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Books Available: | Mariah: A Love Story | | | You Cannot Stay on the Summit Forever | |
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You
know, to talk about the '60s almost brings tears to my eyes. What we
did. What we all did. We changed the world - me, us, Smokey Robinson,
Jerry Butler, The Temptations, Aretha, Otis, Gladys Knight, James Brown.
We really did. Barriers broke down for us. And for all black musicians
afterwards. I mean, to have lived through that, and to have been a part
of that, is more than anyone can ask. I,
too, hear America singing. The
lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis... had to be one of the biggest
things that ever could happen. I went out into this no-man's land, and
I knocked the shit out of the color line...
I
do not remember whether I read it or heard it but I am certain that
on the occasion of the failed invasion of Cuba usually referred to as
"The Bay of Pigs," Norman Mailer commented that the United
States had attempted to take over an island whose music it did not understand.
This may not have been the most perceptive analysis of the fiasco ever
offered. But it draws attention to an important point. The music of
a country - a culture, an era - can tell us a great deal about that
country - that culture, that era. Musical production and consumption
are not accidental. They do not exist bracketed off and isolated from
the country - the culture, the era - as a whole. Music is integral.
Listened to closely, it goes to the heart of a cultural complex (1).
In
this chapter, we will look at Rock 'n' Roll. We will ask of it some
questions: What characterized the music of the early Sixties? How did
it differ from the music that preceded it? What does the music tell
us about the time and what does the time tell us about the music? Does
the music of the early Sixties carry my thesis forward? Do political
protest and cultural form intersect and interact? I As
of 1950, popular music in America was as racially segregated as public
water fountains in the South and residential neighborhoods in the North.
Billboard magazine reported musical preferences. It categorized songs
as either Pop, Country and Western, or Rhythm and Blues. In each of
these categories, different artists created different music for different
audiences. There was little to no overlap. A song would appear on one
of these charts exclusively. That is why there were three charts. Pop
and Country and Western were 'white' music. Rhythm and Blues was 'black'
music. Until
1949 Rhythm and Blues had been known as 'race music.' (2) This was music
performed by black artists to be played on black radio stations or performed
live in front of black audiences. It was the music of 'the chitlin'
circuit.' Never mind that a white person may have written the song or
been part of the record company house band, or been the sound engineer,
or in all likelihood, the owner of the record label. Music made by black
performers for black audiences was 'race music.' In
1954 in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court outlawed
school segregation. That same year, the Chords, a black rhythm and blues
group from the Morrisania district of the Bronx "recorded their
reworking of an old jailhouse song called 'Sh-boom.'"(3) Why
do I link these two events? Are they yoked more than merely chronologically? "On
3 July [1954] having climbed to number eight on Billboard's national
Rhythm 'n' Blues singles chart, 'Sh-boom' suddenly appeared on that
journal's traditionally white bestseller [pop] list."(4) Sh-boom
had, in musical parlance, crossed over. If it had been a person
or an institution one would have said it had integrated. It
was not alone. But the crossover of Sh-boom was noteworthy: "Although
it was not the first rhythm and blues record to penetrate the white
pop charts, the crossover of Sh-boom nevertheless signaled the start
of a new era in American popular music."(5) Young
blacks and young whites - the youth market - had begun to listen to
the same music. Racial segregation had been replaced by generational
segregation. Younger people and older people - regardless of race -
no longer listened to the same music. White adults lamented their children's
embrace of a new music that these adults "...saw as nothing less
than part of a systematic assault on core, essentially white middle-class
American social, sexual, and racial values."(6) If the new music
was anathema to the older generation, it was 'what was happening' for
the younger generation. II Rhythm
and blues had a baby and they called it rock 'n' roll.
I
am not a hood. I am a model student. I get A's in all my major subjects.
(Art and mechanical drawing are another story.) Except for a two month
stint of smoking cigarettes on the south lawn of Central - where it
was permissible - my only vice is staying out at my girlfriend's house
most Friday and Saturday nights beyond Philly's midnight curfew. It
is any weekday from 1953 to 1957 after school. I am sprawled on the
thick deep-green rug on my family's living room floor. My sister's Steinway
piano is off to my left. I am playing with my little brother, Frankie.
I am taking care of him and doing my homework and, as a dedicated 'multi-tasker'
(a phrase I do not yet know) I am watching Bandstand on the TV set. In
1953, Bandstand begins as a local show. By 1957 it has gone national
and been renamed American Bandstand. At that time, it begins
to be hosted by Dick Clark - he of the brilliantine hair, fraternity
good looks, never-changing weight, never wrinkling skin. From 1953 to
1956 the MC is Bob Horn - more beefy, rougher at the edges, more of
a big brother type to the 'regulars' on the show.(7) The
format of the show does not vary. The set looks like a record store.
Bob Horn stands on an elevated platform behind a counter. It looks like
the check-out station at the store. At the center of the set is a dance
floor. White teenagers from North, South, and West Philly sit in the
bleachers on either side of the dance floor. A list of the week's top
ten records is attached in descending order to the front of the record
store counter. With
some hype and fan-fare, Bob Horn announces the next song. The 78 rpm
single comes on. The artists on the records are black and white. The
teenagers come down from the bleachers to the dance floor to dance:
boy/girl; boy/girl; boy/girl. Songs
from that time become my songs. They never leave me. I can hear at least
snatches of their lyrics still today. I sing along with the records.
I sing 'Sh-boom,' 'Crying in the Chapel,' 'My Prayer,' 'The Great Pretender,'
' Shake, Rattle & Roll,' 'Don't Be Cruel (to a Heart That's True),'
'Hound Dog,' 'Heartbreak Hotel,' 'The Book of Love,' 'Under the Boardwalk,'
'Oop-Shoop,' 'Roll Over Beethoven,' 'School Days,' ' Johnny B. Goode.' This
is my music. This is rock 'n' roll. Every
Monday, three kids from the audience are chosen to rate new releases.
After the record is played and danced to, they weigh in with their ratings:
"It has a great beat. I'll give it a 92" (out of a possible
100). "I like the lyrics but it is hard to dance to. 75."
Danceability of a record is all-important. Each
weekday, there is at least one guest on the show. The performer may
be black or white, male or female, an individual or a group. The live
guests lip synch along with their records. There is no interaction between
the artists and the teens in the audience. Much
of the dancing is fast dancing. There are two main styles: South Philly
style and North Philly style. South Philly style reminds me of the well-known
Lindy. North Philly style is something different, and to me, more interesting.
Using fancy hand and footwork, the leader (male) basically pivots in
place while guiding the follower (female) clockwise all around him.
He is the earth and she is the moon. She needs to move energetically
in response to his sometimes subtle directions. He has to remain cool
and in control as he pivots within a much smaller circle than she. In 1957, American Bandstand integrates. There is usually one or two Negro couples who either dance near the camera or whom the camera follows at a distance round the floor. Whites and blacks never dance with each other as partners. Parents
do not like Bandstand. They know that something subversive is
going on. Black music is speaking to white teens. The sartorial style
of the regulars is subliminally sexy. Peter
Guralnick, a student of blues, country, and 'sweet soul music,' captures
the feel of the inter-generational conflict of the time: "I
was twelve when Elvis scored his first success...[I remember] the excitement,
the exhilaration, the novelty... "'Hail,
hail rock 'n' roll/Deliver us from the days of old.' Rock 'n' roll did
deliver us from the days of old... "Pegged
pants and ducktail haircuts, raised collars and switchblades [were in
fashion]... "If
rock 'n' roll had no other value, it would have been enough merely to
dent the smug middle-class considerations of that time... "To
keep a comb in your pocket was both a declaration of independence and
an expression of political solidarity [with other teens]. "The
very outrageousness of its poses, the swaggering sexuality, the violence
which [was] laid at its door, its forbidden and corrupting influence
- that was the unfailing attractiveness of rock 'n' roll. "[It
made] above all one clear distinction: between us [kids] and them [parents]."(8) Rock
'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for
the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic
reiterating and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics... it manages
to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of
the earth... [It] is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form
of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."
III I
am not a musicologist and I can only carry a tune in an especially well-made
basket. I was surprised in my reading how difficult it is to define
rock 'n' roll musicologically.(10) I will simply refer to it as high-energy,
danceable music with a beat. It is easier to define it - as I have been
doing - sociologically. It has two main sociological features. First,
it is biracial. When Muddy Waters says that "Rhythm 'n' Blues had
a baby and they called it Rock 'n' Roll," he omits mention of the
other parent. The other parent was white. Second, it is youth music.
Something brand new has happened: "[Rock
'n' roll] must be seen as a youth movement and is a reflection of a
way of life radically different from the one which prevailed... when
Rock emerged, it spoke to these new values, to this youth, and to this
changed way of life."(11) "[In
the Fifties, white pop] is bright melodies, sweet lyrics, wholesome
singers. Innocent and inoffensive songs [prevail]...Most of the songs
of [this period] were 'feel good' tunes which genuinely reflected [and
helped disseminate] the mood of post World War II America. Artists like
Pat Boone, Rosemary Clooney, and Perry Como dominated pop charts... Generational segregation and racial crossover were hallmarks of Rock 'n' roll. Crossover was a two-way street. While Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino were crossing over in one direction, Bill Haley and the Comets, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and 'The King,' Elvis Presley were crossing over in the other direction. Billboard's lists were desegregated:
As
of 1954, the three separate charts in Billboard no longer faithfully
replicated a racial segregation of styles of popular music. Crossover
was 'in.' Let us look at it more closely. IV First,
let it be acknowledged that rock 'n' roll, the music of the Sixties,
began in the Fifties. Like the Supreme Court desegregation ruling and
the Montgomery bus boycott, popular music was in the vanguard. It was
ahead of other movements. This makes sense. Aural integration required
no interpersonal integration. White and black kids could buy the same
records and listen to the same radio stations without ever being in
each other's company. 'In person' segregation did not have to be challenged.
For a while, there were no dance-ins. The times were not yet ready for
that. In
considering crossover, we ought not contrast it to some mythically pure,
pristine, and hermetically sealed off, 'black music.' It was not a matter
of mongeralization. Albert Murray has called American culture "incontestably
mulatto."(18) So, for example, great black performers had grown
up on white-made as well as black-made music. Solomon Burke, the rotund
'King of rock 'n' soul,' loved the music of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.(19)
The shouter from New Orleans, Roy Brown, began his career imitating
his idol, Bing Crosby.(20) The black cultural nationalist, Imara Buraka
(LeRoi Jones) confessed to having listened to and liked Rosemary Clooney,
Vaughn Monroe, Johnny Ray, and Frankie Laine.(21) Mary Wilson of the
Supremes acknowledged that growing up, her favorite recording artists
were the McGuire Sisters, Doris Day, and Patti Page.(22) Black DJs on
black radio stations played white singles because black audiences wanted
to hear them. "In Memphis, in the early 1950s, B. B. King's radio
show on WDIA regularly aired songs by Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Frankie
Laine."(23) Frank Marshall Davis reminds us that far from being
some mythically pure black race, 'black' people in America for many
years have been culturally "a goulash of Europeans, Africans, and
American Indians - with the African dominant."(24) At
its start, crossover was not a conscious attempt at managed socio-cultural
change. It happened. It crept up on some of those who would become its
leading proponents. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, one of the hip
executives of crossover, confessed: "The
old compartmentalization of musical tastes along racial lines was vanishing
fast [in the late Fifties]. [But the record industry kept] making black
records with black musicians and black singers for black buyers. It
never occurred to us that there were crossover possibilities."(25) It
is possible that this is a hint to the difference between mid-Fifties
and early Sixties rock 'n' roll. The latter was more conscious of crossover
as a possibility and a goal. Many
white - and probably some black - parents hoped and prayed that rock
'n' roll would indeed 'crossover' - and keep going. There was the hope
that it was a fad, a temporary insanity from which their sons and daughters
would soon recover. White parents had two basic difficulties with rock
'n' roll. The two were intertwined. Rock 'n' roll sounded black
to them even when the performer was white. And rock 'n' roll was too
sexy - as black people were. Parents may not have known that
the term 'Rock 'n' Roll' coined by white DJ Alan Freed literally meant
'to have sexual intercourse,' but they saw all that moaning and touching
and shaking and shimmying and, in particular, parents of teenage daughters
feared that pre-marital virginity was going to become as passé
as 1950s pop music. They
were right. V Crossover's
major 'psychosociosexual' problem was the sceptre of the hyper-sexual
black male stud let loose on chaste white teenage girls. The lynching
in 1955 of Emmet Till for allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman
made clear that Caucasian fears of black male sexuality remained at
the ready to be triggered by what were seen as black provocations. How
could rock 'n' roll and its performers and producers deal with this
concern? First,
live black performers on TV shows like Bandstand could lip-synch and
strut their stuff - but not with any contact with the white girls in
the bleachers. That this was a raw issue was highlighted by a slip-up.
When a camera on a TV show caught black teenage star Frankie Lyman dancing
with a white girl, several Southern affiliates dropped the show.(26)
Nor was black male crossover entirely safe. The suave, debonair, 'ladies
man' Nat 'King' Cole was physically attacked by two white men who came
up onto the stage at the Birmingham Civic Center when he had just started
to sing "The Girl."(27) Mostly
crossover worked by avoiding or evading this psychosexual hang-up. The
still popular shouter Little Richard (Richard Pettyman) commented upon
how his highly stylized effeminacy helped him be an early ambassador
of crossover: "By
wearing this make-up I could work and play white clubs and the white
people didn't mind the white girls screaming over me. I wasn't a threat
when they saw the eyelashes and make-up. They were willing to accept
me 'cause they figured I wouldn't be no harm."(28) Analogously,
'Fats' Domino looked more like a roly-poly brown Santa Claus than a
dangerous black buck. Another
way of dealing with the black male performer/white female audience problem
was illustrated by the evolution of 'doo-wop' groups. A doo-wop group
was composed of young males that usually included at least one deep
base and one falsetto voice. Before the days of rock, black doo-wop
groups were a bit older and sang raunchy adult songs. In the age of
crossover, the groups became younger and their lyrics more teen-aged.
Their acts were cleaned-up and refined. Little Anthony and the Imperials,
Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, and the Temptations were no 'hootchie-kootchie'
men with 'their mojos working.' Even when they were 'Under the boardwalk,'
they were just doing teenage stuff.(29) Doo-wop
groups in the Fifties did not even sound 'black.' "In the south
where I grew up," recalled Michael Bane, "the key to doo-wop's
success was its racial anonymity. Since it was not clearly definable
as 'nigger music' it was acceptable in a time of legal segregation.(30) Doo-wop
was only subliminally subversive. Keep
in mind that rhythm 'n' blues was gritty, down and dirty, sensual and
sexual music. Its lyrics were full of code words for sex: "In
the early 1950s most rhythm and blues performers spent at least some
of their time eating cherry pie, baking jelly roll, squeezing lemons,
churning milk [into] butter, or savoring the delights of dripping honey.
Songs like 'I Like My Baby's Pudding' and 'Work With Me, Annie' were
typical. The latter underwent an activity and sex [i.e. gender] change
when it became rock 'n' roll's 'Dance With Me, Henry' by innocuous Georgia
Gibbs."(31) Lyrics
were changed to make them less or non-threatening. "Just
as Bill Haley had muted the sexual content of Joe Turner's 'Shake, Rattle
and Roll' when Clyde McPhatter re-recorded [for a crossover audience]
the old Clovers' hit 'Lovey Dovey' in 1959 - the deliciously evocative
poetry of 'I really love your peaches/wanna shake your tree' [became]
the platitudinous 'I really love you, baby/won't you come with me."(32) My
favorite story about the cleaning-up of the content of black music as
it crossed over is the story of Little Richard's signature song, 'Tutti
Fruity.' As only connoisseurs know, its original lyric was about male
homosexual anal intercourse: Tutti
Fruitti The
story goes that under the pressure of his first recording gig, Little
Richard was not quite being his irrepressible self. 'Bumps' Blackwell
- a conservatory-educated black man - was in charge of musical production
for Specialty Records, which was recording Little Richard. Blackwell
had received a tape from Little Richard and had recognized that "the
voice was unmistakably star quality." Blackwell
tells of the story of the evolution of Tutti Fruity: "When
I got to [the studio] Cosimo Matassa, the studio owner, called... 'Hey,
this boy's down here waiting for you.' When I walked in, there's this
cat in this loud shirt with hair piled up six miles above his head.
He was talking wild... I could tell he was a mega-personality... "The
problem was that what he looked like and what he sounded like [in the
studio] didn't come together. I [said] let's take a break. Let's go
to lunch. I had to think. I didn't know what to do." Bumps,
Little Richard, and the band went over to the Dew Drop Inn. It is there
that rock 'n' roll history was made: "[Little
Richard] gets to going. He hits that piano... and starts to sing...
'A wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-good Goddamn - Tutti Fruitti/good booty...[etc.]." "I
said, 'That's what I want from you, Richard... That's a hit.'" Blackwell
realized that the lyrics were too lewd for public consumption. He got
Dorothy Le Bosture, a prolific lyrics writer to come right down to the
studio. He wanted her to hear Tutti Fruity and give it new lyrics... And
here was the problem: "...Little
Richard would not sing Tutti Fruitti for her. He was too embarrassed.
Bump cajoled him. He told Richard that the song had star potential.
Dorothy was not sure about hearing it. Bumps convinced both of them.
Little Richard turned his back to Dorothy, faced the wall, and two or
three times sang the song. In a few hours, Dorothy had new lyrics for
it."(33) Tutti
Frutti Womp-Bomp-a-Loo-Momp-Alop-Bomp-Bomp Tutti
Frutti, Aw-Rootie (5 times) I
got a girl named Sue Tutti
Frutti [etc.] I've
got a gal, named Daisy Tutti Frutti [etc.]
Let
me take on a central question right here. Like Little Richard's lyrics,
was 'black' music toned down when it became rock 'n' roll? I would say
that yes, it was. But was its sensuous style obliterated? No way. Enough
grit remained in rock 'n' roll to scandalize parents of either color.
Through the influence of rock 'n' roll, white youth culture had been
darkened and black youth culture had been lightened. Dickstein's 'new
Sixties sensibility' had found its musical incarnation.(35) Baby,
baby, baby - VI It
is time to bring in 'The King' - and I do not mean Rev. Dr. Martin Luther,
Jr. From the mid-Fifties into the early Sixties, the classics of rock
'n' roll were sung by Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry
Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley and - The King... Elvis Presley. But
this part of the story starts not with Elvis but with his first manager,
Sam Philips, the white owner of Sun Records in Nashville, Tennessee.
If there was one person who understood the zeitgeist, who saw where
popular music was going, that man was Sam Philips. With Sam Philips,
crossover ceases to be just one of those things that was happening.
It becomes a conscious design. True,
it took Philips some time to recognize what he had in Elvis.(36) He
needed to be convinced to listen to him. But in generic terms, Philips
knew what he was looking for: "'Over
and over,' says Marion Kessler, Philips' secretary, 'I remember Sam
saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro feel, I could
make a million dollars'...'"(37) Philips'
motivation, as we shall see, was not just financial. But, as with Little
Richard, Presley's first recording session was not going well for a
while. Then, spontaneously, Presley launched himself into a relatively
unknown blues song, 'That's All Right, Mama.' "Sam
thought... it seemed to come out of nowhere, yet Sam felt he heard something...
he thought he sensed in Elvis a kindred spirit, someone who shared with
him a secret, almost subversive attraction not just to black music but
to black culture."(38) Sam
Philips knew that especially in the South, white kids still felt some
reluctance to buying black-made music. Little Richard says that white
kids hid his records in their rooms so that their parents would not
know they were listening to him.(39) After
he heard Elvis do, 'Good Rockin' Tonight,' knowing what the song's title
meant, Philips knew he had found the messenger to deliver the
message. It was a message that Philips had been holding for a long time: "I
had to keep my nose clean. [I had to be careful with my beliefs]...They
could have said... 'Why should we give this nigger-loving sonofabitch
a break?...But I had the ability to be patient. I was able to hold on
almost with a religious fervor... And I sensed in [Elvis] the same kind
of empathy [with black people.] I don't think he was aware of my motivation
for what I was trying to do... but, intuitively, he felt it... I don't
think it would be very wise to talk about it, for me to say... 'We're
trying to put pop music down and bring in black [music]'...The lack
of prejudice on the part of Elvis... had to be one of the biggest things
that ever could happen... I went out into this no-man's land, and I
knocked the shit out of the color line...(40) Billboard
heard it too: "[Presley's] style is both country and rhythm and
blues and he can appeal to pop."(41) The Memphis Brass-Scimitar
wrote that "a white man's voice singing Negro flavor [has] changed
life over night for Elvis Presley."(42) Critics and racists heard
it too. Foreshadowing Presley's 'above the waist' appearance on the
Ed Sullivan Show, The New York Journal American wrote that the way Presley
delivered music was "a terrible twist on darkest Africa's fertility
tom-tom displays."(43) And what did blacks think of Elvis? Before 1963, he had twenty-four hits on the rhythm 'n' blues chart including four number ones.(44) There may have been some blacks who resented how a white boy was appropriating their heritage and getting rich off it. But not much was heard from this 'blacklash.' Presley's own spoken respect for black people and their contribution to his music - expressed in the idiom of his time and place - helped. Presley said that, "Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let's face it. I can't sing it ['Ain't That A Shame'] like Fats Domino can. I know that."(45) The evidence indicates that black performers were happy that Elvis was paving the way for greater acceptance of crossover - and therefore its rewards for black musicians as well. Little Richard summed up the sentiment, "Thank God for Elvis Presley."(46) VII As
the period 1960-1963 came in what characterized rock 'n' roll was its
solid position as the glue for the white/black youth culture, and the
increasing awareness of crossover as a consciously sought after phenomenon.
James Brown lamented how his 'Just Won't Do It Right' did not crossover:
"[It] should have crossed over but my musicians held me back. They
could only think in terms of R&B and didn't understand what I thought
about. They were singing R&B, but their voices were too heavy; I
should have had girls singing with me."(47) Ward
says of rock 'n' roll, "This was arguably the most musically integrated
popular music scene in American history."(48) Little Richard put
the same sentiment more personally: "I've
always thought that Rock 'n' Roll brought the races together. Although
I was black, the [white] kids didn't care. I used to feel good about
that."(49) All
that was left to happen was the coup de grace, the official recognition
by the industry of what was happening in the music of the early Sixties.
Recognition came one day after John F. Kennedy's assassination. On November
23, 1963, Billboard - the industry's pulse on the market - "...published
what it believed to be the final Rhythm and Blues singles chart. Such
a racially segregated index of consumer preferences seemed an anachronism..."(50) White artists were appearing regularly on the 'black' chart. Black artists were appearing regularly on the 'white' chart. Why should there any longer be a white chart and a black chart? It made no sense. It no longer mirrored a no longer segregated musical scene. Rock had delivered us from the days of old. A new biracial music had, indeed, for now - overcome. |
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