New World Records NEW WORLD RECORDS 701 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10036; (212) 302-0460; (212) 944-1922 fax email: [email protected] www.newworldrecords.org Shake, Rattle & Roll: rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s New World NW 249 n his novel Slapstick Kurt Vonnegut proposed Window?,”“Shrimp Boats,” and “Come On-a My I a scheme for artificial families, whereby every House” that white audiences placed on the Hit citizen would be given a new middle name, and Parade but did not dance to. all of us having the same middle name would be At the same time, monumental changes in the relatives. Loneliness would be banished. The social relationships of whites and blacks were notion was inspired by Vonnegut's observation beginning. In 1954 the Supreme Court decided that there has long existed a limited number of that segregated schools were unconstitutional. artificial families, such as the American Medical Still, the radio airwaves were segregated, and Association, Veterans of Foreign Wars, artists, when a New York disc jockey played a record by and union members. In the middle fifties a the black balladeer Johnny Ace,it was considered socio-musical phenomenon called rock 'n' roll a bold step. Pop music at the time was white; created the largest artificial family in postwar anything black was considered jazz (which had American life: the family of teenagers. Within a moved into the realm of art and was no longer few years it provided an umbrella for white competing for Hit Parade status), blues, or kids; black kids; city kids; country kids; wealthy, rhythm and blues. A talented black songwriter middle-class, and poor kids; lonely, impression- like Otis Blackwell could expect only modest able, rebellious, and socially aspiring kids. It success if one of his songs was recorded by a gave them symbols, anthems, solidarity, and black performer, because the white pop stations codes of dress, coiffure, and romance.Above all, would not play it. Several people realized that a it gave them a beat to dance to. white singer who could convincingly render big- This is important, because the dancing habits of beat R&B could make a lot of money. the nation—which were prolific and panracial in There was nothing new about white perform- the swing era of the thirties (see notes to New ers aping and popularizing black styles.As early World Records NW 261, Straighten Up and Fly as 1822, Charles Matthews, an English music-hall Right) - were severely altered by World War II. performer, visited America and got the idea of Blacks continued to dance to big bands and blacking himself up to perform the songs of rhythm-and-blues combos led by black bandlead- southern slaves.Thus began minstrelsy, the most ers, including Lucky Millinder, Lionel Hampton, important medium of American popular culture Joe Morris, Count Basie, Tiny Bradshaw, Earl in the nineteenth century. In this century we've Bostic, Bill Doggett, Louis Jordan, Amos Milburn, seen Paul Whiteman self-proclaimed the King of Bullmoose Jackson, and even the more conscien- Jazz for watering down black syncopations and tiously artful Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges Benny Goodman boosted as the King of Swing (the latter of whom had an R&B hit with “Castle for popularizing the music of black swing Rock”). Whites, on the other hand, had aban- bands. By the fifties a new wrinkle in minstrelsy doned the ballrooms.The white bands had folded —the “cover”—surfaced. A cover was a white and were replaced by the singers once featured version of a black song, usually one that had with them.They sang ballads and painfully trivial proved popular with a black audience. Georgia novelties like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Gibbs, for example, covered LaVern Baker's 1 “Tweedle Dee,” Pat Boone covered several Fats Haley's “Rock Around the Clock” as theme music. Domino and Little Richard songs, Bill Haley cov- The movie dealt with juvenile delinquency—a ered Joe Turner's “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Usually favorite theme of the fifties—and the music came the white version was bowdlerized and sold to be associated with rebellious youth. More impor- much better than the original. tant was the rise of Elvis Presley from a local attrac- The first white man to campaign for R&B was tion to a national star through television. Presley neither a musician nor a producer but a Cincinnati- was explosive. He looked like the symbol of a new, based disc jockey named Alan Freed. Freed was white-directed music—full and leering lips, a obsessive about the music; he would frequently porcelain complexion, straight hair rolled back in a accompany records on the air by pounding the pompadour. He swaggered and shook and moaned, backbeat—the accented second and fourth beats— and his ability to elicit screams from girls and imi- on a phone book. He coined the phrase “rock 'n' tation from boys suggested a hermaphroditic force. roll” by putting together two ubiquitous blues The release of his record “Heartbreak Hotel,” a terms with sexual connotations. After he used the blues spiced with electronic echo and full of mor- phrase repeatedly on his shows,“rock 'n' roll” lost bid self-pity, made “How Much Is That Doggie in its double meaning and came to categorize a dance the Window?” sound like the product of another music that whites and blacks alike were respond- century, if not another planet. ing to. The whitening of R&B was taking place all Presley had a lovely tenor, which he manipulated over the country: in 1954 Bill Haley, the leader of a with a hefty use of vibrato (in yet another rever- western-swing band in Philadelphia, started to sing sion to the methods of pre-microphone singers), R&B numbers and recorded “Rock Around the but he was by no means the outstanding singer of Clock”; Elvis Presley, a Mississippi country boy who the period. Nor is it correct to say that he gave liked the blues, led a trio at the Sun record studio rock 'n' roll its style, for Little Richard, Chuck Berry, for a rocking version of “That's All Right”; Buddy and Jackie Wilson were nothing if not stylists with Holly of Texas put together a “western-bop” band mature and incomparable stage personas. Presley with a drummer and a rhythm-and-blues beat. embodied the style for whites, however, which is Black performers were also crossing cultural bar- something else again. (His style, disseminated in riers. Several blues singers who had been trained in Europe, came home again in the sixties with the church—notably Billy Ward and the Dominoes, British groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Ray Charles, Faye Adams, and Little Richard—began Stones.) Presley had money behind him, and he adapting gospel inflections to secular perfor- consolidated his position in the entertainment mances. Chuck Berry of St. Louis wrote blues tunes world by receding from rock into the middle- with a country accent and innovated a percussive American enthusiasms for country and middle-of- guitar style flavored with the steel-guitar effects of the-road ballads. country music. Most of the rock stars were conservative and An amalgamation of sources was being whipped professional, quite different from the hoodlum together around an uncomplicated backbeat. The images they were said to inspire. Even Elvis' scan- sources included the black church, blues, rhythm dalizing pelvic wiggle, which was censored when and blues, jazz, western swing, honky-tonk or white he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, would have barrelhouse dance music, boogie-woogie, and Tin seemed a lot less revolutionary if it had been pre- Pan Alley pop music. In the days when pop music ceded with a clip of Al Jolson singing the last meant jazz, vaudeville-trained singers and entertain- chorus of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” in the 1927 movie ers had been dismissed as hopelessly dated, if not The Jazz Singer. downright corny. But now jazz had become com- Rock 'n' roll changed many attitudes about music, plicated; it was no longer the simple dance music sometimes for the better, sometimes not. It opened that once gave life to Saturday-night get-togethers. the business to independent companies that had The white southerners, whose music was briefly previously been squeezed out by the major labels. called rockabilly (from “rock” and “hillbilly”), But, ironically, the most successful independents admired the older performing style as represented were taken over by the superlabels and became by Al Jolson. It was sentimental, melodic, accessi- the establishment of the sixties and seventies.The ble, compelling, and popular; it offered standards of industry unfortunately became more hit conscious showmanship, which jazz had long ago dismissed. than before. With records regularly selling in the Two things put rock 'n' roll on the map.The first millions, it suddenly seemed unprofitably altruistic was the movie “Blackboard Jungle,” which used for companies to give attention to specialized 2 musics. A rock-'n'-roll star was measured almost ence got younger and younger, and twelve-year- entirely by how high he had last risen on the hit olds will buy anything if the pitch is persuasive charts; no other music is so full of one-shot suc- enough.A music that only a few years before had cesses. The producer who engineered successful audaciously combined Kansas City swing with recording sessions became the real power, and New Orleans rhythms, and New York street har- often the singer was just an arbitrarily chosen front monizing with Spanish melodies, had been blend- for selling a new song or recording concept.