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This week, we'll turn our attention to
the world of popular music in America

before Rock and Roll really broke in
1955.
That's the date that we're going to give
for the beginning of Rock and Roll
though.
As we continue into the course, you'll
see that exactly fixing an exact date is
pretty tough to do.
But, let's say it's 1955.
So, we want to know what was the world
like before 1955.
I'll give a little bit away of what I'm
going to say when we get to next week,
and talk about the birth of Rock and
Roll.
And say, that most scholars will say,
that Rock and Roll, was the, the result
of blending together of three styles that
had been.
prominent in popular music up to 1955.
And those styles are Mainstream Pop,
Country and Western music and Rhythm and
Blues music.
And those, those styles were thought to
be very different from each other, not
only in sound, but in terms of the kinds
of people who would buy that music.
So, Mainstream Pop music was mostly
purchased and consumed by the average
middle class, white consumer.
Rhythm and Blues was thought of as music
for mostly urban African American
consumers.
And Country and Western music was thought
of as music for mostly rural white
farming communities this kind of thing.
And so, these, these, these, these were
really thought of as three separate
markets, even though, stylistically there
were some real differences.
So, the way we'll proceed.
Is, this week, we'll work in, in, in
three parts.
We'll first start talking about
Mainstream Pop and then we'll move to a
discussion of the development of Country
and Western in this period, before 1955.
And then, the development of Rhythm and
Blues in this period before 1955.
So, let's dive right in with Mainstream
Pop here.
One of the first things we have to
understand about popular music before
Rock and Roll is the song is the primary
thing, not any particular performance of
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it.
The basic idea, if you were in the music
business, was to write songs, to publish
songs, and try to get as many different
people to sing those songs as possible.
That's very different from the way we
think about Rock and Roll today, right or
the way we think about it even in the
60s.
Who wants a version of Sergeant Pepper
that isn't done by the Beatles?
Who wants a version of Sergeant Pepper
that isn't the one the Beatles released
and sanctioned for release when they did
it?
Nobody really.
You want that particular recording.
But back in these days, it wasn't that
way at all.
The song was the important thing.
And so, in many ways the, the, the music
business before, the Mainstream Pop
business before 1955 was really driven by
music publishers.
Music publishers job were to get
songwriters to write songs and then for
them to publish them.
Now, yes, record them, yes, get them on
the radio, yes, but the main way in which
they sold these songs was through sheet
music.
Now, this business of sh-, business of
selling sheet music, this is something
that has really disappeared in, in our
current life, almost completely.
When was the last time you went in to
some kind of a music store and saw sheet
music on the wall?
Even when I was a kid in the 70s, you
could still buy tons of sheet music, but
not so much anymore.
Maybe you go into a guitar center.
You see all the guitar instruction books
on the wall in one corner of the store,
but other than that sheet music has
really sort of way out of our picture.
It certainly is not the booming business
it was.
But in the first half of the 20th century
the last half of the 19th century.
It was a primary thing that people were
interested in selling if you were a
publisher.
And so, the idea with sheet music would
be that you would buy the sheet music so
that you could play it at home.
And back in those days, a lot of people
has pianos in their living room.
It was like, you know, having a stereo or
a big screen TV as is today.
And there we people who, in the family
who could play the piano, often multiple
members of the family.
And so you would go up to the local five
and dime and you would pick out the song
that you wanted to buy that week, or
maybe a couple of songs.
They sold so much sheet music that these
stores actually had resident piano, and a
resident pianist right there in the store
to play the music for you so that you
could hear it before you bought it.
this is how, How important the sheet
music business was and so people would
take this music back to the home and they
would perform it themselves.
Now, when recording started to become
more and more prevalent in the first have
the century into the 1920s and into the
1930s, people had recordings, and
recording of course were an important
kind of thing.
But you probably didn't have as many
recordings in the house as you had sheet
music.
So recordings were that special instance
where you wanted to hear something
recorded by a particular person.
Maybe it was Judy Garland or Bing Crosby
or something like that, but otherwise,
sheet music was the big thing.
Well, of course, Rock and Roll didn't
rely very much on sheet music so this was
one of the apple carts that Rock and Roll
upset when it became popular in 1955,
The other thing we have to remember when
we think about popular music in this
period, is that songwriters and
performers were essentially thought of as
entirely different kinds of people, or
different kinds of jobs.
A songwriter was somebody who wrote a
song, and that was wrote songs and that's
what they did, they didn't particularly
perform them, they didn't even have to
have great piano skills or great singing
voices.
But they had to be able to write these
songs.
And they would turn out song after song
after song.
Sometimes in a formula kind of way but
also sometimes in extremely interesting
ways.
If you know the songs of George and Ira
Gershwin for example, Cole Porter,
A lot of these, these, these classic
songwriters from the American Songbook
wrote fantastic and, and, and very, very
clever and interesting and sophisticated
kinds of songs.
But that was their job.
There was no recording of, not that I'm
aware of anyway, of Cole Porter sings the
music of Cole Porter.
it was really not expected that a
songwriter should be able to do that.
That took, singing the songs that is,
took a performer to be able to do.
and what performers did is they made
their mark by having their own personal
style.
A performer was a song stylist.
So the way it would work is that a song
would become popular in the in a culture,
and people would hear the song various
kinds of ways.
we'll talk about that in just a minute.
And then these performers would try to
put their own special mark on it.
So you might hear a song, let's think
from a little bit later period.
something like My Way or New York, New
York.
That's a great song, I wonder what it
sound like if I heard Frank Sinatra sing
that song?
I wonder what it would sound like if I
heard Elvis Presley sing that song?
I wonder what it would sound like if I
heard Liza Minnelli sing that song?
So the idea was, the song was one entity,
and the performance of it was another
entity, and these people specialize.
this is something that we see change in
the history of Rock music.
Where the, the, the model stars to be
from about the mid 60s, that the people
who write the songs are the same people
who perform the songs.
So the idea of a cover version, say, in
this period before 1955.
It almost doesn't apply.
Because everybody's doing versions of
everybody else's songs.
So this gives us a little bit of an idea
of how the music business was structured
in this period before 1955.
And the most important thing for you to
take away from this is, the song's the
thing, not particular performances of it.
So now, in the next video, we need to
move on to the idea of, once we know
these songs are the important sort of
basic unit of trade.
How do these songs reach people who are
interested in hearing Pop music?
How do they get to the songs, how do they
get to know about them?
That's what we'll deal with next.
Let's talk for a minute about two styles
that are important with rhythm and blues,
but sometimes are given a little bit of
short shrift in our histories of popular
music.
again we're talking about the period
leading up to 19 55 and the birth of
rock.
most of the period between the Second
World War, 1945.
and this birth of rock in '55.
These two styles I mean are Doo Wop and
Gospel.
Both of them primarily vocal styles, and
both of them play a big role in how it is
that R&B music sounds the way that it
does.
Doo wop develops after World War II.
It consists of acapella vocal singing
that developed in urban neighborhoods.
Mostly among black males, and it's kind
of an acapella group, a Doo Wop group,
it's kind of like a social club.
And you would form it with kids who lived
right on the same block as you, and you
would work up arrangements.
And then kids from these different blocks
would go and challenge Other Doo Wop
vocal groups from other blocks sort of
competing for territory and that kind of
thing.
And I don't think there were ever any
fights or that kind of thing, it wasn't
an aggressive thing, but it was kind of a
musical challenge.
And it created a whole culture where you
had say, in blocks with New York or
Baltimore, places like that.
All kinds of these groups who probably
had a number of tunes worked up as
arrangements, but they had one worked up
that was really kind of the knock out
blue.
Man, when they did that tune that was
their best shot at, at, at knocking the
other knocking the other group out.
And so what happened is, in a search for
talent for, for these R&B Indie labels
producers would come around and then they
would bring these groups into the studio.
Find their best song, bring in a backing
band and do an arrangement of it and rush
it out onto the market and see if they
couldn't sell some of them.
and so one thing that was great about
that, is a lot of Doo Wop groups were
given an opportunity to record.
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Well, one thing that was not so great
about it, is that after they'd used their
best number to do this recording, it was
very difficult for them to follow up.
What the second or a third number,
because they'd already used their best
stuff and it maybe had taken them months
to work that one up.
How, how to have something to, how can I
follow that?
And so one of the stories of Doo Wop is
it's filled with one hit wonders
precisely for this reason.
groups that had one big hit, and then
maybe a second one that wasn't as good,
and then a third one that, that barely
charted.
There were other groups that had more
success than that.
There were more professional singer kind
of things, but there were an awful lot of
one hit wonders inside of Doo Wop.
so, if you want to think about some
representative records for Doo Wop that
is, that sort of choral vocal singing
that, that term Doo Wop really comes from
the nonsense syllables that sometimes.
They would use in the background vocals.
A good example of that is the song from
1954 from the chords called Sh'boom.
I won't I won't insult you by singing it
for you now, but if you can find a
recording of that, you'll see that
there's an awful lot of background
singing that just kind of uses nonsense
syllables for the singers to vocalize
without specific lyrics.
Of course, there are lyrics as well in
some parts.
But a lot of this nonsense syllable.
Another great example is The Five Satins,
In the Still of the Night from 1956.
One thing about these Doo Wop numbers, is
they would often become novelty tunes, in
other words there would be some sort of,
funny hook with them, that would, that
would make them sort of infectious and
fun to listen to.
but they were also Doo Wop tunes almost
always the slow dance of choice in the
1950s.
So, when there was a slow dance at one of
these teenage sock hop kinds of things
where the boys and the girls wanted to
dance slow, and right up next to each
other.
It was often a Doo Wop tune which would
be that slow number.
And so, even in the middle of the sort of
craziness of people like Jerry Lee Lewis
and Little Richard people listening to
those kinds of records and dancing in all
kinds of crazy ways, there would always
be a couple of Doo Wop numbers in there
to give the boys and the girls a chance
Stead to get together.
We should also talk about the roots of
almost all rhythm, and blues in the music
of the church, and the gospel tradition.
these vocal music practices from the
black church influenced both harmony
singing and solo singing in rhythm and
blues.
You can hear this in some of the call and
response elements, where a soloist will
sing one thing and then a group of
background singers will sing something
back against them, the call an response
kind of thing.
The melodic embellishments that occur,
when the solo singer is singing the
melody oftentimes derived from gospel
music.
In gospel music there is a traditional
conflict between the music of the church,
the gospel music, which is considered
God's music and the music of the club,
the Rhythm and Blues music that, that
would be played at in bars in the
evenings, which was considered the
Devil's music.
Now, this may seem simple minded and
simplistic to, to think of this sort of
division between God's music and the
devil's music.
But a lot of R&B singers went through a
certain kind of conflict.
Even kind of an emotional problem with
moving, if they were already gospel
singers, moving to pop music.
Or if they were pop singers, thinking
they probably should give this music up
and turn their musical talents toward
praise in, in, and toward the church.
And so, this also happened with white
musicians as well, but it's especially
prominent as we get into the 50s and
there starts to be more and more market
for R&B music and a lot more things were
crossing over, a lot more singers are
tempted.
Some R &B artists even recast gospel
numbers as pop songs and the mo, the most
famous one of those is Ray Charles.
Singing I Got A Woman from 1954, and this
is the song where when Ray Charles did I
Got A Woman, and changed it from a gospel
number into a secular one, it was
shocking to a lot of people in the black
community who knew where he got it from.
But as far as Ray was concerned, all
music is God's music, and it didn't
really bother him all that much.
So, it's important when we think about
rhythm and blues in this period, be sure
that we we acknowledge the influence of
Doo Wop and gospel.
One of the most controversial, or, we
might say in a certain sense, dangerous,
at least to White audiences.
Elements of rhythm and blues music, has
to do with the Hokum Blues.
And the perception that these lyrics were
sexual in maybe a kind of a shocking kind
of way in rhythm and blues music.
Now there, the Hokum Blues tradition, is
not limited to Black stars.
There's this big misconception out there
that the Hokum Blues is the property of,
of the Black community and it.
And, and for people who have whole racist
views, that it somehow indicates this
sort of lack of sophistication of the
Black community.
But it's not, it's not actually true.
You can find Hokum Blues in, in White
music and Jimmie Rodgers, who we spoke of
several videos ago
Has got a great Hokum Blues called Pistol
Packing Papa from 1930, which really sort
of proves that this is not the exclusive
province of, of the Black tradition.
I don't say this in any way to disparage
the Black tradition at all, but just to
sort of guard it from,
over-generalizations.
Or perhaps, racist generalizations that
really comes out of some kind of racial
thing there.
the Hokum Blues, in fact, is a playful
type of song, a humorous kind of song,
meant for adult audiences, not for
teenagers.
And so, in an adult audience, to
playfully, through the use of double
entendres and metaphors.
Talk about sexuality, sexual
relationships and activity between a man
and a woman.
In a way that plays with the idea of the
thing without ever actually saying it in
a raw or vulgar way.
Continuing to work with metaphors and
double entendres in ways that are clever.
Everybody knows what you're getting at,
and you're, you're taking joy in how it
is the singer can say it in a way that
doesn't actually say the thing.
But says it in a colorful way that makes
it fun.
And that's what the Hokum Blues is about.
Most White, parents who heard their,
heard the songs their kids were listening
to sometimes didn't really understand
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that those songs were never intended for
kids.
This was not the stuff that they, nobody
really sort of thought about this for
teenagers.
So there was a, a real reaction against
some of the sexual lyrics in R&B and
Hokum Blues.
and that's a big part of the changeover
from rock, from Rhythm and Blues to Rock
and Roll that we'll talk about next week.
So, one of the reasons why Whites tended
to under, misunderstand this practice, is
first of all they didn't know very much
about the Black community at all.
And secondly, one of the myths that
existed in culture was this Stagger Lee
myth.
And the idea that Black men, are really
only ever concerned with deflowering
virginal White women.
and so, when you hear a black man singing
a song about sexuality.
And you're a white person who doesn't
really understand very much about black
culture hearing this.
It may reinforce all of these negative
stereotypes and you may say, I don't want
my daughter listening to that.
It's hell and perdition, you know.
And so there was a real reaction against
these kinds of tunes.
Now, to be fair, some of the titles were
pretty obv, obvious what some of the
songs were about.
Here are some of the titles for you.
Let Me Play With Your Poodle, 60 Minute
Man, Work With Me Annie, Annie Had A
Baby, right?
So, it's not real hard to figure out what
these tunes are going to be about.
what white artists did when a Hokum Blues
would get.
big on the charts on the R&B charts.
And they wanted to cover that song for
the mainstream pop ar, charts.
Is they would do the songs but they would
change the lyrics.
And they would take or obscure the sexual
parts of it.
such that in many cases Freud would love
it.
the sexual references are replaced with
references to dancing.
And so in many ways, sex is sublimated
into dancing.
And so the songs become squeaky clean,
inoffensive and acceptable to everybody
and just about good, clean, teenage,
white middle class fun.
So, even a song like Shake, Rattle, and
Roll originally done by Big Joe Turner
when it's covered by Bill Haley and The
Comets.
Becomes a hit for him and nobody has any
idea what a one-eyed cat could possibly
be peeping at a sea food store.
It's almost like we're talking about one
of the characters from Disney's
Aristocats or something, but of course in
the original Big Joe Turner.
That is a very colorful metaphor for the
male and female genitalia, in a group of
adults hearing this it's fun.
When your kids are in the room it's maybe
a little bit embarassing.
And so one of the things that starts to
happen in next, next week we'll talk
about cover versions, and crossover and
this kind of thing.
Is that a lot of these songs that were
originally hits on the R&B charts, had to
have the lyrics changed significantly.
Before they had any chance of landing on
the mainstream pop charts.
The Black artists that were on falls in
this didn't like this idea at all.
And so it as just another way in which
Black people were being discriminated
against it and not having the same
oppertunity as white people.
So this kind of racial element that's
already a part of the community is very
much a part of those first days of Rock
and Roll.
But this anticipates our story.
Let's think about all that next week,
when we think about the first days of
Rock and Roll in 1955 through 1959.
Alright, we continue talking about
mainstream pop now.
In the first video we talked about how
the song is the important thing in
period, in the period before 1955.
And individual performances of it are
done by performers who specialize in
performance, but mostly don't write their
own songs.
Frank Sinatra never wrote a song, Bing
Crosby never wrote a song.
But nobody held that against them or
thought they were inauthentic because
that's just the way it is back in those
days.
A music business dominated by music
publishers.
So, now the question arises.
How did people actually gain access to
this music?
How did they find out about it?
And in order to, to think about that, we
have to start by imaging what America was
like at the turn of century at about
1900.
one thing that was very different about
America in those days is that it was much
more regional.
where what happened in the south, or the
southwest, or the west coast, or the
industrial north was very different.
And you really had no way of knowing
immediately what was going on in those
other parts of the country unless you
actually went there and found out about
it.
Even newspapers were kind of slow.
Of course, there was telegraph and you
could sort of find out about things that
way.
But nevertheless, you kind of had to wait
for news to get to you.
What that did is it, is it kept regional
cultures relatively intact.
So, when it comes to talking about
styles.
When we talk about folk music, we talk
about country music, when we talk about
blues music, we can talk about styles
that are associated with certain cities.
People know what Chicago blues is, or
Memphis, or Saint Louis, and the reason
why those styles were able to stay
distinct from each other is because those
musicians would move from place to place,
but mostly the audiences stayed the same.
So we lived in a world where there were
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many more regional accents.
But it didn't take long, with the
development of radio, for us to begin to
develop what you might think of, as a
national culture, especially a national
culture for entertainment.
And as I gave away just a minute ago,
radio, and the development of radio,
played a tremendously important role, in
establishing a kind of a national culture
across America, where people in Los
Angeles we're able to hear the same kind
of music that people in New York were
hearing.
And the people down on the farm somewhere
in Tennessee could hear the same people,
the music that people in the big city, in
Detroit or Chicago, were hearing.
That starts to happen with the spread of
radio.
So what can we say about radio.
it's hard to imagine a world before
radio.
Actually for most of us, it's hard to
imagine a world before the internet.
Although, I know there was one, I was
there.
but nevertheless, what would a world
before radio be like?
Well radio was initially developed by a
fellow by the name of Marconi made his
first important sort of experiments to
show that you could do this thing of
sending voices through the air in 1895
the, the, benefit of radio early on Was
thought to be, two things, like so many
technologies, one of the benefits was
thought to be military.
Alright, there's a great benefit in being
able to sort of reach your troops out on
the battlefield, and be able to talk to
them instantaneously without having to
send messengers back and forth, right?
So that's a real that it's amazing how
many of the technologies that were
developed in the 20th century, were first
developed as military technologies, or
space technologies.
putting a man on the moon, we gained a
lot of microchip technology that would
have, that, that made the Internet
possible.
The other thing that it was handy for,
radio was, that is talking to ships at
sea.
So if you've got a ship that's way out at
sea and you want to be able to
communicate with it, radio is a very,
very handy way of being able to do that.
in fact, radio really started to make its
first big impact in 1912 when the Titanic
sank, and it was possible to send radio
transmissions of what was happening on
the Titanic, back to New York via a kind
of radio telegraph system.
You know, that dit-dit-ta-dit, dit-dit,
dit-ta-dit, that kind of thing.
And the guy sitting Right at the desk,
taking down that information, was a
fellow by the name of David Sarnoff.
David Sarnoff, it turns out, went on to
have a career running RCA and developing
the NBC radio network.
He became a very, very important figure
and was right there from the beginning of
this.
People were amazed when the Titanic was
going down, that they were able to read
newspaper reports.
It seemed almost in real time to them,
this was almost like cable news happening
immediately.
They were there and it never happened
before.
And so radio started to get very, very it
showed a lot of promise and by 1920,
radio stations were popping up around
major cities.
by 19, by the end of the 1920s, radio
networks had begun to pop up in this
country and so NBC.
And CBS and other networks were able to
do things by using telephone wires so
they could connect stations up,
affiliates they called, in all kinds of
different cities, and they could sh, they
could play the same programming around to
everybody at the same time.
So, imagine how impressed people would
have been with this, they could be
sitting in their home, somewhere in
suburban Chicago, and hear the same
performance that people in a, in a New
York night club were hearing, in real
time, as it was actually happening,
through the air, on their radio set.
Fantastic, right.
So these, these networks get going by
connecting up all of these stations,
these affiliate stations and then by
connecting in certain stations that were
called super stations.
Super stations could broadcast a very,
very powerful signal, especially after
the Sun went down that could reach.
Whole regions of the country.
So, by putting these superstations and
these, and these these network affiliate
stations connected by telephone lines
together, you could reach from coast to
coast.
Fantastic, who could imagine that, that,
that radio could now reach a whole
country at the same time.
And when you do that, when everybody's
listening to the same music, at the same
time.
It means that there, you're starting to
break down regional differences.
So what happens in popular music is,
through radio, it establishes a national
audience.
And what's on radio at this time?
Well, you've got soap operas.
The Guiding Light was one of the early
soap operas there.
Comedies, Amos and Andy.
Thought it would be seen as really really
politically incorrect by today's
standards.
Amos and Andy was was the one of the sort
of great comedy shows of its day.
Adventure shows like the Lone Ranger and
Superman.
Variety shows, like one famous one that
was hosted by Bing Crosby.
And, of course, music, lots of music.
Lots of musicians playing music over the
radio airwaves.
So if you were one of these song
publishers.
Who wanted to get your song heard.
Get it out there so people could hear it,
so then they can then, buy the sheet
music at the local 5 and dime and bring
it home and play it on their home piano.
What you want to do is get that song on
the radio.
So the radio and the publishing business
were in a sort of were, were working hand
in glove.
To promote popular music in addition to
the other kinds of things that radio was
doing.
Now you can also say that movies help
provide a national audience because once
a movie's made the wizard of oz for
example everybody in every theater across
the country is seeing exactly the same
movie.
And of course, people in the publishing
business wanted to get their move, their
songs placed in movies.
Well there was actually a bit of a debate
about that because some people thought
well if the song is placed in the movie
won't that kind of wear it out, won't it
have the she-, same shelf life as the
movie itself, like after the movie's no
longer popular, the song will no longer
be popular.
You don't want that if you're in a
publishing business, you want to song
that's what they call an evergreen.
It just continues to be used and used and
used because every time it's used you
make a little bit on money.
So movies are important but they don't
really happen in real time.
Now the important thing we have to think
about is that this fantastic music, this
fantastic radio network develops a
national audience for music.
But after the second world war, David
Sonanoff, who I mentioned before, gets
this idea.
If people will listen to music through
the air, think how much they would like
to have music in pictures through the
air.
So at the end of the second world war, he
takes all of R-, well, a lot of RCA's
research and development money and puts
it into television.
Television's going to be the next Big
thing.
Which leaves radio, after a few years,
really as a kind of an also ran.
But we have all these fantastic radio
stations that have been developed over
the course of the '30s and '40s with all
kinds of equipment.
What's going to happen to those stations?
Well, when we start talking about rhythm
and blues, and country and western music.
We'll talk about what happens to those
radio stations.
After they've been, well, not really
abandoned, but at least partially
abandoned by some of the big money which
owes it to television.
But next, what we need to talk about is
what did the music sound like during this
period?
Who were some of the most important
artists in this period of American pop,
before 1955?
Well, we continue our discussion of
main-stream popular music in
the period before 1955, the world before
rock and roll.
In the first two videos, we talked about
how the important
thing for us to know is that the song's
the thing.
Not a particular performance of it.
And how a lot of songs were marketed via
sheet music.
And that was one of the most important
ways of making money in the publishing
business.
And publishers are very, very important.
They're really sort of driving the bus
here.
When it comes to the popular music
business in this period before 1955.
we also talked about how the important
role that
radio played in creating a national
audience for mainstream pop.
Now not so much country western and rhythm
and blues and we're going to talk about
it.
In a future video here, coming just up.
But for now, mainstream pop, sets up,
Radio
sets up a national audience for mainstream
pop.
And then we said a little bit in movies to
a certain extent, too.
But then we said a little bit about how
that, that national audience is going to
migrate to television.
And it will leave opportunities for rhythm
and blues and country and western.
In a period after the second world war,
after 1945.
when it does.
So now, what we want to talk about is
what the mainstream popular music sound
like during these years?
This period from say about oh 19, the
1920's into the
period leading up to 1955, so I'm going to
go through a lot
of names here.
And remembering that it's going to be up
to you to find some of
this music and listen to it and I really
encourage you to do so.
It's really no fun to take a music course
if you never hear any
music so you really need to go out and
look for some of this music.
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So, I'll run through some of these
performance for you and then
you can check them out and see what you
think for yourself.
Plenty of other information about them.
Not only in the book, but also on all
kinds of
sources on the Internet so you want to
check this out.
Maybe the most important artist
we need to mention for the period, the
first
half of the twentieth century, one of the
most
successful, one of the most influential,
artists in the
first half of the twentieth century was
Bing Crosby.
These days Bing Crosby's maybe a little
bit sort of Ignored or forgotten.
But he was a fantastic star.
A singer who is maybe the first singer at
least one
of the first singers to really take
advantage of the microphone.
And that the singers before Bing Crosby's
day didn't have the advantage or weren't
really trained to use microphones.
All their performances were done
acoustically.
So they have to have voices that cut to
the back of the hall.
They'd cut over the orchestra, and so you
got these really big voices.
Not exactly operatic voices, but you get
the
idea of voices that could really cut
through.
With the invention of the microphone, it
meant
that it wasn't so important how loud you
sang.
You could get the microphone right up next
to your mouth.
And that allowed for a certain kind of
intimacy.
A certain amount of Sort of vocal
technique that didn't require
a big voice but could require other out
areas of the
voice and Bing Crosby was one of the first
crooners to
really a develop that technique and that
that sense of intimacy now.
In Bing Crosby's case the intimacy was
never
thought of as something that was even
remotely romantic
in any kind of way.
Bing Crosby was more like everybody's
favorite uncle.
He played golf.
He smoked a, smoked a little cigar, I mean
a little a little pipe.
He always had a nice sort of knit, a knit
sweater on.
He was absolutely non-threatening.
He was he was, just seemed like a really
nice old uncle, that kind of guy.
Who, you were happy to see at Thanksgiving
meals and Christmas
time, and when you went on picnics in the,
in the summertime.
And so
that was the image that he, that he
fostered.
But he was enormously successful.
As I said, hosting a.
A coast to coast radio show for years, was
one of the number one celebrities
appearing films and having a whole string
of
hit records up into the 1940's and 50's.
Some of those would be, songs like I've
Got
A Pocketful of Dreams from 1938 Only
Forever from 1940,
Swinging on a Star from 1944 and his
famous recording of White
Christmas which both went to number one on
the charts both in 1942.
And again in 1945.
So Bing Crosby, a very very important
figure who characterizes much of what was
going on mainstream pop in a period before
at least before the second world war.
Also in mainstream pop we have to think
about the big bands.
And the big bands are usually
thought of, when we think about the a the
history of Jazz
music because they were so important Paul
White and his band was one
of the most important a early instances of
that an interesting thing
about the big bands is they weren't really
about the singing at all.
It was about the bands it was about the
playing.
This is back in the day when a, a bands
job like a rock band in
a club today, was really to go to a dance
and to keep people dancing, right?
There job was to keep them keep them on
the dance floor.
And so this guys,
these big bands were often called dance
bands.
You had Paul Whiteman with a band,
virtuoso clarinetist Benny Goodman with a
band.
Other bands came from Tommy Dorsey Jimmy
Dorsey, and Glenn Miller.
in the African-American community you had
the Duke
Ellington Band as well as the Count Basie
Band.
There was some cross over there but mostly
the white bands
played the white venues and the black
bands played the black venues.
We're still talking about a country that's
very segregated, during these years.
If you want look for a particular example
of what the
big band sound was like, I would recommend
String of Pearls,
which is kind of the signature tune for
the Glenn Miller
Orchestra, was a number one hit in this
country in 1942.
If you listen to String of Pearls, you'll
get kind of
an idea of what big band music was about
during this period.
We also had a lot of singing groups.
The Andrews Sisters, three, three singing
sisters from
Minnesota, singing in harmony vocal with a
kind of a debt, some of
their vocal, stylings, their harmony vocal
stylings almost had debt to big band
horn sections, in the ways in which they
would harmonize together almost sounded
like saxophones or trumpets or trombones
in a, in a big band arrangement.
Some of their most important tunes were In
The Mood, they took this Glenn Miller hit
In The Mood and put lyrics with it,
so there you really get the connection
between
the vocals and,
and the big band technique and the big
band horn technique.
But also, from 1938 by Bei Mir bist du
Schoen and
from 1943 Shoo Shoo Baby and from 1945 Rum
and Coca Cola.
The Andrews sisters would often appear
with Bing
Crosby on his radio show and they would
do.
numbers together one that I could remember
particularly vividly is Don't
Fancy Me, which features Bing Crosby and
the Andrew's sisters together.
Another group that would sing with a a
Bing Crosby and works slightly different
in a
different kind of way were the Mills
brothers.
Four African-American singers who came out
of the, out of the black church tradition.
And these guys had a tremendous amount of
crossover appeal, and by crossover appeal
I mean
it was relatively rare for black artists
to
sell a lot of records to white listeners.
So to cross over really meant.
People thought that you were somebody who
was probably because of your skin color,
more appropriate to a rhythms and blues
audience,
and here you were singing to white
audiences.
But the most, Mills Brothers had
tremendous success in 1943 with
Paper Doll, and 1944 with You Always Hurt
The One You Love
with all these tracks as I say I really
suggest you
seek them out on the Internet and have a
listen to them.
And if you can get video of them that's
great although video's going to
be a little bit tough unless they appear
in a film singing it.
Especially this period before 1945.
Now in the period after the second world
war after 1945 in Liddington
1955 probably the most important person we
have to think about is Frank Sinatra.
Even though I was talking about Bing
Crosby having a
singing career as a soloist and a movie
career and
[UNKNOWN]
and all other kinds of things going on
with
him a and the Andrew's Sisters and the
Mills Brothers.
Mostly during this Big Band era of the
1940s
where the bands and the instrumentation
was the thing.
The singers were kind of secondary.
It's kind of interesting.
Exactly the inverse of what we see in rock
and roll tunes.
Rock and roll tune is, the songs are
mostly sung, and then there'll
be a guitar solo for a minute, and the
singer will come back in.
But with these big band arrangements, they
would be mostly played instrumentally.
The singer would come
in for a minute as kind of a special thing
and then
go back out again, and Frank Sinatra was
one of those singers.
In fact, there was a bunch of singers who
sang with big bands.
And for most of the gig, the singer was on
the sideline; the singer would just
come out as a kind of featured number as a
kind of featured soloist kind of thing.
Frank Sinatra was one of those guys.
He had sung with The Harry James Band and
with the Tommy
Dorsey band but in 1943 he launched his
career as a solo singer.
People thought Frank Sinatra was crazy how
could a singer possibly survive
if not attached to one of these big bands.
Frank Sinatra at that time was a young.
attracktive and unlike Bing Crosby who
didn't really
excite the ladies so much, Frank Sinatra
did.
The, the girls who used to scream and
faint over
Frank Sinatra were called the bobby soxers
and Frank Sinatra.
Was maybe we think when we look at girls
sort of screaming over Elvis, or girls
screaming over the
Beatles later in this course, you'll see
that that was
happening with Frank Sinatra back in 1943
and 1944 1945.
Frank all, always gave a lot of credit to
the musicians that he played with in the
big bands,
saying that his vocal technique came from
watching how
those guys played, and trying to do with
this voice.
The expressive things, the guys in the
bands were doing with their instrument.
but as a star, he was, he was clearly a
teen idol there for awhile
and some representative tracks from this
period
are Nancy With the Laughing Face from
1945.
There's actually a little story that goes
with that one.
All Of Me, from 1948 and I've Got a Crush
on You from 1948.
Think today what would a song be like that
said I've got a crush on you, honey pie.
These were much more innocent days.
Actually Nancy With the Laughing Face is
interesting.
it was written by some guys who.
Whenever they would do a girl's birthday
party, would insert whatever the name
of that girl was into the into the song to
personalize the song.
And they did it at a birthday party
for Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy and,
and this is,
this is they way the story goes.
Sometimes these stories are apocryphal.
they, they they insert the name Nancy with
a
laughing face into the song and Frank
Sinatra misunderstood.
He thought they've written a song
especially for his daughter,
who started crying, and said, I have to
record that song.
And so he did, and it became a hit for
him.
So, it's interesting how sometimes these
things come together.
Some of the other singers that that
imitated Frank Sinatra, or tried
to play on his success.
And we talk about Elvis in the 50's, and
the Beatles in the 60's.
We'll talk about how Elvis and the Beatles
both started something going.
And once they got it going, other
musicians sort of.
Other singers and acts sort of came in,
trying to capitalize on the success that
they had had, sort of ride their coattails
in a certain kind of sense.
And some of those things happened with
Frank Sinatra, too.
In 1951, we get Johnny Ray, with his
emotional delivery of the song Cry.
Tony Bennett in 1953
with Rags to Riches, and Eddie Fisher In
1954 what the song called Oh My Papa.
In fact there was a period there in
the early 50's where Frank Sinatra was
thought to
sort of be on the wane and Eddie Fisher
was going to be the next teen hearthrob.
Other music that was important on the
charts to
give you an idea of what popular music
sounded like.
Before rock and roll in 1955, Patti Page's
Tennessee Waltz from 1950 was
a very big hit.
And Les Paul and Mary Ford, How High The
Moon,
1951, maybe their most important, maybe
their most important single.
We'll talk a bit about Les Paul in the
next video so just
to review a little bit about what we've
talked about here are some
of the most important artists that you're
going to want to think about in
this mainstream pop the period from about
the 1920's 1930's up to 1955.
Bing Crosby the
big bands the Andrew Sisters the Mills
Brothers.
Frank Sinatra, Johnnie Ray, Tony Bennett,
Eddie
Fisher, Patti Page, Les Paul and Mary
Ford.
In fact, in the next video we'll take
especially close look at Les Paul and Mary
Ford and some of the great innovations by
Les Paul, the guitarist,
and so many
other things.
I want to take just a minute to focus in
on Les Paul and the act Les Paul and Mary
Ford to just put an extra bit of emphasis
on mainstream pop in the period before
1955.
But also to talk a bit about the role of
technology, and how the development of
technology really affects in many ways,
the way that the history of rock n' roll
unfolds.
some of you may, some of you guitar
players may be surprised to know that
there is actually a guy named Les Paul
and Les Paul is not just a brand or a
model of guitar made by the Gibson Guitar
Company.
In fact, Les Paul as a guitarist, was one
of the top guitarists in jazz and in
popular music in this period between the
Second World War, well, during the Second
World War, during the 40s leading up to
rock, and roll.
I mean, he, he had the best gig in, in
all the business and that he was the
guitarist for the Bing Crosby group.
and also recorded on the side with his
jazz group.
And then developed this duo with his
wife, Mary Ford.
one interesting thing about these Les
Paul and Mary Ford recordings, is that
Les Paul in, in, did this thing with
overdubbing his, his, music, where
initially, the way he would do it is,
there, there were, there were no tapes
involved, the way that you recorded
something was you'd actually cut it onto
a disc.
But if you had two disc cutting machines
like that, you could put one thing, you
could cut one thing onto a disc, and then
once you had that one thing recorded, you
could play that back and while you were
playing that back, you could play
something else along with it, and then
cut that onto a second disc.
And then, you could take that second
disc, put it back on a first machine.
Put a fresh disk here.
Hear those two things together.
Add a third thing.
Record that onto that disk.
And then keep adding, so you can add this
sort of layered you can do this layered
technique of sort of creating track after
track after track.
Well, one of the things that Les Paul is
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instrumental in doing is creating these
layered arrangements where there are tons
and tons of guitar.
And also tons and tons of vocal
harmonies, all of it, just being Les Paul
and Mary Ford.
One of the things he knew was that tape
recording was going to be big, big, big
in the popular music business and that it
was, it was a technology that was
going to change a lot of things.
And indeed it did.
You see tape recording was developed by
the Germans during the Second World War
as a way of recording Hitler's voice when
he would give his speeches to the nation.
The Germans were concerned that the
Americans had technology that would allow
them to zero in on exactly where Hitler
was when he was delivering his radio
addresses to the German nation and then
they would bomb that radio station and,
and perhaps kill the leader.
And so, what they decided to do was they
developed this technology, whereby they
could get lifelike reproductions of his
voice, send that to the radio station
where Hitler could be in an entirely
different part of the country at the
time.
And so that if, if the station ended up
getting bombed, the worst they would do
is ruin a tape recorder.
Now, the, the allies didn't know anything
about this until Germany was conquered.
And all of the sudden these troops
wondered the first thing you should do,
of course, is take over the
communications of, of, of any sit you
march into.
And they go into these radio stations and
what do they see?
These big reel to reel recorders there.
And it turns out that this magnetic tape
recording the Germans had developed this
to a fantastically high degree of
fidelity.
Well, Les Paul heard about this and he
said, he told Bing Crosby, he said, you
know, Bing This was going to be the next
best thing, the next big thing.
You, you ought to think about investing
in this.
So Bing Crosby took the money that he
had, he was a rich man at the time, he
took a lot of the money that he had, and
he invent, he, he, invested it in the
Ampex Tape Company and that ended up
making him millions of dollars.
He got in on the ground floor of, of
recorded tape.
And one of the things he was able to do
for Les Paul, that is Bing Crosby was
able to do for Les Paul, was to give him
one of the first 8-track recording
machines.
Now we're talking about the early 1950s
here.
8-track recording didn't come in,
generally in rock music until the end of
the 1960s but Les Paul had a machine.
He called it the Octopus because he
recorded 8-tracks, where he could now do
what he had been doing by, you know,
playing things on different records and
playing them back again.
He could play one, he could play one
thing on track 1, one thing on 2, one
thing on track 3, one on 4, one on 5.
He could build these arrangements up the
way he'd been doing.
So, it was fantastic.
for him and it all came from his
connection with Bing Crosby there.
also another thing about Les Paul that
we, we mentioned earlier is that he's
often referred to as the inventor of the
solid body electric guitar.
Not the electric guitar, there had been
electric guitars before for Les Paul.
For heaven's sake, Charlie Christian
played one with Benny Good-, Goodman's
group.
But the solid body electric guitar.
And so, it isn't quite true that Les Paul
invented the solid body electric guitar,
but he was one of the first ones to be
involved in engineering a kind of solid
body electric guitar.
He would, ended up going into partnership
with the Gibson Guitar Company and they
produced the Les Paul model.
The Les Paul guitar has become iconic.
And so these developments in technology.
this, this overdubbing, this tape
technology, this overdubbing technology.
the development of the solid-body guitar,
solid-body electric guitar.
All these kinds of things make a big
change.
Now, we couldn't think about Les Paul as
being an important figure in rock music
per se, because none of his music was
never rock oriented.
But Les Paul as a guitarist, was a
fantastic influence on a whole generation
of guitarists who came after him in rock
and roll.
Jimmy Page people like this, were all
sort of big Les Paul fanatics.
The song are the songs they heard when
they were a kid.
but the technologies that he developed
will continue to influence rock and roll
for many years, in fact decades to come.
Well up to this point, we've talked about
the development of mainstream pop music
in the period up to 1955.
And at the beginning of this this series
of lectures, I said we're going to think
about two other styles of music, country
and western and rhythm and blues.
So now we take up the story of country
and western.
I don't know how many of you have seen
the Blues Brothers movie, but there's a
fantastic interesting scene where John
Belushi Is talking to, they go to this
club.
They're looking for a gig.
It's a, it's a club out in the sticks.
It's a country club, and it says that the
Good Old Boys are going to be performing
that night, and the Blues Brothers show
up.
The band, the Good Old Boys band hasn't
actually shown up, so the Blue Brothers
convince themselves they're the Good Old
Blues Brothers Boys.
[LAUGH] But after the gig is finished,
and they're all packed up and they're
leaving, the actual Good Old Boys do show
up.
And John Belushi starts to talk to the
guy to kind of maybe try to worm out of
it, so he doesn't have to give him the
money or anything.
So what kind of music do you play?
And the, the, the country music, musician
says oh, we play both kinds, country and
western.
And that's supposed to be a joke, because
people think this guy's so limited, that
he thinks the whole world exists in
country and western music.
That they're actually two kinds of music.
The actual truth is, that in the period
before 1945, there were two kinds of
music, country and western.
And, that's what we're going to talk
about, those early days before 1945.
And what was, what, what was thought of
as country music.
And what was thought of as western music.
Now, country and western music overall,
was often referred to as hillbilly music.
It was music that was, that was thought
to be of interest and, and would be
consumed by people who were relatively
low income, low educated, rural
listeners, mostly in the south.
we will find out that through the course
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of the Second World War and through
migration patterns, it turns out that a
lot of these folks ended up in northern
cities.
But we'll get to that story soon enough.
Let's now talk about the difference
between country and western for the rest
of this video.
Country music is associated with the
Southeast, with the Appalachian region,
and it's very much influenced by white
gospel.
There was a guy by the name of Ralph
Peer, who went into the south, and in the
20s, started recording up as many people
as he could on a, on a portable, a
recording machine that he had, a disc,
disc cutting machine and sometimes wire
recorders.
and some of the people that he would get
would be as close as probably we're ever
going to come to hearing what that
original regional music sounded like,
before anybody was, before it got sort of
on the radio, and became a little bit
more affected by other cultures.
And so, some of the first people that he
recorded, Ralph Peer recorded, were
"Fiddlin" John Carson, and I love this
group, Gid Tanner and His Skillet
Lickers, right?
This is very much, sort of, indigenous,
southeastern, culture.
But probably the two most important acts
two most important groups from this early
country, scene, would be the Carter
Family, with their Can the Circle Be
Unbroken from 1935.
You get a real sense, not only of the
gospel influence, of the harmony singing,
but also of Maybelle Carter's distinctive
guitar solo.
Where she plays the melody on the low
strings, while also sort of playing the
cords above it.
among the country guitar players, that's
sort of a famous solo, that a lot of them
point to as being important in the
development of country music.
Also, Roy Acuff was an enormously popular
person among country music people.
A good example of his music is the Great
Speckled Bird from 1936.
Without giving too much away, he says in
the lyrics the great speckled bird is the
Bible.
And so again, you get this connection to
the white gospel tradition in this music.
He also uses a slide guitar, there's also
a slide guitar on that recording.
And we're reminded that the slide guitar
in this case, comes from a craze from
about the same time of Hawaiian guitar in
America.
And so they were actually using, not so
much a bottle neck thing, like we're
going to hear in rhythm and blues music
but more like a Hawaiian guitar.
There were no pedals or anything on it,
the, the guitar was just tuned open.
But, it was that sort of Hawaiian guitar
thing that eventually morphed into the
steel guitar playing that became so
characteristic of country music in the
period after 1945.
We hear that already in Roy Acuff's music
from 1936 incoming from the, from the,
craze for Hawaiian, slide guitar.
In juxtaposition to country music which
was from the Southeast, we can talk about
western music, which was from the
Southwest.
Mostly Texas and Oklahoma, and also the
west coast California.
Western music sort of broke down into two
possible things.
You either had Western swing.
And the guy, the guy who was big in
western swing was Bob Wills and his Texas
Playboys.
For all intents and purposes, the western
swing bands were, were a, a regular big
band except that they they used fiddles,
and sometimes he would use a sort of
south of the border kind of a horn
section.
but it was a, it was sort of country
country music meets big band.
and those Bob Wills recordings, you might
want to check out New San Antonia Rose
from 1940.
Interestingly, that was a hit for him,
him on the country charts.
It was then covered by Bing Crosby, and
was a hit for Bing Crosby on the
mainstream pop charts.
You never would have heard the Bob Wills
record on the mainstream pop charts.
But the Bing Crosby version, no problem
there.
In addition to western swing.
The other style from that, from the
western, part of this, is Gene Autry,
Gene Autry and the cowboy song.
The idea of the, sort of, Hollywood
cowboy sitting on a horse out there.
sort of, you know?
on a, on a ranch somewhere, you know,
with his guitar on.
And singin' a song.
In the case of Gene Autry, you can hear a
tune like Back In the Saddle Again, from
1939, and really get an idea of what the
cowboy song was about.
That's what was western about that music.
Of course, a lot of these guys appearing
in movies at the time, cowboy musicals
kind of things.
And important ones were not only Gene
Autry.
But also, Roy Rogers.
We can take just a minute to talk about
somebody who might be thought of as the
first real star of country music, country
and western music, before it really came
together as a kind of major industry in
Nashville.
We'll talk about Nashville in the next
video.
That person who was the first big star of
country music was a fellow by the name of
Jimmie Rodgers, who was active from about
1927 through 1923.
He died at the age of 36 from
tuberculosis.
But his records had a tremendous appeal.
his, his now, now we have a sense where
his particular performances, not just the
songs themselves, but his particular
performances made a very big difference.
And he was he was.
His singing style was very influential on
people like not only Gene Autry, who we
talked about just a minute ago, but also
Ernest Tubb and Eddie Arnold.
the thing about Jimmie Rodgers that's
interesting is not only his music itself,
but the fact that already we start to see
an image being constructed for Jimmie
Rodgers to portray him in a particular
kind of way.
So when you bought the sheet music for a
Jimmie Rodgers song, you saw him in one
of two images.
He was either the Blue Yodler, or he was
the Singing Brakeman.
The Singing Brakeman is interesting
because it would always have him looking
like he worked on a railroad, sort of
wearing overalls as if he was some
kind of of a guy who, you know, worked on
a rail road when he got some time he
would go into one of the cars and sing
him a song.
And then he would get back to firing the,
the furnace on the, on the train or
whatever.
but of course Jimmy Rodgers, the actual
guy, would never really worked on a
railroad, or did any of those kinds of
things.
This was all a kind of way of marketing
Jimmie Rodgers.
Constructing an image of authenticity
around who he was.
That's going to be really important as we
continue to tell our story.
The idea that these images of
authenticity are almost always
contructed, but that doesn't make them
invalid.
But it does mean that we're starting to
see how the machinery is beginning to
work.
it isn't enough that he's a country
singer.
We have to construct an image of him as a
kind of country singer when we see that.
to get an example, to get a
representative example of what his music
sounded like, I would recommend the song
Blue Yodel, from 1927, a song that was
later covered by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the
70s.
This song features the the the sort of
trademark Jimmie Rodgers' yodel.
You might wonder what's yodeling, which
seems to be more associated with like,
the Swiss Alps, or something, doing in
country music in the 19, late 1920s, and
late 1930s, but there it is.
And it catches hold, and a lot of people
imitate that.
So Jimmie Rodgers can be thought of as
the first star of country music.
In the next video, we'll talk about how
country music really comes together in
1945 in Nashville, Tennessee.
We continue our story about the growth of
country and western music by considering
how it is that Nashville Tennessee became
the home of country and western music
after 1945.
How the popularity of we, Country and
western music grew to the point where
there could be one city that brought both
Country and western music together.
Under one umbrella we'll, we'll think
about that in this particular video.
probably the place for us to start with
thinking about how country and western
came together as an industry in Nashville
is to think as we do with pop music about
radio exposure.
Now, radio exposure for country and
western music is different from the way
it was for mainstream pop.
With mainstream pop, that was exposed on
the radio because it was the music of the
mainstream culture.
And so, when there was music on the
radio, it was mainstream pop music or
classical music.
But it mostly was not country and western
music.
And it almost never was rhythm and blues
music.
That was not thought of as music that was
particularly appropriately played much on
on, on regular network radio.
So, if I say country and western music
gets its exposure through radio, what can
I possibly mean if I just got done
telling you that it hardly ever got on
the radio?
Well, what happened is as I said a little
bit in one of the previous lectures, I
said something about these super
stations.
And the way super stations work in early
radio licensing, you know, when they're
were figuring out how much territory, you
could cover with your radio station.
If your, your broadcasting at this
frequency, how high a power you can
broadcast at and all that kind of thing.
There were certain kinds of deals that
were made.
And one of the deals that were made was
while the sun is still shining, stations
can broadcast a certain power level so
they're not covering each other.
because you've got two stations on the
same frequency.
If they're not far enough away from each
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other, they'll start to bleed into each
other, and listeners won't be able to
hear either one, or they'll go back and
forth between the other.
So they had to work all this stuff out.
So what they did is, they, everybody got
to broadcast during the day.
But in the evening, certain stations were
allowed to crank up the power.
And when they cranked up the power, the
other stations that were on the same
wavelength, had to crank down their
power.
So, they wouldn't get in the way.
So in the evening, there would be
stations in a, in a world before
cellphones and satellite transmissions.
When there weren't a whole bunch of
signals bouncing around through the air.
You could take one of these stations and
it could broadcast, you know, up to five,
600 miles away from where it was and
cover a significant swath of the country.
Well, it turned out one of those stations
was WSM in Nashville, Tennessee.
And they developed a show, a music show,
that was important to people who lived in
Nashville, Tennessee called the Grand Ole
Opry.
And that show, when it played evenings on
the weekend, could be heard all around.
My father grew up in just south of, of of
Pittsburgh.
And he talks about being able to get the
Grand Ole Opry in from W, WSM when he was
growing up back in the the late 1930s.
And so this is, this is fantastic.
These super stations are able to
distribute this music all around regions
of the country without having to use the
network radio to do that.
Another big one of these was a, was a
station called WLS in Chicago that had a
show called National Barndance.
Well, it turned out this music started to
get a little bit more popular.
And so, you could get a short show, maybe
30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes, on one of
the big networks.
In fact, it was the Chicago show, the
National Barndance, that first got onto
NBC in syndication for I think it was, 30
minutes in 19 33.
So, you can actually now hear a little
bit of country music, kind of as a
novelty thing maybe once a week on NBC.
By 1939, NBC was covering the Grand Ole
Opry.
And it wasn't too long before the Grand
Ole Opry came to be thought of as the
country radio show you wanted to be on.
So if you wanted to have a career in
country and western music, you had to get
on the Grand Ole Opry, you had to come to
Nashville, Tennessee.
So what ends up happening?
You get a lot of people coming in to
Nashville, Tennessee, and so it's a
convenient place to have a recording
studio.
If you're doing country and western
music, it's a convenient place to have a
publishing house, if you're a publisher
who publishes these, these songs in
It's even a good place to have a guitar
store or to be a booking agent or any of
these kinds of things.
So, Nashville starts to become
headquarters for country and western
music mostly because so many of the top
musicians are coming through to perform
on the Grand Ole Opry.
Now we pick up a story that we, we left
off from one of the other videos about
how constructing, how you construct
images.
And it's fairly well agreed, I think,
among scholars who study the history of
That the image of the Grand Ole Opry was
pretty much constructed to represent what
people thought of country music, or
country people of the day.
That is, that no matter what these people
who participated in the Grand Ole Opry
were actually like in real life.
While they were on stage, they kind of
played the rube.
They kind of played it down, they played
into almost a caricature of what country
life was.
So, you had people like Minnie Pearl who
would come out to do her comedy bit, and
she would be wearing a very fancy hat.
But on the fancy hat, with the price tag,
would still be hanging there.
Of course, it was important that not only
you knew that she had the hat, but how
much she paid for it.
because that showed how highfalutin she
was.
But of course, by having the tag hanging
there, you knew that she was definitely
not highfalutin.
And it was that irony that they played
on.
Somebody who's so silly that they think
they can impress somebody by leaving the
price tags on their clothing when they
would.
This is the kind of thing that of course
who, I'm sure that when Minnie Pearl went
out in the evening after the show was
out.
She could go out in hats that had price
tags hanging off of them.
Other one was a fellow by the name of
Grandpa Jones.
Who if you look at old videos of the, of
the glamour opera, ones that you can see
even from the late 40s and early 1950s.
It's clear that Grandpa Jones is only
about 35 years old.
He's wearing a false wig, he's got his
hair sort of, he's wearing a wig, a false
beard and a wig and this kind of thing.
And he's playing the role of a cranky old
banjo playing grandpa, but he's basically
playing that part.
Not unlike Mark Hamill playing Luke
Skywalker for Star Wars.
He's playing the role of grandpa Jones,
playing to this idea of the rube.
And this is what the Grand Ole Opry
specialized in, constructing this image
of country music as being a particular
kind of thing, projecting this image.
And it was very, very effective at doing
so.
But there are other ways that Country and
Western music came to be popular in this
country besides the radio.
one of them has to do with the fact that
a lot of people were thrown together in
the Second World War who were from
different parts of the country.
And, so you get people, you know, going
into the South for basic training.
And guys from the north who are now
bunking together with guys from the
south.
And they're, they're, talking about their
lives and they're sharing their music.
And a lot of guys, for the first time,
were hearing country music that had never
heard it before.
And they started to like it.
In fact, country music got so popular in
the Armed Forces during World War II.
That Roy Acuff was voted the most popular
singer in the Armed Forces during one of
those years.
In fact, Japa, Japanese Kamikaze pilots
used to, while they were crashing their
plane into boats and things like that say
to hell with Roosevelt.
To hell with Babe Ruth, to hell with Roy
Acuff.
You know, country singer.
So, it gives you an idea of people were
starting to sort of embrace this music.
And of course, when those Northerners
went back to their cities after they,
they left the service and the war was
over.
If they developed a taste for that music,
they wanted to hear it.
And that's where the development of
country music in these urban areas takes,
takes its foothold.
so Nashville becomes the central place
after 1945.
And as I said before that's mostly
because of the Grand Ole Opry.
And you've got your recording to do's,
and your publishers, and all these kinds
of things sort of focusing in on
Nashville.
The most important publisher of that era
is is a publishing house put together by
Roy Acuff and a guy by the name of Fred
Rose.
Who had been a New York publisher.
But as the story goes, his wife was
originally from Nashville, and so she
wanted to move back to Nashville.
So he moved back to Nashville with her
and opened up a publishing business
there.
But of course, he had all of the
advantage of having been in the business
back in New York.
So in many ways, this Acuff Rose
publishing business became one of the
principal publishers in Nashville.
And brought a sense of the sort of New
York music business sophistication to
town with it.
They were very fortunate that the song
Tennessee Waltz, which I mentioned a
couple of videos ago, from 1950 sung by
Patti Page was actually owned by Acuff
and Rose.
And so, they earned a ton of money from
the royalties that came with having that
hit recording.
And they were able to take that money,
and invest it in the business, and grow
it.
One of the things they were doing at
about that time, is signing songwriters.
And, one of the songwriters they signed
in 1946 I think it was, was Hank
Williams.
Hank Williams has got to be seen in this
period before 1-, between 1945 and 1955
as the most important singer in country
and western music.
And through the fame of country, of of
Hank Williams coming out of Nashville, it
all, it really plays a big role in
solidifying Nashville as the as the, the
home of country music.
But, Hank Williams was another one of
these guys who had a very, very short
time in the sun.
From his first release in 1947 to his
death in 1953, we're only talking about 6
years, but his songs have lived on
forever.
They're still being covered by country
musicians and rock musicians even to this
day.
So he was signed by Acuff-Rose as a
songwriter and not a performer.
In fact, and his first song to come out
on record was actually sung by another
artist known by the name of Molly O'Day.
By 1947, he had his own record out of a
song called Move It On Over.
In 1948, he appeared on a show just like
the Grand Ole Opry, but originating from
Shreveport, Louisiana called Louisiana
Hayride.
A couple years later, a young Elvis
Presley would be featured on the
Louisiana Hayride, also at the Grand Ole
Opry.
Some of his important tunes that, that,
as we look back at Hank Williams Your
Cheatin' Heart and Cold Cold Heart sort
of show Hank in the mode of romantic
anguish.
Thinking about how he's anguishing over a
woman in a romantic relationship.
Hey Good Lookin, which is one filled with
confident, sort of, sort of a country
version of confident excitement and sort
of in prayerful testimony.
We hear him with I Saw the Light
reinforcing the kind of church traditions
that have always been part of a country
life.
So, for Hank Williams, we really have to
think of as that guy who was the first
big Nashville star of country music.
Jimmy Rodgers, again from the late 20s,
early 30s, and Hank Williams from the
late 40s, early 50s.
Very, very important figures.
One last figure we should talk about, I'm
sorry we haven't got more time to talk
about this, is the birth of bluegrass
music.
Very rarely in the history of music are
we able to say, we know exactly where a
style started and exactly who started it.
[LAUGH] But in this case, we almost do.
Bill Monroe, and his Bluegrass Boys were
essentially the beginning of bluegrass
music in popular music.
And even though bluegrass sounds, like
it's a music that goes way back to the
beginning of time, it was actually kind
of developed in the period after 1945.
It sounds like it goes way back, but it
actually doesn't in many ways.
It's music that's, that's, that
emphasizes acoustic instruments, no
drums.
In fact, there were no drums throughout
the Grand Ole Opry for a long time.
So, you've got mandolin, you've got
banjo, you've got acoustic guitar, you've
got fiddle.
and, and in fact, there's just one
microphone, there's kind of a shunning of
technology, often times.
They'll add extra measures, while the
different soloist come to the come to the
microphone.
There's a little bit of extra sort of
walking time, that's that's figured into
the music, so everybody can get in front
of the microphone.
in many ways bluegrass music as old as it
sounds is kind of the bee-bop jazz of
country and western.
It's where the players go who really want
to show off their ability to be able to
play virtuostically.
So, it's important that in the late 40s
when the Bluegrass Boys make their first
recordings.
Earl Scruggs, the banjo player, is sort
of the star soloist of the group.
Earl Scruggs and that banjo playing that
he does that five string banjo playing
becomes really the emblematic sound of
Bluegrass music, even today.
also in that group is Lester Flatt.
After they played, after Lester Flatt and
Earl Scruggs played with Bill Monroe for
a while, they, they started their own
group.
And that's really where they had most of
their fame as Flatt and Scruggs.
If you want to listen to a great
bluegrass piece, you've got time for only
one piece of bluegrass music.
I would look for Bill Monroe and his
Bluegrass Boys, Blue Moon of Kentucky for
194, from 1947.
That also has a great connection to the
course because one of the first songs
released by Elvis Presley on Sun Records,
in 1954, was his own version of Bill
Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky.
Up to this point we've talked about the
growth of mainstream pop music in the
period up to 1955.
And we've talked about the development of
country music up to 1955 as well and the
establishment of Nashville, Tennessee as
as the home of country and western music.
Bringing together country and western,
and launching one of the first big stars
of country music.
Hank Williams in the early, late 1940s,
early 1950s.
We now turn to the third style that I
promised at the very beginning of this
series, and that is the music of rhythm
and blues.
Now, the first thing I think it's
important to say about rhythm and blues
is that Rhythm and blues is a way of
describing a market category.
It's a way of describing a demographic.
Rhythm and blues was thought of as music
made by, and consumed by, African
Americans.
It was music from and for black listeners
and musicians.
but inside rhythm and blues, there are
there's a lot of different kind of music
going on.
So, you know, as a, as a sort of, you
know, musicologist it isn't so much a it,
it is a stylistic label, but it's a
troubled one because its, its first
definition seems to have to do with who's
making it and who's consuming it, as
opposed to the musical qualities that it
has.
Now of course, the musical qualities are,
are consistent and it is kind of
stylistic, but it's just important to say
that that's a lot broader category than
you might think just by looking at them.
Now, we've talked about the different
charts and the different markets.
And when we get into 1945 and forward,
we're going to think a lot about how
there were different charts that were for
rhythm and blues music, for country and
Western music, and for mainstream pop.
Mainstream pop being, by far the biggest
market sort of the, sort of the kind of
the normative market, mainstream pop, and
these two other niche markets.
country and western music, which was
originally called Hillbilly Records and
rhythm and blues, which were really
called, which were originally called Race
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Records.
and, it's important, I think, to point
out that people will say well, there's,
there's a certain amount of racism
involved in this, and the truth is, I
think, that in fact there was, there was
a lot of racism going on in the country,
but my experience is that people in the
music business don't care so much about
white, or black, or brown, what they care
about is green.
They will take anybody's money, and
they'll make it wherever they can.
And so I don't think the music business
is responsible for fostering this racism.
But it certainly is accepting it and
trying to exploit it for all it's worth
by separating these charts out.
And so rhythm and blues is, is separated
out, maybe a little bit more, well,
probably a lot more drastically than
country and western is that we were
talking about just now.
But, it is important to understand that
these charts were divided for the
merchant's use and not really for the
fans.
That is, when we start to talk originally
about magazines like Billboard and
Cashbox, those weren't designed for fans
to sort of buy and sort of see what the
big hits were.
They were designed for people who ran
jukeboxes or eventually, for people who
ran radio stations, for people who ran
record stores, so they could know what
records were hot, so they could make sure
they had the records that everybody
seemed to want to buy.
Had plenty of those on hand, but weren't
stuck with a bunch of ones that nobody
wanted anymore.
And so you had a service that tried to
provide a kind of a predictor, almost
like a kind of a weather service for
sales and that's really what that was
about.
And so, you know, from a pragmatic point
of view, if you're, if you're in a black
neighborhood and you're selling R&B
records and you, there's probably no
likelihood that white musicians and white
customers are going to come in to buy
records from you, you don't really need
to know what it is their going to like
because you don't need to have that
product on hand and vice verse.
As rhythm and blues starts to emerge from
our, in our historical consciousnesses in
the early 20th century, maybe one of the
first important figures we're going to
think about is a guy by the name of WC
Handy who sold a lot of sheet music
pre-World War One with songs like Memphis
Blues and Saint Louis Blues.
But the first blues recordings we have
date from the 1920s and the biggest star
of the 1920s, it's clear in blues music
is a singer by the name of Bessie Smith.
Her Down Hearted Blues From 1923 sold
over a million records.
Bessie's performances are maybe, if you
don't know her music, they're a little
bit more polished than you might think
would come from blues artists of the
1920s.
We're so used to thinking of Delta Blues
and those, those, those recordings being
a lot more sort of raw and rugged.
But these are, these are these are very
and there is some very sophisticated
singing, and there's, you know, not much
of the usual sort of guitar playing stuff
on it.
But in the wake of, of Bessie Smith's
tremendous success people sort of think
we'll let's, let's go out in the country
and see if we can find people who, who
can do this blues music, and we can maybe
sell some records.
and so, one of the most famous of these
musicians who's discovered during this
period is Robert Johnson, another one of
these guys who died very young.
died in 1938 at a at a very young age.
He's mostly associated with Delta or
Rural blues.
Blues that came from the Mississippi
Delta era, area, or, or, or from places
in the South that were not particularly
built up or urban.
the music will often feature one singer,
maybe there will be another person along,
with that, that singer, playing the
guitar, maybe playing another instrument,
or banging, tapping their foot on the
floor.
And so, that music tends to be very
loose.
If a singer wants to add an extra beat or
an extra measure or whatever like that.
No problem, they can just do it, as as
the spirit moves them.
They don't have to worry about
coordinating with other musicians.
So it's a very, expressive, sometimes
very raw, sound,
And so Robert Johnson is really the, the
true master of that.
Probably the song you need to know, at
least the one that hooks up mostly with
what we're going to talk about in the
history of rock, is his Cross Roads Blues
of 1936.
Eric Clapton and Cream covered that tune
in the late 1960s.
And Eric Clapton in many ways is
responsible for bringing to our attention
the fantastic recordings of, of Robert
Johnson.
Most of them that were done in a couple
of years.
Right there, around 1936, there's also
kind of a fun story, which is almost
certainly not true, that Robert Johnson
sold his soul to the Devil, to get his
fantastic guitar playing skills, he met
him at the crossroads and made a deal
with the Devil.
Anyway, colorful story but I don't think,
it probably worked out like that.
At least, we have no historical evidence
to prove that it's true.
As we go onto the 1940's and the war
years.
Jump Blues starts to come in.
Jump Blues is a form of big band jazz.
This, what's happens when you can't
afford to bring all those horn players
around on the road anymore and you break
it down to just a couple of horn players.
and you get this sort of Jump Blues
style.
And nobody was better at jump blues
during the 1940's than Louie Jordan and
His Tympani Five.
And here's another case of a black artist
crossing over onto mainstream pop charts.
those records of his Caldonia from 1945
and Choo Choo Ch'boogie from 1946 were
big hits not only on the R&B charts but
also on the mainstream pop charts.
Well, in the next video, we'll see what
happened with R&B in the time after World
War II.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Well now we turn to Rhythm & Blues, and
the period after 1945, closing in on
1955, and our at least provisional date
for the birth of rock music.
One of the things that we have to keep in
mind as we think about how this music
originally associated with, R&B culture
starts, or black culture, starts to make
its way into urban areas.
Is the migration occurred in this country
from the rural South to the urban North.
The idea that, that, that blacks who were
liv, working in rural environments, in
fields and doing farm work and that kind
of thing.
Would get on the train and go to the end
of the stop, wherever it landed north,
and that place north might be Chicago, it
might be Detroit, it might be Baltimore,
it might be New York.
But whatever, they wanted to get out of
that kind of life, and into the
increasingly available faculty or factory
and service jobs that were available in
the big cities, and this was especially
the case during the second World War.
Where everybody was being pulled together
to, to to build the things that we needed
to compete in that war.
So, there was a giant migration into the
cities.
we're still talking about a time where
things are pretty segregated, so people
are moving up from the south into the
cities.
But still staying together in their own
neighborhoods, and that plays a big role
in how it is that R&B is able to become
such an important force.
Well, once these people are all in these
areas, there are independant labels, and
now we start to talk about indie labels
Independent labels that start to take
advantage of this.
These people are here, they want to hear
music, we will put out records that they
will perhaps buy and and this is how you
get these independent labels which are
mostly regional, mostly, in certain
cities.
So, we can talk about places like Chicago
and New York and Memphis and Los Angeles
and, and these kinds of places,
Baltimore, you name it.
in addition to talking about indie
labels, which we'll have to do, we'll
also need to talk about Regional Radio.
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Now, a couple of, several lectures ago, I
talked about how when the radio audience
migrated from radio to television.
It left a lot of openings in radio,
because the, the syndicated programming
that those stations were using didn't
disappear immediately.
But it was clear that everyone was
putting their money into television,
because that's what the next big thing
was.
And so there were real opportunities in
radio.
People who had these stations started
changing their orientation.
Rather than being a local affiliate for a
national network, they started to think
regionally.
They started to think, well, if I'm going
to sell advertising, how can I sell that
to some kind of a group right here
locally.
And it turned out that one of those
groups they could sell advertising to was
the black community.
and that's, that's a fantastic story of
this chain, of this moving to television,
making opportunities for radio stations
that could now focus on rhythm and blues
music.
So, we'll talk about that in just a
minute.
For now, let's go through the, the story
with indie labels and the rise of R&B.
There are, at least, well there, there
are probably dozens of independent labels
we could talk about, that have to do with
rhythm & blues.
But there are some that are really
important, that we have to, that we have
to take some time thinking about.
Let's first start with Chess Records,
which was formed by Phil and Leonard
Chess in Chicago In 1947.
Chess Records is mostly associated with
the style of Chicago electric blues that
we hear in artists like Bo Diddley, Muddy
Waters, Howlin' Wolf.
And also the first records of Chuck
Berry, which aren't so much Chicago
electric blues, but Chess was the label
that Chuck Berry was on.
Of course he made an awful lot Of money
from them, but Chess did more than that.
They had other black artists on their
label who were doing things that weren't
just Chicago electric blues, they had
doo-wop and other kinds of things.
But what they become, have become known
for, is the Chicago electric blues of the
1950's.
And when you think about an independent
label like Chess Records, you have to
figure that Chess Records consists of
Phil and Leonard Chess, and maybe a
secretary who answers the phone and does
all of their paperwork for them.
They maybe got a couple of rooms of
offices, and so, they do their, their
office work by day, and then at 5 o'clock
they clear all the desks away and create
a space.
And then somebody comes in with a tape
recorder, and they actually do their
recordings there.
And now as they're sort of making more
money, they will be getting increasingly
better facilities.
But these, these independent labels, I
mean they are really just living on a
shoestring here.
They're having their records pressed in
order to get them to dis, distributed.
You basically are going around to record
stores yourselves with the, with the
records in the trunk of your car,
distributing yourself.
So, there's certain limits to how much
business you can actually do if the way
your doing it is this very limited
circumstances.
And so this indie status had a way of
sort of keeping indie labels small.
In fact there's a certain kind of penalty
that can come to you, if you actually
have a record that gets too big, too
fast, but we'll talk about that a little
bit later.
Now in distinction to Chess Records,
which was, those Chess recordings are
usually appreciated, because they have a
kind of rawness to them.
There's a certain kind of unbuttoned
ruggedness to the way the record sound,
and that's what people like the early
British blues rocker from the 1960's.
They loved that aspect of what was going
on with Chess Records.
And to a certain extent, I'm not sure the
guys at Chess wanted them to sound quite
like that, but that's what they had
available to them and that's just the way
they sounded.
But it became the mark of what a Chess
blues record would sound like.
Now in distinction and sort of contrast
to that, we turn to Atlantic Records
which was formed just a year later in New
York.
By Ahmet Ertegun, who would become one of
the most important people in the music
business in the second half of the 20th
century.
and Herb Abramson, that was a slicker,
more traditional approach to R&B.
Traditional in the sense that there would
be arrangements done for tunes.
So, the artists would come in reading
charts, there would be professional
session musicians who would do these,
these these sessions.
Where as opposed to, to Chicago with
Chess Records if it would show up for the
session.
They'd kind of make stuff up as they went
along.
And this was really a kind of imitation
of what main, of how a mainstream pop
recording session would go.
And the people at Atlantic Records tried
to get the best possible sound they could
out of their recordings.
They didn't want them sounding rugged,
they didn't want anybody to say, what a
fantastic, raw sound.
Of course, they liked a kind of a raw
performance, but the actual sound of the
recording they were very particular
about.
And Atlantic had a guy by the name of Tom
Dowd doing all of the engineering.
Tom Dowd has become one of these
legendary figures in the history of of
rock music, for being one of the first
guys to really master the recording
studio and get some great sounds.
In fact, we talked before about Les Paul
and that first eight track recording
machine that he got, that he called the
octopus, that he got thanks to Bing
Crosby.
Well the second one that was made was
made for Atlantic Records.
And Tom Dowd had that machine, and so
Atlantic was making recordings on eight
track, oh, 15 years before the Beatles,
Sergeant Pepper.
so they were really concerned about sound
quality.
Some of the artists they had in the
period before rock and roll were Ruth
Brown, who was really kind of their go to
artist.
Ray Charles was on the was on the label
at that time.
Big Joe Turner, and The Drifters, all had
had hits on the R&B charts for Atlantic
Records.
The other important Indie that we
definitely need to spend a little bit of
time on is Sun Records from Memphis,
Tennessee founded by Sam Phillips in
1953.
Now, Sam Phillips didn't start in the
music business in 1953, he had been an
independent recording guy.
His thing was he would go out and record
all kinds of things, usually he'd be
recording you know, choirs that sang,
church music and that kind of thing.
But on the side he was recording a lot of
African American musicians because that
was the kind of music he liked.
In fact, before Elvis Presley came in to
his studio and recorded in 1954.
Sam Phillips was recording and releasing
almost exclusively black artists.
In fact, an important record, Rocket 88,
which was the number one R&B hit in 1951
for Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats,
interestingly enough with Ike Turner,
later of Ike and Tina Turner Review on
piano.
that record was actually by Sam Phillips
in his, in his studios in Sun, but then
leased to Chess Records who released it
in 1951 on the Chess label, they bought
the rights to the recording from Sam
Phillips.
So, he was involved in doing a certain
amount of that.
But when he got his own artist, maybe his
biggest artist early on was Rufus Thomas,
who had a some hits from an R&B charts.
But then he was famous for having having
signed Elvis Presley in 1954 and then
having sold Elvis' contract to RCA.
Other artists he had later in the 50's
Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny
Cash, was also and Roy Orbison, were also
on the Sun label in the second half of
the 1950's.
But that gets ahead of our story.
Other important indie labels in R&B,
Specialty Records in Los Angeles, started
by Art Rupe in 1945, he would later
release all of his singles by Little
Richard.
Imperial Records also in Los Angeles,
started in 1947 by Lew Chudd.
He would release all those Fats Domino's
records, although all the Fats Domino's
records were recorded by Dave Bartholomew
down in New Orleans.
And then interestingly, Dot Records in
Tennessee, run by Randy Wood, it started
in 1951, which released the records of
Pat Boone, of all people.
Interestingly, the story about Pat Boone
is that we like to think about him as
being exclusive appealing to white
artists, but Pat Boone actually had a
bunch of hits on the R&B charts.
Now we want to, we want to just take a
minute to contrast those indie labels,
Chess, Atlantic, Sun, Specialty,
Imperial, and Dot with what would have
been the major labels in the 1950s, and
those, those labels were.
And this line will come up and you'll see
these as they go by.
Decca, which was started in the UK in
1937.
Mercury, out of Chicago.
RCA-Victor out on New York.
Columbia out on New York.
MGM, affiliated with the Hollywood
Studios out there.
And Los Angeles, also Capital in Los
Angeles which was taken over by EMI.
The Americ, the British label in 1956.
You can see the artists that are
affiliated with each of those major
labels.
Those labels, when they release a record,
could get it into national distribution
almost immediately.
The indie labels were regional, it was
very difficult for them to release
anything nationally.
And so you had these fantastic major
labels that were focusing almost entirely
on mainstream pop.
And that left room for these independent
labels to focus on R&B.
Mostly not bothered too much or harassed
in any way by the major labels.
Until rock and roll hit, and until these
R&B labels started to sell big numbers of
records.
Then all of a sudden, the majors took
notice, and they were going to start
fighting back.
But that get's ahead of our story.
In the next video, let's talk about the
role of radio and the rise of R&B.
We talked in the last video about the
rise of rhythm and blues in the period
leading up to 1955, our birth of rock.
But especially the time between 1945 and
1955, and the role of independent labels
as they were able to create music that
people in urban areas wanted to buy.
But they were limited by the amount of
distribution they could get, limited by
how far a guy could drive, with records
in his trunk, to put them in a record
store each week.
Major labels, on the other hand, had
distribution networks that could get
recordings out across the country, in
relatively short periods of time.
But for most of the period, up to 1955,
the indies and the major labels coexisted
fairly easily.
That apple cart was upset in 1955 with
the rise of rock, but we're anticipating
our story.
Let's talk now about the rise of regional
R&B lit radio in the 1950's.
Now as I've said before, programming,
radio programming started to be directed
at an African American audience in these
urban areas.
Because radio broadcasters started to
realize that there was a significant
population to which they could, you know
sell product.
And you may think, well that's a kind of
a cynical way to view but after all radio
is a for-profit enterprise.
The music is there really only to get you
listening, so they can sell you a
product.
I mean, it seems like a cynical thing to
say, but that's the way that business
works.
You don't have any advertisers, you can't
stay on the air.
And so from that point of view, you could
say well, this advertising thing is not
such a good thing.
But on the other hand, if you think about
the fact that we're at that point African
Americans are living in a very segregated
country, where there are certain stores
they could go into quite innocently to
buy something, where they can be turned
away simply because they were black.
There was restaurants where they might
go, where they might want to get a meal
but they were turned away simply because
they were black.
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If they were listening to one of these
stations and they heard an advertiser
advertising on this station, they knew
they could go to that business.
Be it a restaurant or a theater or or a
store or something like that and their
business would be welcome.
So to a certain extent, these radio
stations, even though they were about
selling advertising and using music, that
they thought black listeners would
appreciate to do so.
Were actually providing a public service
in that they were helping folks out from
that point of view, at least that's a
kind of more positive way to think about
it.
Some of the most important R&B stations
that rose up were WDIA in Memphis, and on
the, on the air there were Rufus Thomas
and BB King.
You thought he was originally a blues
guitarist, he's always been a blues
guitarist but he was DJ in Memphis.
Also in Memphis, WHBQ, which featured
Dewey Phillips, the guy who originally
played That's All Right Mama on the radio
in 1954 after Elvis Presley had recorded
it at Sun Records.
WLAC in Nashville, Gene Nobles, John R
Richbourg and Hoss Allen, were the DJ's
there.
WGST in Atlanta featured Daddy Sears.
Out in Los Angeles, on KFVD, you had
Hunter Hancock.
All of these guys were on the air doing
shows that featured exclusively black
musicians, R&B musicians.
So, when Alan Freed comes along in 1951,
First in WJW in Cleveland, and starts to
put his show on the air.
He's already aware that these other guys
have been doing this.
In fact, there are stories that Freed
would call those stations and ask the
kinds of things they were playing.
Now, not all of these DJs were black, but
they sounded black on the air.
And so did Alan Freed in 1951.
In fact, listeners, black listeners,
would come down to the station to see him
when they knew he was finished, and they
would be surprised to see this white guy
coming out and they would be who's this
guy, we were looking for Alan Freed.
Well, I'm Alan Freed.
Really?
I didn't know you were white.
Well, this just goes to show that the,
the, some of these sort of, race
distinctions that we like to draw are
sometimes a little bit more fluid than
we, than we, than we imagine.
Well, in the case of Alan Freed he ends
up moving with the success of his show in
Cleveland, to New York, WN WINS changing
his his he was, the original show was
called The Moondog Show.
But it turned out there was a panhandler
in New York by the name of the Moondog
who tried to sue him, so he just changed
it to The Rock and Roll Party.
Because he changed it to The Rock and
Roll Party, and because it was so famous
because it was coming out of New York, he
says that he invited the word Rock and
Roll.
Well, however that may be, the fact is
that because the radio population that
had been part of the national audience up
to 1945 was now migrating to television,
that offer these opportunities in radio.
R&B Regional Radio folks took advantage
of that.
They started to play a lot of this black
music, because black folks were now
moving up from the rural areas into the
northern cities, and so there was an
opportunity for to sell advertising on
these stations.
And so far so good everything's fine,
what could possibly be disruptive about
the fact that a black community is
listening to black music on a black
station.
And going into businesses and frequenting
businesses that welcome their business.
Everything is fine, but the problem is,
or the problem came to be, not a problem
for us, we celebrate it, was that white
teenagers could also hear those stations.
Because just about this time radio's were
starting to become portable.
You could have a radio in your car,
right, you could get away from what your,
what your parents were listening to, and
you could listen to this music in the
car.
You might never be able to go into the
neighborhoods where these records are
sold.
You might never be allowed to go into the
clubs where this music is played, but you
could turn on the radio and hear it any
time.
So, what happens in the first half of the
50's is that these shows get rolling,
because people think they're playing
music to black audiences they are, but
the white teenagers are listening in as
well.
And they don't, people don't find out
about this until disc jockeys like Alan
Freed start to put on shows where, you
know, they put on a show that they think
is going to be, is going to ha, it's
going to have all black artists on it.
They think it's going to be attended by
an all black audience, and all of a
sudden, there's all these white kids
there.
And they're saying to themselves, where
did these kids come from?
Right.
And that ability of this regional R&B
radio, to reach a white audience, is to a
large extent responsible for how it is
that music started to catch hold as the
music of America's youth.
And it plays a big part in how it is that
rock and roll comes to be an important
style in 1955.
Welcome to week two of The History of
Rock - Part One, here on Coursera.
This week we're going to talk about the
Birth and First Flourishing of Rock and
Roll.
So, that's the period from 1950 'til the
end of the decade, 1959, 1960.
in this video were going to talk about
the rise of Youth Culture during that
period.
But before we do, let's briefly review
what we talked about in week one.
You remember that one of the main points
of week one is that there were three
principle marketing categories.
Or divisions, of popular music in the
period up to 19 40, 1955.
that was mainstream Pop, Country and
Western, and Rhythm and Blues.
And we went through each of those those
history of each of those styles a bit to,
to get a sense of what was going on
leading up to 1955.
We also raised the question, why is 1955
the, the birth of Rock and Roll?
Why should we choose that particular
year?
so now, that we're going to focus in on
1955 and see if we can understand exactly
how it is Rock and Roll took off the way
it did.
And why it really should be seen as
something different from the styles that
came before.
And I'll give the story away a little bit
by saying one of the main ideas that's
often taught with regard to the beginning
of Rock and Roll.
Is that Rock and Roll constitutes the
blending of Country and Western and
Rhythm and Blues with mainstream Pop.
So, it's the blend of those three with a,
with a, some gospel thrown in on the side
and doo-wop, as well, that really create
what Rock and Roll is.
What I will say is that Rock and Roll
happens when these styles become
mainstream Pop styles.
That is, when Rhythm and Blues, and
Country and Western themes, cross over
from their individual markets into the
mainstream pop market.
And that's what we're going to talk about
this week.
So, let's start with with talking a
little bit about the entire flow of what
we'll say this week about the, the
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chapter.
the period through 1950, 55 through 1959
is considered the first wave of Rock and
Roll.
And that basically divides up into the
period before Elvis, that is right at
1954 or 1955 in that period, Elvis, 1956.
And then what happened after Elvis.
Well, not after Elvis, in the sense that
he was gone, but after Elvis' initial
success.
It may be better to say in the wake of
Elvis.
So, that's the way we'll divide it up.
You may be surprised to find out that
Elvis is actually not really at the very
beginning of Rock and Roll.
But doesn't make his biggest impact until
other artists have in some sense cleared
the way for him.
I should also take a minute to point out
that what you're learning in the Coursera
course that we're doing here.
Is really an American perspective on the
history of rock music.
It's the way it looks, the way this
history looks in the United States.
we will find out, especially when we
start to talk about The Beatles and The
British Invasion, that in many ways, the
history of Rock and Roll looks different
in the U.K.
Some of the same things we're talking
about that are going on in the music here
are, are balanced in different kinds of
ways in the U.K.
So, for those of you who are taking the
course who aren't in the United States,
please understand that we're talking
about the course.
talking about the subject and the way it
looks from the America perspective.
The, the American market, being the
biggest market, really in the world for
this music at this time.
But, that's, that's my caveat with regard
to that.
well, let's now talk about dig, dig into
this idea of the rise of youth culture in
the 1950s.
And talk about the invention of the
American Teenager.
What could I possibly mean by the
invention of the American Teenager during
these years?
after all, haven't we always had
teenagers?
What is it, before rock and roll people
went from the age of 12 to the age of 20
and never went 13 through 19, now?
Of course with, there have always been
teenagers.
But we've never, up, up to this point the
culture had never really separated
teenagers out as they're, as they're own
sort of separate entity in the culture.
So, kind of the way it worked is, you
went to school until you graduated from
high school.
And then when you moved on to college or
into a career, or something like that,
you put childish things away and became
an adult.
There wasn't really a transition period
that was celebrated in a particular kind
of way.
And there weren't goods and services and
products and those kinds of things that
were, that were devoted to teenagers.
But what starts to happen during this
period, is that parents start to develop
a, a, maybe a greater sort of care.
Maybe it's not fair to say care because
that, that makes it seem like the parents
before then weren't caring as much about
the, about their kids.
But they start to really focus more on
the children.
Maybe that's because Coming out of the
second world war, a lot of these people,
the, the, the fathers had been away at
war.
People come back, war had been a tough
time.
Now the war was over, they wanted to get
back to as normal a kind of life as they
could.
And they really focused on doing what
they thought was best for their kids.
So these kids were a little bit more
pampered maybe, than earlier generations
were.
There was a lot more focus put on their
educations and, and, and their general
sort of emotional health and this kind of
thing.
And what that generated was a bunch of
kids.
Who had their own turned out had their
own clothes, their own language, their
own cars, their own ideas of what teen
romance was.
Lots of leisure time and disposable
income.
And most importantly their own music.
And Rock and Roll would become the music
that the idea that all of a sudden kids
could be teenagers for a while.
In a period of time where they were no
longer children, but weren't quite
adults.
And there was a whole kind of culture
that they could go into.
That could have all kinds of things that
were exclusive to that.
This was new in the 1950s, and the
importance of Rock and Roll is it was the
soundtrack of this new teenage
experience.
if you want to get an idea of what, what,
life was like in the 1950s for, for this
kind of kid
You might think of films like the 1973
film, American Graffiti.
The one of early George Lucas films.
It was actually set in 1962, but it
captures a lot of that late '50s kind of
ambiance the television show Happy Days.
A lot of people have heard that, have
ever seen, have, have seen that, have you
ever seen the movie Back to the Future
with Michael J Fox.
Where they sort of go back to the '50s?
Now, a lot of that is idealized.
There were a lot more problems and there
were all kinds of other issues that
happened in the '50s.
That you don't really sort of see in that
idealized view of what the '50s were.
But that's the idea, a time of innocence,
a time of teenagers It's a Potsy and
Ralph Malph.
Down at the malt shop, this kind of
thing, you know, dancing to the jukebox,
and, and, and this, this, this is what
the American teenage teenager thing is.
I've got friends colleagues about the
same age as me, who, who, who, who didn't
have teenage years.
Or didn't have a sort of teenager
culture, when they were growing up in the
UK at that time.
And so they talk about this as the
American invention of the teenager.
For was, for us, what's important, is
that it opens up a market for product.
And in the second half of the 1950's,
music would be sold to these teenagers as
the music that sets them apart from their
parent's generation.
And that's the important thing.
We should also talk about the, the
construction of Rock and Roll Youth and
Juvenile delinquency, [LAUGH], that
starts to develop at about this time.
a real concern, because people were so
consumed with their kids growing up the
right way, a real concern that they might
take the wrong path.
And juvenile delinquency, the idea of
kids going bad, kids going wrong.
really started to become a thing that
people were talking about in the culture.
You can see this especially, in three
films that came out just about in the mid
1950's.
There's a film from 1953 starring Marlin
Brando called The Wild One.
And one of the main characters, the one
played by Brando is a character by the
name of Johnny.
His motorcycle gang are called The
Beetles.
Sound familiar?
We'll get to that in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, Johnny is a rebel and when asked
at one point in the movie what he is
rebelling against?
He turns the person that asked him and
says, I don't know, what do you got?
In other words, it was almost rebellion
for its own sake, but it was certainly
viewed as a kind of juvenile delinquency.
Another film like that, featured James
Dean from 1955.
It was called Rebel Without a Cause.
Well, there you go, rebellion with no
reason, rebellion for the sake of
rebellion itself.
a misunderstood youth, who you know is
meets tragedy at the end of the film.
And that's further reinforced by the fact
that the actor, James Dean, actually did
meet with a tragic death.
And to a certain extent that sort of
solidifies this idea of dying young,
rebellion.
The thing about The Wild One and Rebel
Without A Cause, however, is the music
that appears in those movies, is not rock
and roll at all,
and so, there is not the direct
connection with rock and roll, but the
third movie.
Blackboard Jungle from 1955 starring
Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier.
Is about Some kids in an inner, inner
city school, and how they're struggling.
And their, their music teacher, one of
their teachers likes to play music to try
to connect up.
And, and in the movie, the music he uses
is Jazz to try and talk to these kids.
But over the opening credits, and then
later in the mu, in, in the movie, the
song Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley
and The Comets is played.
And with that, with Rock Around the
Clock, and Blackboard Jungle, and this
whole sense of juvenile delinquency, and
the concern about it.
You get this linking together of rock and
roll, with, with troubled youth, that
will, in fact, become part of the
identity of rock and roll for the rest of
its history.
what's interesting about that movie and I
guess you really have to use your
imagination to imagine this happening.
Is that the, the, the playing of Rock
Around the Clock in the theater when
people went to see the film.
And the film starts out with this sort
of, you know, sort of crawling text that
says you know.
Juvenile delinquency in our country is a
big problem, this kind of thing, you
know.
And then out comes Rock Around the Clock.
And kids got so excited about the music
when they were seen this film, they
actually start to riot in theaters.
There were reports of people tearing out
theater seats and this kind of thing.
Well, what could more reinforces the idea
of Rock and Roll whipping these kids up
into a demonic fever that we needed to do
something about in our culture.
And keep these kids from going over to
the dark side and this kind of thing.
So anyway, now these films the youth
culture.
All of this sort of pulled together to
create an environment that makes it
possible for, for Rock and Roll to to, to
begin to flourish.
Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock was
one of the top pop hits of 1955.
In 1955 we really start to see songs that
we would think of as Rock and Roll songs
now, as top hits in the Pop Charts.
Not just crossing over but being some of
the biggest records of that year.
many, of course, records have followed.
And, and many of R&B songs would start to
cross over in the Pop, in, in, onto the
Pop Charts, and we'll talk about that in
just a minute.
Now some would argue that there was so
much R&B crossing over in 1955 into the
Pop Charts.
That that what we call Rock and Roll
would really be better just be called
White Rhythm and Blues white R&B
But I will, I, I I'll try to fashion an
argument for you.
And present an argument for you that
shows that Rock and Roll is really in
someways a changing of what R&B is and is
worth the, this separating out.
But for now let's just let's just think
about the youth culture that, that made
it possible for rock n roll to to happen
in this country.
And turn our attention in the next
lecture to how is it that White teens
came to hear Rhythm and Blues in the
first place.
At the end of the last video, we asked
the question, we, we first observed that
there was a, a development of the
invention of the teenager, a, a rise of
youth culture in, in the United States in
the 1950s.
And then we left off by saying that R&B
was an important influence in the
development of rock and roll, but how is
it that white teenagers actually got to
hear rhythm and blues?
Now you say well, well how, how, why not?
I mean how, why wouldn't it have been
available to them?
Well, think about it, think about what we
said before.
We were living in a very segregated
country back then some people would say
we still are.
But certainly we were living in a very
segregated country back then, and rhythm,
and blues records were thought of as the,
the music of, of black America, of, of
urban, mostly sort of urban African
American folks were who were living in a,
in, in pretty close confines in, in one
particular neighborhood in town.
I mean that gets into a whole other
series of issues that have to do with
American culture that.
But let's, let's just accept that as
having as, as having been, and for the
white, for the white middle class kids to
go into that neighborhood would have been
a real problem, not because they would
have been so much in danger, but because
their parents would not have allowed them
to do so.
There was a real divide.
and so how is it that they would have
come to hear that music, if they couldn't
go to the clubs where the music was being
played, if they really couldn't get to
the record stores where those kinds of
records were being sold, because they
weren't being sold in mainstream pop
record stores that they might have had
access to, how did they get to it?
Well, one of the most important ways, in
which R&B came to young white teenagers,
and it, it wasn't, it wasn't by
intention, nobody who was doing R&B at
that time was trying to reach white
teenagers in the first half of the 1950s,
but one of the most important ways that
it reached them was through radio.
And this hooks into the story that we
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were telling last week about how it is
that this large, this large network of,
of radio stations and a national audience
was created by radio, developed up to
the, the second World War and then after
the second World War, that national
audience and a lot of the technology that
went with it, started to migrated to
television, which was going to be the
next big thing.
Leaving a fairly developed radio business
there, but with a certain amount of
attention being taken away from in
nationally, and being put into a
television program at the national level.
That opened up a lot of opportunities
regionally, and so stations started to
look at their region, think about
opportunities for advertising, and some
stations decided they would focus on
rhythm and blues music, and sell
advertising that might appeal to the
African American community.
And so one of the important figures in
rhythm and blues radio, in fact, fact, in
radio generally, at this time, was the
disc jockey.
Now I think it's, I think I mentioned
this last week, but it's important for us
to, to realize that up until this time,
the second half of the 1940s into the
1950s, playing a record on the radio was
considered cheating.
Any body who heard music on the radio
before then assumed that the music was
live.
So if you were playing a recording, it's
like you were trying to trick the
listener into believing you had an
orchestra in your studio that, in your
station there that you didn't actually
have.
And so there was, sort, a sort of sense
of sort of, second rate quality if you
played records instead of live music.
But with the rise of the disc jockey,
records were played increasingly.
it was seen as a very cheap alternative
to live music.
And for some, some stations that were
sort of keeping an eye on the budget this
was a, they, they didn't go exclusively
with disc jockeys but they used disc
jockeys more and more.
and one of the important things about the
disc jockey is the disc jockey had a lot
of discretion in terms of which records
they would play, which gave, gave the
disc jockey a certain amount of power.
Some people would think it gave the
mobil, the ability especially in a
regional station to make a regional hit,
or not and so they became very important
figures in, in shaping the music as it,
as it began to develop.
Certain for, I, I, the statistics for
this show that in 1947 for example, there
were about 3,000 disc jockey's in this
country.
A handful of them were, were, were black
disc jockey's, but most of them were
white disc jockey's and, and these, a lot
of these white disc jockey's were on R&B
stations playing music to African
American listeners.
some of the important R&B stations that
we should think about especially with
regard to rhythm and blues and, and the
way that it, it spread is WHBQ which
which in 1949, launched Dewey Phillips'
show, Red Hot and Blue in Memphis.
Dewey Phillips turns out to be the guy
who helped launch the career of Elvis
Presley in 1954.
We'll talk about that in just a minute.
that launched the career of Elvis Presley
by playing his first record on his, first
Sun recording That's Alright Mama.
But then there was also Gene Nobles, John
Richbourg and Hoss Allen at WLAC in
Nashville.
Daddy Sears at WGST in Atlanta, and
Hunter Hancock who, who was a black DJ in
K, at KFVD in Los Angeles.
These guys were all doing R&B shows,
usually in the evening where they were
playing all kinds of R&B records by by
independent labels.
and, they were, they were really, if you
were, if you were a, a, a young kid
tuning the radio in, even though you
couldn't get to the neighborhood where
this music might have been played, by
turning it in on the radio, the music was
available to you.
And to a lot of these, these young
teenagers, this was a very alluring
thing.
The world of R&B was a world of, of
danger, and forbidden sexuality, and all
the kinds of things that teenagers love.
And the fact that their parents would
have been very, very upset if they knew
they were listening to it, made it all
the more appealing.
After all, teenagers have always been
teenagers, and they certainly were back
then.
The most important of all the R&B DJ's,
the guy who really sort of towers above
the rest in terms of influence and
importance was a Alan Freed.
And Alan Freed really became a kind of
celebrity national celebrity, in and of
himself.
In fact he became one of the biggest
targets at the end of the decade when the
payola scandal started to come in, and
we'll get to that a little bit later.
Anyway, Alan Freed, by the time he
launches his his show called The Moondog
Show in July of 1951 at WJW in Cleveland,
by the time he's doing that these other
DJ's had already been doing that kind of
thing.
So it wasn't like he invented this kind
of a show, other people had been doing
it, but Freed did it in a way that really
began to pick up some real attention.
He was initially sponsored by a fella
named Leo Mintz who, in Cleveland, owned
one of the biggest record stores called
Record Rendezvous.
And Leo Mintz had, had been sponsoring a
classical music show because, of course,
classical classical records sold pretty
well back in those days.
Had been sponsoring a classical show on
the same station, but at 11:00, after I
guess they thought most decent people had
gone to bed, they decided to put on this
show devoted to R&B music.
So in other words, the station that Alan
Freed was initially on was doing
classical music until 11:00, then at
11:00 he comes on with the R&B, and Alan
Freed, for all intents and purposes,
sounded like he was a black DJ.
He was doing a lot of things, like you
know, pounding on phone books, and, and,
and you know, all excited in his
delivery, and all the kinds of things
that we, we came to expect from AM DJs
later.
he was doing all of that stuff and very
effectively.
Most of his listeners were surprised to
find out that Alan Freed was actually
white.
People who would come to the station
would say, you know, you know who are
you?
I'm Alan Freed.
I thought, really?
I thought you were black.
this kind of thing, and so Leo Mintz
helps get this thing started, and they
don't really know it, but in this period
between 1951, 52, 53 in Cleveland, there
are a lot of white kids tuning in to
this.
Now how would they ever know?
Well one story is that this kid started
coming in to the store and buying the R&B
records.
But it probably didn't happen that way.
prob, probably the, the way they really
found out about it is, Alan Freed an
entrepreneur always interested in making
a little bit of extra money, starts to
put concerts together where he brings all
of these R&B groups together.
A concert like that would have to, would
be like a package show, five or six
different groups, put them on at a big,
at a big theater in Cleveland.
And all of a sudden he, all of a sudden
all of these kids show up who are both
black and white and they're together at
the same show.
Now that wouldn't raise much of an
eyebrow today, but back then the white
power structure that was in charge of
these kinds of things didn't think so,
didn't think that was good.
In fact, some theaters, the black patrons
and the white patrons couldn't even be in
the same, you know, in the same part of
the theater.
The black attendees would have to be in
the balcony, say for example, and the,
the, the white kids on the main floor.
But they started to sort of blend
together, and this was seen as very
dangerous.
Rock and roll from the very beginning,
was seen as a kind of a dangerous
influence.
so these white, these black and white
kids coming together at these at these
shows, a scandal.
Well Alan White has, or Alan Freed has so
much success in Cleveland that he moves
to the big apple, to, to New York, to
WINS.
And has, has to change the name of his
show, the Moon Dog show, to the Rock and
Roll Party, I think as I said last week,
because there was a panhandler in New
York who called himself The Moon Dog and
actually took him to court about it.
So the Rock and Roll Party launches in
September of 1954, and he's on he's on
doing this show in the, the biggest radio
market in the world, New York City.
and so he, he makes a tremendous impact
there.
Eventually that show of his, the Alan
Freed show, gets gets, goes into
syndication nationally, so people get to
hear them all over the country.
he does shows, just like he'd be doing in
Cleveland, but now, he does tours, where
his, the Alan Freed show goes around from
city to city, that kind of thing.
he did a bunch of movies.
they were really sort of flimsy plots
with just an opportunity for you to see
lip sync performances of some of the
early rock and roll performance, but for
that they're great.
Rock Around the Clock from 56, Rock Rock
Rock from 1956, and Don't Knock the Rock
from 1957.
So as an important figure in sort of
championing the cause Of early rock and
roll Alan Freed is an important figure
and probably the most important DJ for us
to think about.
Lets turn our attention now to Indie
labels and early rock and roll.
We said before, last week, that the, the
major labels of the, of this era Decca,
Mercury, RCA, Victor, Columbia, Capita,
and MGM, really were the ones that had
all the money, and had all the
wherewithal to very quickly and
efficiently distribute their records
nationally.
An independent label was a small company
with limited distribution.
You could distribute your records about
as far as you could get if you put them
in your trunk and drove to each place.
I mean that's basically the way it was
for a lot of indie labels.
There was one, maybe two guys, working
there, and really distribution was about
taking the records out to the jukebox
providers to the radio stations trying to
get the songs on the air, and to the
record stores.
And that's the way it worked.
and so it really limited these guys in a
lot of kinds of ways, so they kept their
focus low.
And that's okay because the major labels
really didn't want this other business in
R&B and country and western so much,
because it was just too small potatoes
for them.
They were making the big money in
mainstream pop and they were happy with
that.
But these Indie label owners, they really
had to work hard to promote their
records.
After all It was their money that was on
the line.
If it worked for a major label, you were
really working, spending the companies
money.
But if you had an independant label, you
were spending your money.
And so it made it a lot more different.
So these guys would really go at
promoting these records, and in the
record business this meant sometimes what
came to be called payola, that is you
would try to do something nice for a DJ,
who had, as I said before, all this
discretion about what to play or not to
play.
Do something nice for him to convince him
to play your record and not somebody
elses.
Sometime that would be a cash gift
sometimes it would just be a gift, maybe
a case of whisky something like that,
sometimes it would be a paid vacation.
There are all kinds of ways you can think
of that you could offer somebody
something to do a favor for you.
Everyone was doing it.
The majors were doing it too, but the
indies were really aggressive about it
and really going after it.
So, what ends up happening is these indie
records start to cross over onto the
mainstream pop charts, as we talked about
in 19, the 19, well they're, we'll talk
in, in a minute when we talk about
crossover, about what the figures were.
But when these things start to cross over
from the R&B charts, which was thought of
as sort of a small potatoes, we don't
care about that, by the majors, onto the
mainstream pop label, well, then they
started to cut into the major labels
market share, then they were a lot more
concerned about that, and then the race
was really on in rock and roll, to see
who could garner the greater market share
and who could be more successful.
So, before we can talk about that, let's
talk in the next video, about how
crossover works.
Let's talk now about crossover, chart
crossover, and cover versions.
As I said last week, the charts that
we're talking about are record industry
charts, and the two organizations that
get the most consideration from scholars
are a magazine called Cashbox and
especially the magazine called Billboard.
There magazines were designed, not for
fans to read, they weren't like fan
magazines like Rolling Stone, or Mojo, or
something like that that you would pick
up in order to find out what, for a fan
to find out what was happening, or
interviews with their favorite artist,
something like this.
These were magazines that were put
together to help advise people, who were
in the business of providing music retail
or music services, what music was popular
and what music was not popular.
So if you were somebody who, who
serviced, who had a jukebox business.
What you wanted in, you, when you put
your records in that jukebox is you want
to get people to put as many dimes or
nickels or whatever they're putting in
that thing, as possible.
And so you want to maximize the number of
plays per record you can possibly get.
So, what you want to know is, what do
people like?
What are they playing?
You know, what, what seems like it's
getting hot?
What starting to cool off?
You put as many of the hot records or
getting hot records into your jukebox as
you can and pull the ones, pull the
records that are starting to cool out and
that way you can maximize your process,
your profit from each of these each of
these jukeboxes that you have in various
sort of lounges and bars and this kind of
thing.
If you're somebody who's running a radio
station, you want to play the music that
everybody seems to be wanting to listen
to, right, because the more listeners you
get, the more advertising you get, the
more you can charge for advertising.
So, you want to know what's hot on the
radio and having a, a magazine tell you
what the national trends are and regional
trends are is very, very valuable.
and if you're somebody who's in record
retail, you don't want to have a whole
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bunch of records sitting on the shelf
that nobody wants anymore.
You want to have records on the shelf
that people are likely to buy, and so you
want to sort of time your buying to what
seem like the trend, what's happening
with the trends.
So if you know what the trends are, if
you have some suspicion you can guess,
you have a much better idea of maximizing
your profit and your business in the
music retailing and service than you
might if you didn't.
And so that's what these things were
meant to do.
And because of that they were divided up
into markets.
And as we said before, the markets were
thought of as fairly distinct and almost
exclusive, not entirely, but almost
exclusive of each other.
So pop as we said before, mainstream pop
was considered a middle class, white
audience.
R and B was an urban, black audience.
Country and western was a rural, white
audience, farming communities, or those
who were displaced from such communities
into urban environments.
And the charts were also divided up by
use.
So there was a separate chart for radio,
a separate chart for retail, a separate
chart for jukebox, and each of these
designations.
You kind of look up whatever your
particular concern was and see what seems
to be happening week by week in popular
music.
Now at this point, I should say a word,
at least a sort of sound of warning about
using chart numbers too much.
I will talk to you about chart numbers as
an indication of popularity of records.
And, in the book, in the text book, if
you're following along in the text book,
you'll see a lot of chart numbers.
But you should know that chart numbers
are, are a fairly coarse instrument for
trying to figure out the popularity of a
particular record.
I mean if a record goes to number one, or
number two, or number three, or number
four, it's probably not a big distinction
there.
There are kind of, could be all kinds of
things that account for that.
But a number 20 record really is a
different kind of thing than a number 1,
2, 3 or 4, 4 or 5 record, right, so, at
that level, when you're, when you're
looking at where they, where they place
generally in the chart, it makes a lot of
difference.
It helps, also, charts to, they, they
help, they help keep us from getting into
the fan mentality.
Which is this idea that we're always
rooting for the artist that we like the
most, and maybe neglecting those that we
don't like as much.
When you see the chart statistics there,
sometimes it causes you to admit that
some of the artists you like maybe didn't
sell as many records or weren't as
popular as maybe you thought they were.
And it makes, also forces you to admit
that artists you don't like so much
actually had a fair amount of success.
Their chart numbers are useful that way,
but we shouldn't be too literal about
them and use them to do sort of fine,
make fine distinctions that they were
never designed to be able to make.
Let's talk now about crossover records.
And crossover songs.
There are really two, when we talk about
crossover, that is when a tune is
originally on the country chart and
somehow makes it onto the pop chart or a
tune that starts on the rhythm and blues
chart and makes it onto the pop chart.
And that's mostly what were talking
about.
I mean when you think about it, by
definition, crossover could mean
anything.
It could be going from country to rhythm
and blues, rhythm and blues to country,
or, or from mainstream pop back to
country or whatever.
But, mostly it's about records from one
of those two other smaller charts making
it into the, into the pop chart.
When we're talking about crossover that's
what we mean.
And there's two ways that can happen.
Either the record itself can actually
cross over.
So, Little Richard Does Tudy Fruity, it's
originally on the R&B charts, then after
place for a while and it's a hit there,
it shows up on the main street pop
charts, done by Little Richard.
That's a cross over record, same song,
same artist.
On the other hand, a song itself, but not
the same record, can cross over.
So it could be a song, Tutti Frutti by
Little Richard, that appears on the
rhythm and blues charts.
That is then covered or done in a
different version by Pat Boone.
And the Pat Boone record, on the
mainstream pop charts, goes up the pop
charts but doesn't chart on the R&B
chart.
There you see the song moves.
From, in the case of Tutti Frutti, both
the record and the song, crossed over.
But there's a distinction there.
so we want to keep that that straight.
Now, when a song crosses over like that,
and it's done in a different version we
often use the term cover version.
And as I mentioned last week, I'm not
really quite sure cover version is, is
exactly the right term here because
people were already doing lots of
different versions of songs.
There are, there are, those kinds of
versions usually involve putting your own
personal stamp on a record.
It turned out though during this period
that there were actually cover versions
that were more like duplicates.
In other words you are making a record
that sounded exactly like the other
record.
The only difference was that you change
the lyrics so that there were no kind of
sexual connotations that anybody could
pick up on.
And the artist was white.
Sometimes even like marketly white, I
mean you call a group The Crew Cuts and
you know it's probably you know a vocal
group of white guys, right.
And so, this kind of thing, this is the
part where we start to go into the area
of controversy in certain kinds of
disputes that have broken out over this,
in the record business.
They come down to this controversy about
whether or not, there's, how much racism
is involved in the idea that white
artists would cover the music of black
artists and do better on the main stream
pop charts than the black artists
themselves did.
Let me tell you a little bit about the
statistics and why they should be so,
such an important consideration.
In the period between 1950 and 1953,
about 10% of the songs that were hits on
the R & B chart crossed over to the pop
charts.
So, one in ten R&B hits could cross over
to the pop chart.
So you would say that between the R&B
chart and the pop chart, that's a pretty
fair amount of isolation between the two.
It's not exclusive in an absolute sense,
but there's a lot of isolation there.
In 1954, you could see the trend.
Already 25% of R&B hits are crossing over
from the R&B chart to the pop charts.
But by 1958, 94% of the songs that were
R&B hits appeared on the mainstream pop
charts.
Well, if you were one of those black
artists that had the original R&B record
and it was a hit, boy, it would have been
great if then it would've crossed the
actual record with your name on it,
would've gone over to the mainstream pop
chart.
And you would be able to have all the
success, financial and otherwise, that
goes with that.
And to have that success taken away
because somebody covers it in a version
that sounds almost exactly like yours.
But they get all the success, you got the
thing started on the R&B chart, and they
take it over.
Well that was a pretty bitter pill for a
lot of African American musician to
swallow.
and there were all kinds of ways in which
musicians were ripped off in that era as
well.
A lot of times those musicians didn't
even own the rights to those particular
songs, the publishing rights they signed
that away when they recorded.
I mean record company people, they did
this to both black and white musicians.
They would say, well what would you
rather have?
I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session.
I don't know what the amount was, let's
say it's 50 bucks.
I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session
now, or I'll give you a certain
percentage of the earnings over time.
Most musicians will take their money now.
They don't know whether they're ever
going to see that guy in the future.
And so when they took their money now,
they signed away their publishing.
So if that R&B hit crossed over, the
publishers who, who own that music, they
still made all kind of money for it, no
matter who sang it, right.
But the original artist only go the money
they got the first time when they
recorded it.
And so they, they, they felt very ripped
off.
Now, there is there is a kind of a
controversy surrounding this.
And the, the biggest part of the
controversy is whether or not this really
is a kind of a, a ripping off or not.
Now, the, you, you've heard the argument
that comes from people like Little
Richard and and, and others who, who, who
felt like they didn't get the money they
should have got and they were ripped off
by these white covers.
The white artists have, have often argued
that because these songs would not have
been playable on radio the way they were.
Because they the lyrics might of been a
little bit too adult themed, lets say,
for main stream pop radio.
They weren't really taking it away from
these from, from, from, these people in
that, in that way.
They were really sort of adapting them
and, and that, that they weren't taking
something with them they would of
otherwise got.
Or you can, you can decide what you think
about that.
But what I can tell you here is that
because of the success, the crossover
success of tunes like Rock Around the
Clock in 1955 and Maybelline from Chuck
Berry and these kinds of things, we can
start to look at 1955 as really kind of
being a tipping point.
That's the point where all of a sudden
something that had been kind of a once in
a while kind of thing, this cross over
thing, really starts to happen in a, in a
very big way.
And so, 1955, that's one of the reasons
why we can look at that as the beginning
of rock and roll.
So, let's have a look a who some of the
first rock and rollers were.
who they were, and what they were up to.
Let's look, take a look at who some of the
first rock and rollers were in this first
period of rock
and roll 1955 through 1959 when these
first rock and
rollers begin to cross over from R&B onto
the pop charts.
The first one I think that we should talk
about is Bill Haley and the Comets.
And we'll come back to him in just a
minute.
But, we've talked a lot about how
important
Rock Around the Clock was as a record.
Shake, Rattle and Roll is something that
he had done the year before.
and so we should really sort of tip our
hats at Bill Haley as as really being the
first one to, to really to really sort of
get this, this rock and roll thing going
in 1955.
But there are some other important early
entries here.
let's turn our attention, for example, to
Fats Domino.
Fats Domino coming out of New Orleans,
appearing on the Imperial
label which was out of, the label in Los
Angeles but all the recording
was done in New Orleans by a fellow by the
name of Dave Bartholomew.
He's a famous New Orleans musician.
Fats Domino was an interesting kind of, a,
of, of, a, of an entertainer for these
years.
Fats Domino, an African American guy who
was maybe a little, overweight.
you know, very, very friendly.
sort of, cheerful
demeanor.
And in no way would white audiences think
that, that Fats Domino was.
Threatening or menacing in any kind of
way, and I'm
not I'm not saying that would have any
reason for that.
These are all kind of racial or racist
kind of views at the time, but
for a black entertainer to to succeed in a
white audience with a white audience.
There are, there are probably some
features there that
can help that happen, and Fats Domino was
a very
kind of friendly guy.
His music had a kind of easy-going 12
eight compound
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time deebata, deebata, deebata, deebata,
deebata, deebata kind of feel.
A kind of a laid-back New Orleans kind of
sound.
he really had a lot of country influence.
In fact, among the other musicians that he
hung with in New Orleans, They all
kind of thought of him as more of a kind
of a country country western artist.
We don't think of him that way, but in his
crowd,
that's the way he was thought of.
So, maybe, if there's a bit of the sort of
country twang
that that makes his music maybe even a
little bit more approachable.
By a wide audience that's, that's not
particularly familiar
with rhythm and blues, or rhythm and blues
culture.
So if his early R&B hits that didn't cross
over, I mean,
he was on the R&B charts way before rock
and roll 1955.
his first big one was The Fat Man from
1950.
And another one called Goin' Home from
1952, there are several more.
But his first big crossover is a tune
called Ain't It A Shame from 1955.
We'll talk about that with regard to Pat
Boone in just a minute.
And, maybe the most representative song of
of Fats Domino from this era is Blueberry
Hill from 1956 a big hit for him.
Another one is I'm Walkin' from 1957.
An interesting note about Blueberry Hill,
is it goes against a lot
of what we talk about with regard to
crossovers and covers in that
Blueberry Hill is a song that didn't
really arise out of the R&B tradition.
Blueberry Hill is a song that had been a
hit in 1940 for the Glen Miller Orchestra.
A big band.
So in some ways, the biggest hit for
Fats Domino, one of the early African
American, first,
early African American stars of rock and
roll, was
a cover version of a tune that had
originally
been done By Glen Miller.
So, the minute we start to generalize too
much about cover and
cross over, it's always possible to come
up with a counter example.
and this is one of them.
Moving on from Fat's Domino, let's
concider Chuck Berry coming out of St.
Louis.
Via Chicago.
He recorded on Chess Records.
Was introduced to the guys at Chess
Records by Muddy Waters.
Chuck Berry was also a big fan of country
music.
And in his autobiography, he talks about
how important it was
in his live act before he
started recording, to understand different
dialects.
He calls them with music and so he could
do country western
tunes in the country western style with
his voice sounding very country western.
Then he could do blues and R&B, and
[UNKNOWN]
for instance.
And these really understood different
kinds of styles.
and in many ways I think he used an awful
lot
of the country voice when he was recording
those first couple
of tunes because most, well, many
listeners as the story goes
had no idea that Chuck Berry was was a
black guy.
They thought he was white.
There's actually some television clips
from the day when you
can see where he comes out and there's a
studio
audience there and maybe I'm imagining it,
but they pan over to the studio
audience and it seems like a lot of those
audiences are almost entirely white.
It seems like a lot of those folks are
looking at
Chuck Berry and they're going, God I
though he was white, right?
And so, again, like Fats Domino, that
country twang, that country influence
maybe gives these
first black artists, maybe more
approachability in the
white market than they might have had
otherwise.
In fact.
Chuck's first big hit is the
song called Maybellene from 1955.
And it's really kind of an interesting
example because
for one thing, if you look at the credit
who it was written by, it was clearly the
words the music we'll talk about in a
minute.
But the words were clearly written by
Chuck Berry, but it
says words of music By Chuck Berry,
Leonard Chess and Alan Freed.
Well, why should that be?
What could Alan Freed have possibly had to
do with the writing of Maybellene or
even Leonard Chess for that matter?
Well, Leonard Chess owned publishing, and
Alan Freed was cut
in on a piece of the publishing which
meant that
every time Alan Freed played that record,
if it became
a hit It would be money coming back to
Alan Freed.
And so these kinds of publishing deals
were made all the time
as a way of cutting somebody in on the
publishing of a tune.
So that they would have an incentive to
play the tune, and make it into a hit.
And that's exactly what happens
with Maybellene.
Interestingly, the song, Maybellene.
Actually goes back to a fiddle tune called
Ida Red, that had been
originally recorded by people like Roy
Acuff
and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
In fact, he was going to do it as Ida Red,
because
he did it as part of his country western
kind of set.
But they said, no, if you do Aside A Red
it's in the public domain.
That's a traditional song.
You won't get any publishing on it.
Let's just do the same, do the same tune,
what you usually do it, but let's just
change
the lyrics.
because if you change the lyrics, you can
call
it a different song and we can cover it.
Then, you get some publishing, and I'll
get some publishing, and we'll, and
Leonard
Chess gets some publishing, and Allen
Freed
gets some pub, so that's what they do.
How did he come up with Maybellene, well
Chuck
Berry would never give you a straight
answer on that.
And I think one of his, his funniest
responses
to that was, it was the name of a cow.
In a children's book he read when he was a
kid.
But the story goes, at least coming
from Leonard Chess, that it came directly
from a makeup the box of
a makeup kit there, because Chuck Berry
had been a cosmetician in St.
Louis, and so Maybellene, of course, a
famous brand of cosmetics there.
So right there, inside that tune You begin
to see an awful lot going on there.
If you, if you listen to the lyrics,
it, it, and think about the metaphors very
closely.
it's almost it's self kind of a hokum blue
so all the metaphors
are so thickly veiled that you really
can't tell that there could
be any kind of sexual content, but I'll
leave it to you.
To check it out and see if you think that
that's an accurate description or not.
One thing about Chuck Berry is, he saw
what was happening with these crossovers.
And he decided his lyrics be, would be
written so that they didn't need to be
fixed.
In other words, he would write them so
they were directly appealing to a teenage
audience.
So nobody had to change anything.
And maybe his records then.
British records
to be covered by somebody else.
And he could get the he could get the
money and the and the fame that came with
it.
And, in fact, he did.
School Day, 1957; Rock and Roll Music,
1957; Sweet Little Sixteen, 1958; Johnny
B.
Goode, 1958.
All of those became big hits for Chuck
Berry, and a lot more.
Is a very, very important song-writer,
Chuck Berry,
writing all his own songs at a time when
most performers didn't write their own
songs, along with
Buddy Holly, one of the most important
ones of
this generation.
Also his guitar style, that sort of, the
guitar licks that
you hear like at the very beginning of
Johnny be Good.
Are something that every kid learning rock
and roll guitar, up to a
certain period maybe in the 80s or 90s,
maybe they still learn it.
But everybody, sort of learned that, like
that Chuck Berry thing.
And this other thing he does, this duck
walk thing where he
gets down and puts the guitar between his
legs and does that.
All these things Made Chuck Berry a
fantastic
guitarist and showman, and a, and a
tremendous personality.
Let's talk a little now about Little
Richard, because now we're getting farther
and
farther away from the image that would be
most appealing to to white listeners.
Little Richard was a flamboyant guy,
there's just No two ways about it.
Chuck Berry might have been the first rock
and roller to write a song
about makeup, but Little Richard was the
first rock and roller to wear makeup.
I mean he was a sort of a crazy exciting,
energetic performer, playing on the piano,
singing, sometimes screaming, sometimes
with his feet up on the keyboard, he was
fantastic.
But all, in a very kind of
charismatic Lovable, perhaps
nonthreatening kind of way.
Always music, always filled with a certain
kind of excitement and joy.
tunes like Tutti Frutti from 1955 which
was a number two hit on
the R&B charts but only got to number 17
on the pop charts.
The Pat Boon
version got to number 12.
Long Tall Sally.
1956 was the number one hit, number six on
the pop charts.
Good Golly Miss Molly, 1954, was number
four on
the R&B charts, number ten on the pop
charts.
Now if you paid attention to those numbers
that just went by, you'd notice that the
R&B numbers are always closer to the top
of the charts, than the pop numbers were.
but again, a flamboyant style may be a
little rawer and rougher than Fats
Domino's music or
Chuck Barry's.
But the, these three guys, Fats Domino,
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Along
with Bill Haley right there at the very
beginning of Rock and Roll.
Now, let's move on to this idea of the
whitening of rhythm and blues that
we talked about in the last lecture, and,
and, and think a little bit about this.
Bill Haley who recorded for Deca.
Now we, we, we've talked about his Shake,
Rattle and Roll
from 1954, that was his cover version of
the Joe Turner tune.
And so we all ready know something about
this whitening effect
that goes on with the original, R&B
recordings and changing the lyrics.
Sort of making them more, appealing
perhaps, or
at least acceptable To a mainstream pop
audience.
The guy who takes most of the heat for
this kind of this, however, is Pat Boone.
Pat Boone is actually a descendant of the
the
explorer Daniel Boone, and recorded for an
indie label in
Gallatin, Tennessee called Dot.
His version of the Fats Domino tune Ain't
That a
Shame, went to number one in the pop
charts in 1955.
remembering that the, the Fats Domino's
did not do as well.
And his version of Tutti Frutti, the
Little Richard
tune in 1956, went to number 12, beating
out Richard's.
And sort of passing it in the charts on
the way along.
So, he usually takes the, the brunt of the
heat for doing.
Cover versions
that most fans would say they don't like
nearly as much as the originals.
But what he does, by adding almost a kind
of
a swing band kind of vocal approach to
those tunes.
Really merging the mainstream pop kinds of
styles from before 1955 with R&B.
In some ways what he does is more
indicative of the qualities of rock 'n
roll,
separable From rhythm and blues than, than
the
original R&B ones are in certain kinds of
ways.
Pat Boone also had a whole ton hits
that were not cover versions of somebody
else's tune.
Don't Forbid Me, Love Letters In The Sand,
April Love, those were all number
one hits in 1956 and 1957, some of them
even crossing over.
People were surprised to find this.
Pat Boone hits that aren't cover versions
crossing over.
On to the R&B charts we sometimes call
that reverse
cross over where a song becomes a hit on
the
mainstream chart and then becomes a hit on
the R&B chart.
We come back again to the society of the
controversy
over cover versions is the idea of these
white musicians.
covering music that was originally done by
black musicians.
And whether or not this is, this is right
or not.
And I've offered in the, in the previous
lecture, I I offered the, the reasoning
there.
I'll leave it to you to decide what you
think.
But I would ask you to keep an open mind
to the idea that
It probably matters whether, how close the
song hues to the original version.
In the case of the Pat Boone versions of
both the
Fats Domino version and the Little Richard
version, they are not dupliacates.
If you don't like them, you don't like
them because,
because of how much they don't sound like
the original, right?
And in that way, even if you don't like
it, you have to acknowledge
that in the, in terms of the pop and music
at that time it was
perfectly alright to do a cover version of
somebody elses tune, if you made it your
own.
The tops his of mainstream pop hits of
1955
there are three, of those top hits, I
don't
know if it's the top 20, or 25 hits,
there were three versions of the ballad of
Davy Crockett.
So, it was certainly possibly for that to
happen.
The ones I think that really are subject
to a
certain amount of Of negative criticism
are the ones that basically
just duplicated somebody else's record.
Where the only reason why you did it
was basically to put a white artist label,
name
on the label, because you didn't think you
could
sell it with a black artist name on it.
And that's probably one of those things in
history of
rock that will, we, we, shouldn't be too
proud of.
But that's, that's part of what happened
and it's part of the culture of the time.
So now, having talked about this first
rush of Of, of, of a
stars from 1955, we turn to the guy who
really sort of defines
this first wave of Rock and Roll, and
that's Elvis Presley.
We'll talk about him in the next lecture.
Now it's time to talk about Elvis
Presley.
Elvis Presley in this first wave of rock
and roll, really in the history of rock
and roll.
But first certainly in this first wave of
rock and roll, this 1950's, second half
of the 1950's, is absolutely the most
important figure, there.
And it, it's, he's important not only
because of his musical contributions, but
because of the tremendous success that he
had as an artist and as a performer.
I mean Elvis was, in many ways, a lot
like people before him.
Like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Elvis
was a song stylist but he was a
fantastically charismatic performer.
the young Elvis was dangerous, he was
definitely sort of a bad guy, in a
certain kind of a way.
he's seen as sort of a, maybe a negative
influence on young people.
I think about, I mentioned that because a
lot of times, the Elvis of later years,
the Elvis of, of the early 1970s, for
example, is not really seen so much that
way.
But the early Elvis, we have seen those
early videos, you should check it out.
anyway, Elvis himself born in Tupelo,
Mississippi, but moved with his family to
Memphis when he was about 13 years old.
discovered Sam Phillips' Memphis
recording service which later became Sun
Records in 1952.
Elvis discovered Sam Phillips' recording
service when he wanted to make, ih, a
demo tape for his mom's birthday.
and so he did that in 1953, and started
hanging around the, the, the, the studio
there.
Once Sam Phillips started doing Sun
Records, eh, established that in 1972,
1952.
He'd started out as a guy who basically
just recorded concerts and did some radio
announcing, that kind of thing.
But then decided, you know, and in fact
he recorded a Rocket 88, the Jackie
Brenston tune which he then sold or
licensed to Chess records.
And they released that in 1951.
Well they got the idea I should have my
own label.
So it went from becoming Memphis
recording service to becoming Sound
file:///C|/_jeblanco/_jb/Coursera/HistoryOfRock/1-2/3%20-%205%20-%20The%20Rise%20of%20Elvis%20Presley%20(12-45).txt[24/06/2014 8:23:28]
Records in 1952.
Then Elvis comes along, and Elvis finds
out that they're there.
He's, had always, you know, always wanted
to be a singer.
He'd listened to a lot of country western
music, grown up with a lot of rhythm and
blues music.
He used to go to the other side of the
tracks and try to sneak into clubs and
hear various kinds of things.
He was kind of a, in fact in, in, in the
mostly white high school that he was
He was in, he was kind of a, a loner, you
know, in some kinds of ways.
He was so different from the other kinds,
he was so dedicated to Rhythm and Blues
Culture.
Anyway, Sam Phillips sees this young
Elvis kid coming in, he starts to show up
for sessions
There's a story that at one session of
prisoners, he actually tried to offer
advice about what they should do on one
of the tunes.
And Sam Phillips, the way he told the
story, he said man I didn't think that
maybe the best environment for a kid his
age to be hanging around.
And so I tried to scare him off, anyway,
Elvis kept coming back.
And kept, kept wanting to record for Sam
Phillips.
And so, finally Sam decided to start
working with Elvis.
he did a couple of tunes for him in the
studio at Sun in 1954 and Sam, didn't
think he could use either of those.
But he saw some kind of promise in Elvis
Presley, so he put him together with
Scotty Moore.
and Bill Black to more experience
musicians who he trusted to kind of work
with Elvis, to do a bunch of different
kinds of things.
He wasn't really quite sure what Elvis
could do well.
Sam Philips said from the time he started
Sun Records until the time he started to
have success with Elvis Presley.
Which would have been '52, '53 into 1954.
He'd always recorded Black artists.
But understanding that crossover was an
important component of being able to sell
those records.
Crossing over those R&B records, crossing
over to a White audience.
He'd always said famously If I could
find, a Black guy or if I could find a
White guy, that could sing like a black
guy, I could make a million dollars.
Well, it turned out, Elvis Presley was
that guy.
But even Sam didn't know it at the
beginning, so when Elvis came back with
Scotty and and Bill and they were doing
all kinds of tunes.
A lot of them, were sort of, almost like
Dean Martinish, kinds of sort of crooner
songs and they did whole.
Session of that kind of thing, and things
were not going well.
everybody was getting tired you know,
they were getting a little bit sort of
punch drunk.
And the way the story's often told, Sam
Philips had to fix something having to do
with his, his recording equipment.
Had to, you know, go underneath the, the
equipment and fix some wires or some kind
of thing.
And so the guys had a little bit of time
on their hands.
And they were kind of clowning around,
and Elvis always used to like to clown
around.
And so he starts to do this That's
Alright Mama thing, this Arthur Crudup
thing that he knew.
And he starts to sort of do it, and the
other guys thinking it was kind of funny,
started, you know, joining in.
And they started to do it, all just as a
kind of a gag that amused themselves
while they're waiting for Sam to finish
playing with their equipment.
And as the story goes, Sam Philips' head
pops and he says, what's that?
And he said it's nothing, we're just
fooling around.
Let's record it.
So they record That's All Right Mama, and
of course, wouldn't you know it, that
becomes the song in 1954, the summer of
1954.
That becomes the defining record of Elvis
Presley in his, in his career.
At least the first, the first big one.
It's got that Sun Records sound.
That slap back echo that Sam Phillips was
so famous for and in many ways, it's kind
of like Elvis is taking country music.
It's what the Arthur Crudup, who was an
R&B singer.
It's what the Arthur Crudup song would
have sounded like, if it was done by
country western musicians.
The flip side of the record, is Bill
Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky, done as
if it were an R&B tune.
So, it's interesting that, that we've got
an R&B tune, done as if it is a country
tune and a country tune or bluegrass tune
done as if it was an R&B tune.
So, if you look for, for someone who was
able to put those styles together.
There it is, on, on the A and B side of
that, of that single from 1954.
Well after he made that record.
Sam Phillips immediately took it out to
his friend Dewey Phillips, no relation.
not brother or family members.
But they just happened to have the same
last name.
Dewey Phillips who's, we've said before
hand the radio show at WHBQ.
And Dewey Philips starts to play it over
and over again.
Well the song catches on.
And so Sam Philips has got a regional hit
on his hands.
And on the strength of that regional hit
he's able to get Elvis on the Grand Ole
Opry, and get him a regular spot on
Louisiana Hayride.
It's interesting that, that two sided
single, some of the markets preferred to
play Blue Moon of Kentucky.
Other markets preferred to play That's
Alright Mama, depending on whether they
saw Elvis as primarily kind of a hip
country act or a countryish R&B act,
right.
But both sides got ear play, depending
on, on the region.
But anyway, it started to have some,
some, some pretty good success with it.
Things were starting to heat up.
This Elvis Presley guy is looking like he
could be a big star.
And in walks a guy by the name of Colonel
Tom Parker, who, who had previously
managed Hank Snow.
A country and western singer that had had
a certain amount of success.
And Parker sees something in Elvis
Presley, and starts to broker a deal to
take over the management of Elvis
Presley, and get him signed to RCA
Records.
And so they, this isn't the first time
somebody had asked Sam Phillips to sell
Evlis' contract.
But Tom Parker brokers this deal for what
at the time seemed like an enormous
amount of money.
He brokered a deal to sell the Sun
contract to RCA for $35,000, plus Elvis
would get $5,000 in back royalties that
he was owed for.
That hadn't been paid yet on records that
had already been sold, so $40,000 total.
It seemed like to a lot of people in the
industry like RCA was throwing its money
away on one of these idiotic rock and
roll singers who were just the flavor of
the month.
And boy, would they ever regret it.
but the deal was done.
It's important to point out, it was the
first, the first one of these rock and
roll singers had signed with a major
label.
So that was already an indication that
rock and roll was coming up in the world.
out of the indie label into a major
label, with all the resources at their
disposal.
But it's also important to point out that
Elvis was signed into the country
division of RCA.
And so his recordings were done at
Nashville, so it's not like he was
entirely in the mainstream even within
RCA.
But It was a crucial step for rock and
roll and because he was now with this
major label, they were able to get him
Television appearances.
So, he appears in early 1956, on the
Dorsey Brother show, a few times.
Although that show did not have very good
ratings.
He appeared a couple times on the Milton
Berle Show.
Which did get very good reading, rating
ratings, and was extremely controversial.
And then a couple of times on the Steve
Allen Show where it was controversial.
And of them where he even comes out
wearing a tuxedo and sings Hound Dog to a
Hound Dog
To try and make up for the controversial
things that he'd done before.
Which included getting to the end of, of,
a Hound Dog on one of these performances.
And going into a kind of almost stripper,
bump and grind kind of thing at the end,
totally impromptu.
If you see the clip of that, you can see
Scotty Bill and the drummer, DJ Fontanna
are looking at each other and saying to
themselves what in the heck is this guy
doing?
Live TV and all of the sudden he goes to
this ending we haven't rehearsed?
And he was really playing it up and the
girls were screaming and all this kind of
thing and the next day it was like Elvis
the Pelvis.
This is sinful, you know, hell and
perdition.
And so Elvis was now the bad, the bad boy
who was leading all these, these kids
astray and all that.
So then he came back the next
performance, and did this thing where he
was wearing a tuxedo.
And sing Hound Dog in this very sort of
proper way, as a kind of a
tongue-in-cheek kind of thing.
Anyway, Elvis Presley, very, very big.
One of the important things about his
success, was that he not only had
crossover success.
But he was one of the first artists to
repeatedly have top hits on all 3 charts
at the same time.
Remember the figures that I cited in one
of the earlier lectures about how
separated the charts were in the period
of the first half of the 50s.
Now, we're talking hit records that are
in the case of records like Hound Dog and
Jailhouse Rock.
Were number one on all three charts at
the same time, imagine that.
That's what you call market saturation.
And so this, this tremendous you know,
charisma, television presence.
All this kind of thing really sent all
kinds of ripples through the popular
music business that RCA a major label had
gotten involved.
This guy was on TV, he was having
fantastic hits, he was a star, he was a
celebrity.
And all of a sudden the other labels sort
of thinking we need to get into this game
too.
And all of a sudden the rock business
started to go up a couple levels in terms
of, of big sort of major label and
corporate interest.
Now we think about Elvis as a performer.
We should, we should view him as I said
before, as a song stylist.
Elvis never wrote any songs.
We talk about Chuck Berry writing his own
music.
Buddy Holly writing his own music.
But most of these guys didn't write their
own songs at this time.
And Elvis was one of those.
What he knew how to do.
Was how to choose tunes that were best
for him.
And a typical Elvis recording session we
knew this.
Wwe know this from various accounts,
including those of Jerry Leiber and Mike
Stoller who were there.
Had him going through song, after song,
after song with the band until he found
something that he thought fit him, just
right.
He had a lot of idea about what he did
well.
The deal he made with Colonel Tom Parker
is he would, he would stay out of the
business end of that.
And Colonel Tom Parker would do that, and
Colonel Tom Parker would stay out of the
music end.
And if he recorded something that he
didn't want released It wouldn't be
released.
Elvis was the final arbitor of what
happened, musically speaking.
And I think that that maybe defeats the
image of Elvis of just being kind of a
dumb, dumb but attractive and talented
singer.
He really understood his own talents, his
own music, his own approach.
He blended together Pop, Country, Western
and R&B singing styles.
You can hear an awful lot of Dean Martin,
for example, and Elvis with that hubba,
hubba, hubba thing that he does, you can
hear an awful lot of R&B.
Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, for
example, if you take the, the original
Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters
recording of White Christmas.
And then listen to this version of White
Christmas that Elvis does on his
Christmas album from a couple years
later.
You can hear Elvis doing that version,
but doing all the different voices of the
Drifters in succession as they sing it in
his own way.
Absolutely imitating them.
And a lot of things he does sound very
Elvis-like.
Which give us, gives us a sense of where
he got a lot of the things that he
blended together to create his unique
vocal style.
Remember, as a song stylist, that's what
you'll want.
A unique vocal style and Elvis Presley
certainly had that.
Well, by 1958, Elvis had been drafted
into the army.
March of 1958 on a day that everybody
thought was Black Monday.
Elvis Presley was inducted into the armed
services and was away for a couple of
years.
But Elvis' success opened up opportunity
for other rock and roll artist.
So lets turn our attention to them in the
next lecture.
Right now I'd like to take a little bit
of time considering why it is that Sam
Phillips of Sun Records would of sold
Elvis's contract the way he did to RCA.
You would think, I would, I would think
not knowing if I, if I didn't know how
the, the business work.
That you know if you have a singer like
Elvis Presley, and he's just starting to
rise in the charts and heard of becoming
a big star.
Why would you want to sell that person's
contract to another label when maybe if
you became a star, you could make all
that money, and grow your own company,
right?
Well it's, it's kind of ironic that the
way things work for the independent label
actually is at, at that time actually
punished too great of a success and
here's why.
If you have a record that really starts
to take off.
You have to pay, in order to make as many
copies as you want to be able to sell.
You have to pay to have all those records
pressed, and all the sleeves printed, and
all of it assembled and shipped out.
You have to pay all that money up front.
The record store people, or whoever else,
the jukebox people, or wherever, they're
not going to pay you for those records
until sometimes months later.
So, if you're a small independent label
and you've only got so much capital to
work with.
And you put out all this capital to get
these records out there.
Those records could be selling like hot
cakes, but it doesn't do you any good,
because you're not going to see that
money, maybe for six weeks eight weeks.
In the meantime, you're really kind of
frozen out, I mean there's, unless you've
got tons and tons of money at your
disposal, which is not the definition of
an independent label, right.
You're kind of, kind of frozen out and
its, its, it actually ruin a big record
like that could, could back in those days
is ruin an independent label, because of
the time lag between the money that they
put out there.
So it's ironic they would be going under,
just at about the time they were having
their biggest possible success.
By the time the money comes into them
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it's too late they, they haven't had
enough money to sustain the business
during that period.
And so, what Sam Phillips decided to do
in the case of Elvis is, Elvis's contract
was coming up for renewal anyway, and
there's no guarantee that Elvis would
have resigned it.
And this is a little bit like talking
about athletics these days or sports,
professional sports.
So, while Elvis's contract was still
worth something he sold it to RCA, but he
wasn't even sure he wanted to sell it at
that point.
The way he tells the story, he says that
he offered them, he made an offer to them
when he offered $35,000.
He thought they would never take it in a
million years.
It was like a way of telling them to go
away, setting the price so high that they
just wouldn't take it.
But to his surprise, they took it, and
when it, when the money was actually, was
actually that much money in the deal, he
had to think, well should I grab this,
you know, a bird in the hand versus two
in the bush.
Should I grab this now?
Take this money and use it to reinvest in
the company and other artists.
He had other people coming along at Sun
Records, we'll talk about in the next
lecture.
People like Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison
and Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.
Maybe he thought that he would take that
money and would reinvest in his business,
and he would grow the entire thing, even
if he lost Elvis.
and so, that's one reason or at least a
couple of reasons why Sam Phillips would
have sold Elvis's contract as he did.
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I said at the beginning of this week
lectures, that this era's basically
divided up into the period before Elvis.
And we talked about that 1955, we talked
about Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little
Richard, Bill Haley, people like that.
And then Elvis, which we've just gotten
done talking about.
The importance of him, especially when he
comes onto the scene in 1956, when he
signs with RCA.
And they put all of their promotional
muscle behind him, and he starts to have
all this fantastic national success on
all three charts.
And then there's the period after Elvis,
or after Elvis' initial success.
So, now we're talking about 57, 58, and
59.
and that's what we're going to talk about
now, the artists who were important
during that third division of years that
we're talking about in this relatively
short period from 55 to 59 or 60.
let's stay with Sun Records for a minute
and talk about some of the artists that
were still at Sun after Elvis departed.
The first of these is Carl Perkins, a
singing guitar player who had a pretty
good hit, a number 2 hit with Blue Suede
Shoes.
In fact, even before Elvis did it, Carl
Perkins had a record that was a hit on
all three charts at the same time.
but unfortunately for Carl Perkins, on
his way to television performance on the
East Coast to promote Blue Suede Shoes,
they were in a car accident and he,
nobody was killed.
But I, as I recall, I think he busted a
leg or something like that, and so
couldn't perform for four to six weeks.
So, just when the song would have
crested, maybe he could have put himself
in the position to be a bigger star.
He was laid up in the hospital in and out
of it for a month or two.
And so that was really a sort of a, a bad
turn of events for him.
Interestingly, Carl Perkins was one of
the favorite, artists for the Beatles to
cover later.
And George Harrison was such a, such a
fan of Carl Perkins, that when all the
other guys, early on in the band when
they changed their names to have stage
names.
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Paul was Paul Ramone, and John Lennon was
Long John Lennon.
George Harrison changed his name to Carl
Harrison, not exactly a dramatic change
but anyway, kind of cute and fun, Carl
Perkins.
Another one that was at Sun after Elvis,
Johnny Cash had a country and western hit
in 1956 with Folsom Prison, Folsom Prison
Blues, a song that we all think of now as
a classic country hit.
and then I Walk the Line in 1956 was on
Sun Records which was a country western
pop crossover.
That's something we haven't talked about
yet.
The idea that this song could be a hit
first on the country western charts, and
then cross over onto the pop charts.
Last week, we talked about New San
Antonio Rose, which had originally been a
hit for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys,
and they, when covered by Bing Crosby
became a hit on the pop charts.
But here, the actual Johnny Cash record
moved over from country, and then finally
maybe the biggest name and most
successful name, at least for these
years, after Elvis is Jerry Lee Lewis
who's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On.
was a big hit in 1957, Great Balls of
Fire in 1957, after that it was
Breathless.
I mean, he had a, was a, Jerry Lee Lewis
was in many ways very much like Little
Richard, a pianist who sang and who was,
sort of, did, had a wild kind of act.
Although his was a little bit more sort
of you know, southern white Louisiana.
as opposed to Richards, but he was a
fantastic performer, very charismatic.
one other men, person that we should
mention who was on Sun.
And we'll talk him, him next week is Roy
Orbison, who was here about this time.
Now, in the case of Johnny Cash and Roy
Orbison, they, they both went on to have
their greatest successes after they left
Sun Records.
But you can kind of see with all of these
going through the Sun studios in Memphis,
a small, little independent label.
there was an awful lot of talented people
coming through Sun Records.
Some of the other, what we call,
rockabilly artists, we talk about this,
this southern style out of Sun Records
that Elvis, and the rest of these artists
were involved in his rockabilly the, the,
the, the cross between hillbilly music
and rock music, rockabilly.
Maybe the most famous later exponent of
rockabilly would be somebody like Brian
Setzer who still continues to record in a
rockabilly style.
Anyway, some important other rockabillies
Gene Vizet, Gene Vincent Who Be Bop a
Lula, was a hit on Capitol label, on the
Capitol label out of Los Angeles 1956.
Gene Vincent was, was signed by Capitol,
in the wake of Elvis, to be their version
of Elvis Presley, when once RCA had one,
everybody had to have one.
Eddie Cochran was signed by Liberty out
of Los Angeles, and had a hit Twenty
Flight Rock in 1956, and Summertime
Blues, in 1958.
Interestingly, those Eddie Cochran
records were recorded in Gold Star
Studios in Los Angeles, which will,
later, we'll talk about this next week,
be a very important studio for Phil
Spector and those wall of sound
recordings.
Both Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran
performed in a movie called The Girl
Can't Help It from 1956, which is sort of
an upscale version Alan Freed movies I
was talking about a couple of lectures
ago.
Because they're actually are move, real
movie stars, and there actually is a real
story.
This movie, The Girl Can't Help It, was a
kind of a hit movie of the day, and Paul
McCartney often talks about how
influential that movie was, and the
performances in it.
especially the Eddie Cochran performance
of of Twenty Flight Rock.
In many ways, Eddie Cochran and Gene
Vincent were probably more influential in
the UK.
And that may be because they were so
available to UK, music fans through that
film.
But anyway, both of them had really big
success in the UK, maybe a bit bigger
than they had in the United States.
Now, right in this part of the course, we
probably should talk about Ricky Nelson
and the Everly Brothers.
In this period at the end of the 50's, as
other important rockabilly stars.
But I'm going to save discussion of them
for next week when we talk about music
and the period between 1960 and 1963.
Because both Ricky Nelson and the Everly
Brothers went on to have a lot of
success, sort of into that era.
And so we'll save discussion of those,
we'll double back and pick up on those
guys.
when we get to that point.
let's talk a little bit about something I
call Rockabilly Ladies.
One of the things we, you have to
remember that when rock and roll was
unfolding people were trying various
kinds of things.
And one thing they thought is, well, you
know, if there can be a rockabilly Elvis,
why not a female Elvis.
That, that could maybe be something we
could sort of sell some records.
And so Janis Martin actually was signed
to RCA just weeks after Elvis Presley was
signed to RCA to be kind of the Elvis,
female Elvis, and so she had a, a single
that came out called Drugstore Rock from
1956.
So, that gets kind of into the teen, teen
life, you know, you go to the drugstore,
the soda, soda fountain there.
But then she had a song called My Boy
Elvis from 1956.
Wanda Jackson had a tune, a bunch of sort
of rockabilly tunes from that era maybe
the biggest one at the end of this era
called, Let's Have a Party from 1960.
She knew Elvis Presley personally and he
sort of talked Wanda Jackson into doing
this sort of female rockabilly thing, but
maybe the most interesting historically
is is Brenda Lee.
Now Brenda Lee went on to have tremendous
success in the 1960s.
These are her song I'm Sorry was a
fantastic country western hit and cross
over, but when she was just 12 years old
in 1956 she was called Little Brenda Lee
and recorded a tune called Bigelow
6-2000, that was markedly a female
rockabilly tune.
Now these female rockabilly are now sort
of a a bit of a kind of footnote to the
history, but it sort of shows you that
the, the people in the industry didn't
quite know what they were not that they
didn't know what they were doing.
But they didn't know what would catch on,
and so they tried a couple of different
things and this is one that probably
didn't catch on so much, it didn't catch
on like Elvis did.
Well the last figure I want to talk about
in this lecture is Buddy Holly.
Buddy Holly is a very important figure in
this period, but comes, comes at it
pretty late in the game.
In fact, Buddy Holly is somebody who also
was signed in the wake of Elvis going to
RCA as as a major labels version of Elvis
and that label was Decca.
But let's say a little bit about Buddy
and his background.
Buddy, I think as most people know, comes
from Lubbock Texas.
and as I said signed to Decca in the wake
of Elvis's RCA deal.
But that initial signing with Decca went
absolutely nowhere.
They took Buddy off, I forget where they
did their recording, maybe it was in New
York.
And the did some recording and nothing
became of it, and so he went back to
Lubbock.
And back in Lubbock, he caught the
attention of a producer.
Well a guy who had had some records on
the charts himself, Norman Petty, who had
his own recording studio in Clovis, New
Mexico who was kind of becoming a record
producer not unlike Sam Phillips at about
the same time.
He has great equipment, great ideas, was
a very forward looking kind of guy.
So Buddy Holly and his guys used to go to
Clovis, New Mexico to record almost
everything they did.
So, almost all of those recordings that
you know, the classic Buddy Holly
recordings, were all recorded in Clovis,
New Mexico.
And, and engineered by, and produced by
Norman Petty.
there's a time difference of one hour
between Lubbock and Clovis.
And so the, Buddy Holly and his buddies,
and I think the distance between the two
is about 100 miles.
You can, you can check on a map and see.
But, the story is that you know, long
stretch of flat highway.
The, the band used to like to leave Texas
and try to arrive in in Clovis before
they left Texas.
So, that meant sometimes having to do 70
or 80 miles an hour, maybe 90 or 100,
depending on, on what the distance is
there.
That gives you some idea of the wide open
spaces of, of what we're talking about
here.
Well, with those recordings from Clovis,
New Mexico they got interest in two
labels.
Well, one label first, Coral, who
ironically was subsidiary of Decca.
So Decca had had, had not, wasn't holding
anything against Buddy Holly for the
first one not working out.
But what they decided was an interesting,
kind of, promotional trick.
They decided that some of the records
would be released as Buddy Holly on the
deck of subsidiary Coral.
And some of the others as the Crickets on
the deck of subsidiary Brunswick.
I guess the idea is that you can one
artist being two different bands, and on
two different labels, and be able to
maybe have more chance of getting on the
charts, or getting more records in, in,
into radio play, and that kind of thing,
and so anyway, that's why it happened.
So, if you really want to get picky about
it, the tunes that we really think of as
being Buddy Holly tunes, some of them
were Buddy Holly tunes, and some of them,
strictly speaking, were Cricket's tunes.
Although now in all anthologies, they're
basically thought of you know, as Buddy
Holly's and the Cricket, and same guys,
same studio, same everything, and most
folk.
again an important songwriter along with
Chuck Berry one of the important early
songwriters The Beatles of course and
others Bob Dylan.
And a lot of other 60's musicians were
very much influenced by by Buddy Holly
and Chuck Berry.
some of the big representative examples
of the Buddy Holly style.
Peggy Sue from 1957, Oh Boy from 1957 and
Maybe Baby from 1958 Buddy Holly was much
covered by other artists, so we've got
the Beatles doing Words of Love the
Rolling Stones doing Don't Fade Away,
Linda Ronstadt doing It's so Easy and
lots and lots of others later.
Buddy unfortunately died early in a plane
crash it was February the 3rd, 1959.
I think he was only 22 years old when he
died.
Don McLean, later in 1971, in a song
called American Pie talked about that as
the day the music died.
The idea that rock and roll in its
original incarnation, this era that we're
talking about from 55 up to this point
basically died the day that Buddy Holly
went down in that plane.
and so, what we want to do is in the next
segment talk about what happened at the
end of this period in 1959.
But at this point, rock and roll it turns
out was in a certain kind of trouble.
There had been a lot of pressure that
rock and roll was a negative influence,
and this pressure was really starting to
threaten the possibility of rock and roll
continue.
So, in the next video, let's, let's find
out what happened at the end of the
decade when rock and roll was in such
trouble.
As I said in the last video, by 1959,
rock was up against some very significant
challenges.
This early period of rock and roll that
started with Little Richard, and Chuck
Barry, and Bill Haley and The Comets.
And Fats Domino, went through Elvis
Presley, and then the artist that we've
been talking about, just most recently
Buddy Holly and, and people like that.
there's some real problems that start to
hit at the end of the decade.
Maybe the most obvious one being as we
said when we're talking about Elvis.
In 1958, Elvis goes into the army.
Now, Colonel Tom Parker was smart about
having a bunch of, of tunes, recorded up.
So that he could continue to release
Elvis, new Elvis stuff while Elvis was
unable to record to sort of sustain his
career so that his career didn't die when
he was unavailable for a couple of years.
But nevertheless he went into the army.
And so he was off the scene to a certain
extent.
It turns out some stories go, that Elvis
could have actually gotten not a, he did
get a deferment.
But he could have gone with the USO and
been a performer.
but no, I mean what he really wanted to
do was serve.
I think the Colonel thought since Elvis
had been so controversial earlier it was
good to show that he was an honest,
upstanding, young American boy who was
happy to fight for his country.
And the whole idea the Colonel had was
about mainstreaming Elvis Presley so that
when rock and roll died, Elvis's career
wouldn't die.
And the people at RCA were behind, were,
were behind that idea, too.
So that's sort of the way.
But, you know, either, either way, by '58
Elvis was out of the picture.
We talked in the last video about how
Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in
February of 1959.
Little Richard quit rock and roll to
preach in late 1957 figuring that rock
and roll was the devil's music.
This goes to this idea of a, of a
conflict between, you know, gospel and
the church as being the, the work of God.
And rock and roll being sort of the devil
drawing people into, you know, dark clubs
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at night, this kind of thing.
And so, Little Richard, as the story
goes, was on a flight and it was a very,
very bumpy flight.
And he was afraid he was going to die,
and he made a prayer saying he had made a
promise to God saying if you get me down
from this plane alive, I will quit rock
and roll and I will serve you.
And the flight landed safely and he kept
his word and quit.
Anyway, he was out by late 1957.
Chuck Ber, Chuck Berry in late 1959 was
arrested for violating what's called the
Mann Act, which is transporting a minor
across state lines.
He always maintained this were trumped up
charges that were basically a way of
trying to strike back at a successful
black American in this country.
He appealed the conviction and ended up
having to do some prison time for that.
But anyway he was, he was out for a while
by late 1959.
There was the Jerry Lee Lewis scandal in
May of 1958.
his third wife, Myra, was actually his
cousin, once removed.
It turns out that she was 13 at the time
they were married.
And his second marriage had not quite
been final at the time.
This was such a scandal that it basically
forced Jerry Lee Lewis out of out of the
mainstream pop world, at least for a
couple of years.
He, he went on to have a very successful
career in country and western music in
the 60s.
And I think all is forgiven now.
But back at the time.
it just, that kind of thing really fit in
too much with the negative stereotypes
that had to do with southern southern
life.
And so, by that time, we're talking about
Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck
Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis all being out of
the scene by some time in 1959.
So, rock and roll was in trouble in terms
of its performers.
And then, come The Payola Investigations
in late 1959.
And I think it's important for us to
understand that rock and roll, with all
this crossover, these independent labels
and these unwieldy, unmanageable
musicians.
Had cut a significant, had cut out a
significant amount of market share for
themselves of, of, of market share that
used to belong to the major labels.
and all of these Tin Pan Alley composers
who just not too long ago, publishes had
been selling all kinds of music, were now
having a problem having to deal with this
rock and roll thing.
They thought, they, they kept thinking
that music would just go back to the way
it was in 1945.
When people go over this rock and roll
fever and came to their senses.
somebody like Mitch Miller, for example,
st, at Columbia was proud not to have any
rock and roll artists on their label.
He was staying true to what was real
music.
Most of these guys in the music business,
the older guys who ran the record
companies had no respect for rock and
roll.
They thought that rock and roll musicians
were kind of cretins, and the fans were
stupid and gullible.
And they couldn't believe how it had
gotten so popular.
And mostly they just wanted their market
share back, it seems.
But, to a certain extent, they thought
that perhaps it was because these indie
labels were cheating.
and they were able to convince people in
Washington that, that was in fact that
case.
Now, as it turned out, a Congressional
Committee in Washington was just
finishing up and investigation of quiz
shows.
Maybe you know that relatively recent
movie about that, where there was a quiz
show, that turned out was rigged.
And so the idea that hits on the radio
would be rigged.
And that's how this lousy rock and roll
music could overtake what we all know as
good, traditional, tin pan ally music.
That must be what's going on.
So, this Congressional Committee decided
to turn its attention, after having
finished up with the quiz show, to what
was going on in the music business.
And especially, in radio, and to a
certain extent television.
So, the House Special Subcommittee on
Legislative Oversight got to work and
started interviewing people about this.
Now, their whole contention was that that
there was this pay for play thing going
on.
That people were, the record labels,
especially indies, were paying disc
jockeys to play these records.
That's why they were getting on the air.
That's why they were becoming hits.
And, these investigations adversely
affected both the major labels and the
indie labels, because they were all doing
it.
It's just that the major labels were able
to endure this and it drove a lot of the
Indie labels out of business.
Just having to defend yourself legally
and, and all that goes with it.
anyway, Payola, this idea of paying for
play has a long history in popular music.
There was nothing really new about what
was going on.
the major labels spent probably a lot
more money than the indie labels did
paying to get plays on the radio.
But anyway, the Congress got in there and
they started asking questions and it
became a big scandal.
There were two people who were sort of
who, who were the biggest stars to be
questioned on all this.
The first was Dick Clark, who was just
getting started in his American band
stand career out of Philidelphia, the
television show he'd been involved in,
radio.
But it turns out, Dick Clark, thinking he
was being a smart businessman, had
invested in, had a portfolio of products.
He was, he owned publishing, he owned
shares in record manufacturing.
He owned shares on the show that he was
he was producing.
And so, you can get the idea that there
could be a conflict of interest that
could arise when you own a part of the
record company.
And the publishing on a record that
you're playing on your television show
that's nationally syndicated, right?
That could be a kind of a conflict of
interest.
The way he portrayed himself in Congress,
however, was, fellows I'm, I'm just
trying to make a living here.
Whatever you tell me you think I should
do in order to keep this as clean as
possible, that's what I want to do.
But I'm just a businessman trying to make
my, my fortune in the music business.
I'm trying to play by the rules here, if
there's something here that's wrong, you
know, I'm happy to do whatever I can to
accommodate.
And so they ended up thinking that Dick
Clark was just a fantastic young man, a
model sort of citizen, a great
businessman, that kind of thing.
He came out of the whole thing almost
entirely unscathed, with his reputation
intact, even though there was some very
edgy moments for him.
And some possibility of his career
collapsing, he came through it with
flying colors and was praised.
Alan Freed, on the other hand, did not.
He continually resisted and was, was not
particularly cooperative.
he eventually pleaded guilty to taking
bribes.
he was he got a suspended sentence and a
$300 fine.
But he, by that time, he'd already been
fired from every job that he had when he
was at the height of his career.
So no more radio, no more TV, no more
nothing.
and by 1965, he was sort of died kind of
a broken man.
And so, it's too bad about how all of
that turned out for Alan Freed and Dick
Clark was able to get through it all.
one of the effects, or the, I guess there
many effects to the Payola
Investigations.
One of them is that it made radio
stations much more conservative in the,
in the sense that they were fearful of
losing their licenses.
I mean, a radio station can only
broadcast if it has a license by the
Federal Government.
So, the Federal Government decides to
pull your license, you're out of
business.
So, you really better be sure you're, you
know, minding your, minding your business
closely and, and, and not transgressing
against anything that can get you into,
into trouble.
And so, after all the rock and roll
craziness that had gone on with DJs and
all this kind of thing.
This music business pros decide that, you
know, they had better take a little bit
more control over what music gets on the
radio so they get into trouble this way.
And in fact, one of the things we can say
about this next era is if the period from
1955 through '59 had been dominated by
independent labels and artists.
Who, you know defied tradition and maybe
polite, regular polite behavior and that
kind of thing.
If it was kind of like the wild west of
the music business.
After that, after all this Payola thing
and various musicians were out of it, the
next era was the music business taking
control of rock and roll again.
That is they liked the idea that there
was this youth, youth market that had
been created, that they could sell
records to.
But they figured, they could probably do
it better and more efficiently if they
took it over.
And so, that's essentially what happened.
So, what we're going to try and figure
out next week is when this happens.
All these years from 1960 through the end
of 1963, The Beatles hit this country in
early 1964, that period between Elvis and
The Beatles.
is this period a kind of a dark ages for
rock music?
When rock music becomes, sort of,
homogenized and family friendly.
And lacking all the kind of excitement,
and interest, and edginess that it had in
those first years.
Or, are these golden years, as new styles
begin to develop, and new kinds of things
start to happen in popular music.
that really were cut short perhaps, by
the arrival of the British invasion and
The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones and
the rest of them.
We'll consider all that next week.

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This week, we'll turn our attention to

the world of popular music in America

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