
[lii] Jet, June 14, 1982, p 56-57, quoted from a visit to Johnson Publishing Co. at an unknown date in the 1970s.
[liii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley#cite_ref-251
[liv] Wald, 231.
[lv] Ken Goodman in That Rhythm…Those Blues, PBS, 1988.
[lvi] Charles Corley, op. cit.
[lvii] Speech to the Annual Convention of NATRA (National Association of Television and Radio Announcers), August 11, 1967.
[lviii] ibid.
[lix] ibid.
[lx] Palmer, 237.
[lxi] Abrahams, 131.
[lxii] Clarke, 449.
[lxiii] Jackson, John A., American Bandstand, 208-210.
[lxiv] Chapple and Garofalo, 236.
[lxv] Abbott 1992, 319.
[lxvi] Jim Dickinson interview by Joss Hutton, January 2002, http://www.furious.com/perfect/jimdickinson.html
[lxvii] Ewen, 680.
[lxviii] Clarke, 469.
[lxix] Thanks to San Francisco Examiner jazz critic Phil Elwood (1926-2006) for pointing this out.
[lxx] Philips, 232.
[lxxi] Up! Ye Mighty Race!, February 1994
[lxxii] Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n Roll, 246.