Week 2

 

 

 

 

Readings and Resources

Readings and Resources

Textbook or eBook:

Campbell, M. (2019). Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.

This reading will discuss the emergence of Rock and Roll as both a musical style and as a subculture in American teenage society.

• Chapter 11: Rock and Roll (pgs. 171-196)

Articles, Websites, and Videos:

Elvis Presley is known today as the King of Rock and Roll. When we look at him through our current perspective, it can be hard to see just how revolutionary he was as an artist. While we may see him as a relatively “tame” artist because by today’s standards, Presley comes across as clean cut, he was an artist who was a polarizing figure in American popular culture. Never before had an artist come across as so bols and daring. This film looks behind Elvis Presley’s experiences as a person and performer and delves deeply into the reasons behind why he was such an influential and controversial performer in the 1950s.

MVD. (2013, Nov 15). Elvis presley: Memphis flash. 

 

1. 40

Rock and Roll Begins

 

Chapter Introduction

When did rock and roll begin? The answer depends a great deal on the context in which the question is asked. Was it when people labeled rhythm and blues “rock and roll”? Or when young white singers began covering rhythm-and-blues songs? Or when the media acknowledged a new kind of music and its new stars? Or when what was called rock and roll brought new sounds to the pop charts?

The term itself dates back to at least the 1920s. It came into popular music via blues lyrics. In these songs, “rocking’” and “rocking’ and Rollin’” were euphemisms for sexual intercourse. One of the first “race record” hits was Trixie Smith’s “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll).” The lyrics to Winnie Harris’s 1948 R&B hit “Good Rocklin’ Tonight” make the sexual reference as explicit as it could be and still get the record in the stores and on the jukeboxes in the late 1940s: “I’m gonna hold my baby as tight as I can, tonight she’ll know I’m a mighty man.” A few years later, “rock and roll” was used to refer to music, not sex, although sex remained an undercurrent for both teens and their horrified parents.

40-1Teens in the 1950s

After the war, the economy continued to boom. Economic growth meant more disposable income, some of which was spent on entertainment. America’s newfound prosperity trickled down to a newly enfranchised segment of society, the teenager. No longer burdened by farm chores or the work-to-survive demands of the Depression, teenagers had far more leisure time than their predecessors. They were also better off. Parents gave them allowances, and many found after-school jobs. More time and more money inevitably led to the emergence of the new teen subculture.

Teens defined themselves socially, economically, and musically. “Generation gap” became part of everyday speech. So, unfortunately, did “juvenile delinquent.” Teens put their money where their tastes were, and many had a taste for rock and roll. They rebelled by putting down high school; idolizing Marlon Brando, James Dean, and other “rebels without a cause”; and soaping up cars (celebrated in the rock and roll of this era, from Chuck Berry’s “May Bullene” to the Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe” and “409”). However, the most obvious symbol of their revolt against the status quo was their music.

Rock and roll and rhythm and blues epitomized this new rebellious attitude. The music was, by contemporary pop standards, “crude” and obviously black or black inspired. Some songs were blatantly sexual: Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” was a prime offender. Elvis and his fellow rock-and-rollers talked differently, wore their hair differently, dressed differently, danced and walked differently. All of it—the music, the lyrics, the look—horrified teens’ parents; that was part of the appeal. More than any other aspect of American life in the 1950s, music preference demarcated the boundary between teens and adults.

40-2The Beginnings of Rock and Roll

It was disc jockey Alan Freed who attached “rock and roll” to a musical style. Freed was an early and influential advocate of rhythm and blues. Unlike most of the disc jockeys of the era, he refused to play white cover versions of rhythm-and-blues hits, a practice which gained him respect among black musicians but made him enemies in the business. While broadcasting over WJW in Cleveland in 1951, he began using “rock and roll” as code for rhythm and blues.

Freed’s Moondog’s Rock and Roll Party developed a large audience among both whites and blacks, so he took his advocacy of rhythm and blues one step further, into promotion. He put together touring stage shows of rhythm-and-blues artists, which played to integrated audiences. His first big event, the Moondog Coronation Ball, took place in 1952. Twenty-five thousand people, the majority of them white, showed up at a facility that could accommodate only a small fraction of that number. The ensuing pandemonium was the first of many “incidents” in Freed’s career as a promoter. Freed linked the term rock and roll to rhythm and blues, so it’s no wonder that Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew, the mastermind of so many New Orleans rhythm-and-blues hits, commented that rock and roll was rhythm and blues. Bartholomew said, undoubtedly with some bitterness, “We had rhythm and blues for many, many a year, and here come in a couple of white people and they call it rock and roll, and it was rhythm and blues all the time!” As rhythm and blues began to find a white audience, white acts began to tap into this new sound. Among the first was Bill Haley and His Comets.

40-3Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”

One of the first big rock and roll hits came from an unlikely source, by way of an unlikely place, and took an unlikely path to pop success. Bill Haley (1925–1981), who recorded it, grew up in Pennsylvania listening to the Grand Ole Opry and dreaming of country music stardom. By the late 1940s, he had begun fronting small bands—one was called the “Four Aces of Western Swing”—and enjoyed some local success. Over the next few years, he began to give his music a bluesier sound and chose—or wrote—songs with teen appeal. “Crazy, Man, Crazy” (1953) was his first hit. In 1954, he had some success with a song called “Rock Around the Clock.”

A year later “Rock Around the Clock” resurfaced in the soundtrack to the film The Blackboard Jungle. The connections among film, song, and performer were tenuous. The film portrays juvenile delinquents in a slum high school, but “Rock Around the Clock” is exuberant rather than angry, and Haley, at almost thirty, looked nothing like a teenaged rebel. But it was music for and about teens (parents weren’t likely to rock around the clock), and that was enough for the producers. With the release of the film, the song skyrocketed to No. 1. It was Haley’s big moment. He had a few other minor hits, but he never repeated his chart-topping success.

40-4The First Rock and Roll Record?

“Rock Around the Clock” is often identified as the first rock-and-roll record because it was the first big hit clearly associated with rock and roll. And it was a different sound—at least for pop. The sound is a light version of jump-band rhythm and blues. Haley’s voice is bright, but it has little of the inflection that we associate with blues singing. The band supports Haley’s voice with a small rhythm section that includes a guitar played in a high register and drumsticks tapping out a brisk shuffle rhythm. The band plays riffs underneath Haley, then alone. In retrospect, we consider this energetic, upbeat music to be not rock and roll, but rockabilly, a country take on postwar rhythm and blues.

Even as Haley’s record zoomed to the top of the charts, Elvis Presley was recording a grittier kind of rockabilly at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records. We consider the relationship between Elvis, rockabilly, and rock and roll next.

Listening Cue

“Rock Around the Clock” (1954)

Max Friedman and

James Myers

Bill Haley and His Comets.

STYLE Rockabilly ⋅ FORM Verse/chorus blues form

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Voice, electric guitar, acoustic bass, drums, and saxophone (accordion)

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Haley’s voice is light and friendly but not bluesy or country—and not pop crooning either

RHYTHM

Shuffle rhythm at a fast tempo

Syncopation in vocal line, guitar riff, and instrumental riff in sixth chorus

TEXTURE

Light, layered texture with most instruments and voice in a high mid-range contribute to bright sound

Remember …

LIGHT-HEARTED LYRIC

“Rocking” here is simply about dancing the night away; nothing suggests a more intimate involvement between partners

LIGHT-HEARTED MUSIC

The brisk tempo, discreet shuffle beat, and generally high register of Haley’s voice and the guitar give the song a bright feel

SOUND OF ROCKABILLY

A “lite” version of rhythmic R&B: faster tempo, higher register, less rough-edged vocal

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

 

CH. 41

Elvis Presley

 

Chapter Introduction

In the summer of 1953, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into the Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis to make a demo record. Phillips wasn’t in, so his assistant, Marion Keisker, handled the session. Perhaps to make him feel at ease, she asked him about himself. The conversation went something like this:

Marion:

“What kind of singer are you?”

Elvis:

“I sing all kinds.”

Marion:

“Who do you sound like?”

Elvis:

“I don’t sound like nobody.”

Marion:

“Hillbilly?”

Elvis:

“Yeah, I sing hillbilly.”

Marion:

“Who do you sound like in hillbilly?”

Elvis:

“I don’t sound like nobody.”

This now-legendary encounter gives us some insight into Elvis’s success. Imagine yourself—barely out of high school and with no professional experience—having such a clear sense of who you are and what you can do. Elvis truly didn’t sound like anyone else. Less than three years later, he would be a household name.

41-1Elvis Presley: The First Rock-and-Roll Star

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) recorded his first local hit for Phillips’s Sun Records in 1954. The record, a cover of bluesman Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” sparked interest on country-western radio (although some stations wouldn’t play it because Elvis sounded too black). Within a year he had reached No. 1 nationally on the country-western charts with “Mystery Train”—one of Elvis’s most enduring early hits. In late 1955, he signed a personal management contract with Colonel Tom Parker (actually Andreas van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from Holland), who arranged a record contract with RCA. RCA quickly got Elvis in the studio. “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first No. 1, topped the charts in March 1956. Soon, Elvis was a national phenomenon. By 1957, he had recorded several No. 1 hits and made numerous television appearances, most notably on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Elvis quickly became the symbol of rock and roll for millions, for both those who idolized him and those who despised him. With his totally uninhibited stage manner, tough-teen dress, greased pompadour, and energetic singing style, Elvis projected a rebellious attitude that many teens found overwhelmingly appealing. To the audiences of today, Elvis may seem almost wholesome. However, his seeming lack of inhibition when performing contrasted sharply with white pop singers who stood in front of microphones and crooned. In his day, this was bold stuff, and he took a lot of heat for it because he refused to tone down his style despite the criticism. In sticking to his guns, he gave rock and roll a sound and a look—both of which immediately set the style apart from anything that had come before. Elvis was rock and roll’s lightning rod. For teens he was all that was right with this new music; for their parents he symbolized all that was wrong with it. And for all intents and purposes, he stood alone.

Elvis performs on The Milton Berle Show, April, 1956.

The Billboard charts reflect his singular status. Except for Elvis’s hits, rock and roll represented only a modest segment of the popular music market. The top-selling albums during this time were mostly soundtracks from Broadway shows and film musicals. Even sales of singles, which teens bought, show that rock and roll did not enjoy the unconditional support of America’s youth. The top singles artists during the same period were either pre-rock stars (Frank Sinatra and Perry Como), younger artists singing in a pre-rock style (Andy Williams or Johnny Mathis), teen stars like Pat Boone, who covered early rock-and-roll songs, or vocal groups like the Platters, whose repertoire included a large number of reworked Tin Pan Alley standards. Among the lesser figures—from a commercial perspective—are such important and influential artists as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ray Charles. Elvis was, by far, the most important commercial presence in rock and roll; no one else came close.

41-2Elvis at Sun

Elvis could not have picked a better place to start his musical career than at Sam Phillips’s studio. By the time Elvis arrived at his door, Phillips had been operating his recording service for over three years and had recorded numerous blues-based acts, including Jackie Branston, Junior Parker, and Bobby Blue Bland. Elvis brought only himself, his rudimentary guitar skills, and his remarkable voice. Although he didn’t play much guitar, he played the radio really well. He was an equal-opportunity listener with an insatiable appetite for music. And what he heard, he used: Elvis could emulate almost any style—pop, country, gospel, R&B—and still sound like himself. For Sam Phillips, he was the “white man with the Negro feel” that he had been searching for. Phillips recruited guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black to back up Elvis, and advised him on what songs to record. Several were covers of rhythm-and-blues songs: “Mystery Train” was a cover of a 1953 recording by bluesman Junior Parker, who also recorded for Sun. Elvis’s version transforms rhythm and blues into rockabilly.

41-3Rockabilly

Carl Perkins, perhaps the truest of the rockabilly stars, once explained his music this way: “To begin with … rockabilly music, or rock and roll… was a country man’s song with a black man’s rhythm. I just put a little speed into some of the slow blues licks.”

Rockabilly began as a white southern music. Its home was Memphis, more specifically Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, which would also record Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Even today the style retains this strong southern identity. The sound of rockabilly, however, was not confined to Memphis or even the South: “Rock Around the Clock” is a familiar example.

Elvis’s Sun sessions are quintessential rockabilly. In Junior Parker’s 1953 version, “Mystery Train” is a boogie-based rhythm-and-blues song; it chugs along at a slow pace underneath Parker’s bluesy vocal and the occasional saxophone train whistle. Elvis’s version is brighter and more upbeat, and it uses a modified honky-tonk beat: two-beat bass alternating with a heavy backbeat on the electric guitar that is modified with a quick rebound that begins alternately on, then off, the beat. In form, the song is a modified blues; it has the poetic and melodic form of a blues song, but its harmony and phrase length are slightly irregular.

Listening Cue

“Mystery Train” (1955)

Elvis Presley

STYLE Rockabilly ⋅ FORM Blues form with modified harmony (both first and second phrases start on IV) and phrases of variable length

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Voice, electric guitar, acoustic bass, drums

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Elvis’s high, lonesome sound, plus occasional special effects in vocal asides

RHYTHM

Two-beat rhythm with “rebound” backbeat at fast tempo

HARMONY

Different take on blues harmony: start on IV chord

TEXTURE

Open sound, with light bass and drums, guitar just under Elvis’s voice

Remember …

FAST TEMPO WITH A MODIFIED TWO-BEAT RHYTHM

Drums maintain a light, fast rhythm very much in the background; the distinctive feature is the “rebound” backbeat in the guitar, which comes with, then ahead, of the backbeat

ELVIS’S SOULFUL SINGING AND UNIQUE SOUND

Elvis’s singing is bluester than traditional country singing, and without a twang. At the same time, it is distinct from the timbres of 1950s R&B singers

MODIFIED FORM OF THE BLUES PROGRESSION

Each chorus starts on a IV chord instead of a I chord; in the vocal sections, the first two phrases are of variable length instead of the customary four bars

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

Elvis’s singing is the magical element. In both its basic timbre and its variety, his sound is utterly unique—the purest Elvis. It ranges from a plaintive wail on the opening high notes to the often-imitated guttural singing at the end of each chorus. Elvis positions himself not only between country and rhythm and blues, but beyond them. We don’t hear the nasal twang so common in country music, nor do we hear the rough-edged sound of a blues singer. Elvis draws on both but sounds like neither (“I don’t sound like nobody”).

41-4Elvis in Hollywood

Elvis’s sound brought him radio attention, but it was his looks and his moves that propelled him to stardom. Shortly after breaking through with “Heartbreak Hotel,” he made his first Hollywood film, Love Me Tender. He would make three more, including Jailhouse Rock, before his induction into the army. Among the songs featured in the film was “Jailhouse Rock.” Jerry Lieber and Mike Stroller, an up-and-coming songwriting/ producing team, wrote the song for Elvis. Released in conjunction with the film, it went to No. 1 in the fall of 1957. In the film, it serves as a soundtrack to an extended dance number.

We get some sense of his presence and his appeal in the scene from his 1957 film Jailhouse Rock where he sings the title song. In staging the scene, choreographer Alex Romero wisely asked Elvis to perform some of his songs, then choreographed the movements of the other dancers to mesh with Elvis’s moves. In the scene, we see that for Elvis, all of this is fun. He moves freely, spontaneously; the other dancers seem routine by comparison. Elvis’s uninhibited movement, evident in film and television clips, contrasts sharply with pop singers—white and black—who simply stand in front of microphones and croon their songs.

“Jailhouse Rock” highlights the qualities that made Elvis so appealing and evidences the craft of Lieber and Stroller, who wrote and produced the song. The song begins with guitar and drums marking off a stop-time rhythm, which continues as Elvis begins to sing. The beginning of the song is, practically speaking, all Elvis, and he makes the most of it. There is an exuberance and a lack of inhibition in his singing that jumps out of the speakers. In this song, Elvis communicates fun—the exhilaration of moving to the beat (even when it can only be felt)—in a way that was unprecedented in pop. There is an emotional honesty to Elvis’s singing that transcends the staginess of the scene in the film. The story may be fake, but Elvis’s enthusiasm is real. Elvis found this kind of realness in the blues, and in songs like “Jailhouse Rock” he brought it into the mainstream.

Rhythmically, “Jailhouse Rock” shows rock and roll in transition. The most rocklike feature is the guitar pattern, which divides the beat into two equal parts. By accenting and slightly lengthening the first note of each pair, Elvis creates a rhythmic feel (evident especially in the stop-time verse sections) that is somewhere between a standard rock rhythm and a shuffle rhythm. And even though the bass player is playing an electric bass, he is still walking—one note on each beat, like a swing-era or jazz bassist. Most strikingly, the band switches to a swing rhythm in the instrumental interlude; we can almost hear a sigh of relief from the guitarist and drummer as they let go in a rhythm that they know how to feel. Because of the rhythmic inconsistencies, “Jailhouse Rock” is rock and roll commercially, but not quite rock and roll rhythmically.

Eight-beat rhythm

Volume 90%

 

©Michael Campbell/Cengage

The musically significant part of Elvis’s career lasted only three years. It ended in 1958, when he was inducted into the army. Although still a major public figure in the sixties and seventies, he seldom recaptured the freshness of his earlier years, and he seemed out of step with 1960s rock and rhythm and blues. Still, during his ascendancy, he was crowned the king of rock and roll. What justified his coronation?

41-5The King of Rock and Roll?

Here’s a heretical thought: Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll, sang very little rock and roll. Such a statement would have been literally incredible to teenagers living in 1956 or 1957; for them, and their parents, Elvis embodied rock and roll. As Carl Belz, the first important rock historian, noted in The Story of Rock:

Elvis Presley is the most important individual rock artist to emerge during the music’s early development between 1954 and 1956. His extraordinary popularity surpassed that of any artist who appeared in those years, and it remained as a standard for almost a decade…. For the music industry, Presley was “king” for almost ten years. He was the first rock artist to establish a continuing and independent motion picture career, the first to have a whole series of million-selling single records—before 1960 he had eighteen—and the first to dominate consistently the tastes of the foreign record market, especially in England, where popularity polls listed him among the top favorites for each year until the arrival of the Beatles.

Belz equates importance almost exclusively with popularity. His list of Elvis’s firsts contains no musical innovations; importance is strictly numbers and visibility. However, Elvis’s contributions to rock history extend beyond his remarkable commercial success. He brought a fresh look, a fresh attitude, and a fresh sound to popular music. All three proved to be enormously influential.

Elvis gave rock and roll its most memorable visual images. His looks sent girls into hysteria and guys to the mirror, where they greased their hair and combed it into Elvis-like pompadours. His uninhibited, sexually charged stage persona scandalized adults even as it sent teen pulses racing. These images endure, as the legion of Elvis imitators reminds us. There had been flamboyant black performers, like T-Bone Walker, whose stage antics included playing his guitar behind his head while doing the splits, but no popular white entertainer had ever moved like Elvis did, and no one had ever looked like he enjoyed it as much. Even now, when we watch clips of Elvis performing, we sense that he is having fun. This was an extraordinarily liberating presence for a new generation of pop stars.

His musical contributions were less influential. Certainly, he brought a new vocal sound into popular music. In his various blends of blues, R&B, country, gospel, and pop, Elvis summarized the musical influences—and epitomized the musical direction—of this new music. But his musical significance stops there. He neither wrote his own songs nor consistently used the rock-and-roll rhythm and sound copied by so many late-1950s and early-1960s bands. The road from rock and roll to rock would follow a different path.

Listening Cue

“Jailhouse Rock” (1957)

Jerry Lieber and

Mike Stroller

Elvis Presley, vocal.

STYLE Rock and roll ⋅ FORM Verse/chorus blues form in which the first phrase is doubled in length

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Voice, electric guitar, piano, bass, and drums

RHYTHM

Primitive rock rhythm, kept mainly in guitar during refrain; Elvis and band not sure whether to rock or swing

Nice contrast between syncopated stop time in verse and rocking/walking in refrain

MELODY

“Talking blues” in verse; simple riff in refrain

TEXTURE

Wide spacing: guitar low, just above bass, Elvis in the middle, piano high

Remember …

ELVIS’S SINGING

Exuberant and uninhibited, influenced by blues and country, but a completely new vocal sound

FULL RHYTHM SECTION WITH PROMINENT ELECTRIC GUITAR

Rhythm section includes drums, bass, piano, and electric guitar; the guitar stands out in both its accompanying and solo roles

EXPANDED VERSE/CHORUS BLUES FORM

Verse-like section is extended to eight measures; the chorus remains eight measures in length

RHYTHMIC VARIETY

Stop time in the verse versus consistent timekeeping in the chorus

MULTIPLE RHYTHMIC CONCEPTIONS

Rock rhythm in the band during the chorus, swing during the instrumental interlude (one can almost hear the band relax back into a rhythm they’re familiar with), and Elvis somewhere in between: not really swing or the even beat division of rock

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

1. 42

The Architects of Rock and Roll

Chapter Introduction

In the latter part of the 1950s, the most apparent distinction between rock and roll and rhythm and blues was racial: Most of the prominent rock-and-roll stars were white; R&B stars were black. So if one simply extrapolated the history of rock and roll from what had developed through the end of 1956, it would be reasonable to assume that rock and roll was simply white takes on black music, like rockabilly and the pop covers of R&B hits.

In fact, however, the crucial difference between rhythm and blues and rock and roll was not race, but rhythm. Most of the R&B acts from the late 1950s continued to build their songs on the shuffle rhythms used so extensively in postwar rhythm and blues or on modified pop rhythms. By contrast, white rock-and-rollers were drawn to a more active rhythm, which was assembled over a two-year period by two black musicians: Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

42-1Little Richard

Little Richard, born Richard Penniman (1932) in Macon, Georgia, was on the road in black vaudeville shows by the time he was fourteen. He made a few records in the early fifties, but none of them did much. In 1955, Lloyd Price (of “Lawny Miss Clawed” fame) suggested that Little Richard send a demo to Art Rupee, who ran Specialty Records, one of the many independent labels recording rhythm and blues. He did, and a few months later “Bumps” Blackwell set up a recording session at Cosmos Mantissa’s J&M studio in New Orleans. The house band included some of the legends of New Orleans rhythm and blues, including drummer Earl Palmer and saxophonist Lee Allen. The session got off to a slow start because Little Richard sang mostly slow blues songs, which were not his strength. During a break in the recording session, they went to a local club, where Little Richard began to sing a “blue” song, a naughty novelty number that he’d featured in his act. Blackwell realized that that was the sound they wanted, so on the spur of the moment they recruited local songwriter Dorothy La Bowtie to clean up the words. Her new lyrics didn’t make any more sense then than they do now, but they were enough to get Little Richard his first hit, “Tutti Frutti.”

Little Richard ca. 1958

Little Richard made his mark in a series of songs released between late 1955 and early 1958. Many of them were about girls: “Long Tall Sally,” “The Girl Can’t Help It” (the girl in this case was blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield, the star of the film for which the song was written; Little Richard also appeared onscreen), “Lucille,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Jenny, Jenny” stand out.

He found his sound right away in “Tutti Frutti” and kept it pretty much the same throughout his three years in the limelight. His songs seem to offer little variation, mainly because his vocal style is so consistent but also because they are fast and loud and rely so heavily on standard blues form. “Long Tall Sally” could be grafted onto “Tutti Frutti” without dropping a beat—they are that much alike.

42-1a“Lucille” and a New Orleans Conception of Rock and Roll

The changes in Little Richard’s music are due mainly to the musicians behind him. Unlike Chuck Berry’s backup band, they quickly adapted to Little Richard’s new rhythm. In his first hits, such as “Tutti Frutti,” the band plays in a conventional rhythm-and-blues style: walking bass, heavy backbeat on the drums, and so on. However, in some of his later hits, such as “Lucille” (1957), the entire band is thinking and playing rock rhythm. Bass, guitar, and sax play a repetitive riff in a low register, while Little Richard hammers away, and the drummer taps out a rock beat and a strong backbeat. The contrast with Berry’s songs from the same year is clear: Berry is single-handedly trying to establish the new beat; in songs like “Lucille,” the entire band is on the same page as Little Richard.

The low register riffs and the interplay between them and a strong, active, and steady beat are among the most distinctive elements in the music coming from New Orleans during the 1950s, whether heard in rhythm and blues or Little Richard’s rock and roll. In particular, the heavy bass line, locked-in rock beat, and slower tempo forecast the feel of 1960s rock.

Listening Cue

“Lucille” (1957)

Little Richard

STYLE Rock and Roll ⋅ FORM Large-scale form: verse/chorus; both verse and chorus use blues progression

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Voice, saxophones, piano, guitar, bass, drum

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Loud, abrasive vocal sound

RHYTHM

Clean rock rhythm, understood by Little Richard and the entire rhythm section

HARMONY

Standard blues progression, outlined by the bass/guitar line

TEXTURE

Thick sound because of prominent bass/guitar line in a low register

Remember …

LOUD SOUND

Little Richard’s abrasive vocal sound, complete with whoops, is the most uninhibited vocal sound of the early rock era

REAL ROCK RHYTHM

The entire band understands rock rhythm: even division of the beat in the bass line; reinforcement of rock rhythm by drummer

DARK SOUND

Rhythm section and saxophone operate in low mid-range, which darkens the sound. The prominent sounds in a lower register foreshadow one of the defining features of 1960s rock.

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

Like so many early rock-and-roll songs, “Lucille” is a verse/chorus blues. The scene-setting sections feature stop-time breaks (when the band stops playing underneath Little Richard) and no change in harmony. The lyric tells the tale of the wayward “Lucille,” but the song is really about Little Richard’s voice and the beat. We don’t listen to Little Richard songs for the lyrics, as we do with Chuck Berry. It would seem that they’re there simply because he has to sing something.

42-1bLittle Richard and Rock and Roll as Outrageous Music

Little Richard sang with a voice as abrasive as sandpaper. He hurled his lyrics at the microphone, periodically interrupting them with his trademark falsetto howls and whoops. His singing, like his piano playing, is more percussive than anything else: we are more aware of rhythm than melody, which in most cases is minimal. His music started loud and stayed that way. It was a conscious decision, as he acknowledged:

I came from a family where my people didn’t like R&B. Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald was all I heard. And I knew that there was something that could be louder than that, but I didn’t know where to find it. And I found it was me.

Little Richard embodied the new spirit of rock and roll more outrageously and flamboyantly than any other performer of the era. He gave it one of its most identifiable and influential vocal sounds, and he blazed its rhythmic trail. In his sound and persona, Little Richard officially put rock and roll over the top. He was flagrantly gay in an era when gay meant only “happy” and the vast majority of homosexual men were locked tight in the closet. And he was black. When Little Richard performed, he made the outrageous seem routine. In a favorite pose—one leg up on the lid of the piano, hands beating out a boogie beat, and a smirk on his face—there was no way you could avoid noticing him. Generations of rockers—gay, straight, androgynous, and cross-dressing—have followed his example.

Little Richard has claimed that he was responsible for the new beat of rock and roll. He was right, up to a point. However, it didn’t become a rock-defining sound until Chuck Berry showed how it could be played on the guitar.

42-2Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry (1926-2017) was the ultimate architect of rock and roll. More than any other musician of the 1950s, he crafted the style that would soon lead to rock.

“May Bullene,” Berry’s first big hit, gave little rhythmic hint of the direction in which his music would evolve. However, he quickly found his new direction: Berry’s hit recordings between “Roll Over, Beethoven” (1956) and “Johnny B. Goode” document the synthesis that eventually produced rock and roll’s beat and texture.

Berry’s instrumental contribution was twofold. He provided both the first important model for lead guitar playing, and the first definitive rock rhythm guitar style. The lead guitar style came first. In “Roll Over, Beethoven,” the guitar introduction builds on the thick double-note style that Berry used in “May Bullene.” It becomes even more insistent because it is now based on rock rhythm. Berry was not a virtuoso guitarist, like many of those who followed him, such as Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. But his playing was perfectly suited to broadcast the new rhythm that would define rock and roll: the repeated notes made the rhythm insistent; the double notes gave it density.

In the long nights at the Cosmopolitan Club, Berry must have heard hours and hours of Johnnie Johnson’s boogie-woogie. What Berry did was transfer boogie-woogie left-hand patterns, similar to the ones heard on “Roll ’Em, Pete,” to the guitar. The repetitive boogie-woogie patterns became, in Berry’s adaptation, the first authentic rock rhythm guitar style; even in medium-tempo songs, he typically divides the beat into two equal parts. In “Roll Over, Beethoven,” this pattern is very much in the background. In “Rock and Roll Music,” it is more prominent, but there is no lead guitar.

Finally, in “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), he put all the pieces together. In this song, we can hear how Berry forged this revolutionary new style. Berry’s voice is neither bluesy nor sweet, but it’s well suited to deliver the rapid-fire lyrics that are a trademark of his songs.

The basic instrumentation of “Johnny B. Goode” is conventional enough. It is Berry’s overdubbing—recording an additional part onto an existing recording—that is the breakthrough and the key to the sound of rock and roll. (We can assume that one of the guitar parts was overdubbed because both lead and rhythm guitar styles are Berry’s and no other guitarist is credited in the album notes.) The two guitar lines, the rhythm section—a walking bass, drums (here adding a heavy backbeat), and a steady rhythm guitar—and an active piano obbligato (second melody playing under the main melody) create a dense texture. Berry’s rhythm guitar line is heard throughout; the lead guitar line includes both solo choruses and instrumental responses during the vocal sections.

Berry’s influence and appeal went beyond the music: the lyrics of his songs captured the newly emerging teen spirit. He talked about them (“School Days” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”), to them (“Rock and Roll Music”), and for them (“Roll Over, Beethoven”). His music defines the core elements that make rock and roll stand apart not only from pop and country, but also rhythm and blues.

How did a black man speak so easily to white teens without either compromising his dignity or threatening the establishment during a period of real racial tension? (The year that Berry recorded “Rock and Roll Music,” 1957, was also the year that President Eisenhower forcibly integrated the Little Rock schools.) Perhaps it’s because the lyrics speak with such detachment and humor about their subjects. Berry is usually an impersonal commentator. Johnny B. Goode is a country boy; his race is not mentioned. Even when Berry himself is (presumably) the subject of the song, he deflects attention away from himself toward events (the car chase in “May Bullene”) or activities (going dancing in “Carol”). Even in “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” possibly his most autobiographical song, he writes in the third person.

Listening Cue

“Johnny B. Goode” (1958)

Chuck Berry

STYLE Rock and roll ⋅ FORM Large-scale form: verse/chorus; both verse and chorus use blues progression

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Vocals, plus two guitars (overdubbed), piano, bass, drums

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Berry’s singing is neither pop-pretty nor bluesy—it is too light and friendly; his guitar playing has an edge—in its basic sound, his use of double notes in solo and rhythm lines, and the occasional bent notes

RHYTHM

Steady eight-beat rhythm in vocals, lead and rhythm guitar; rest of band in four

HARMONY

Blues progression used in verse and chorus

TEXTURE

Strong rhythmic layer, with rhythm guitar, bass, and drums, underpins vocal lines and solos

Remember …

ROCK RHYTHM GUITAR PATTERNS

Berry adapts the boogie-woogie left-hand patterns to the guitar; they become the foundation for rock rhythm guitar

ROCK LEAD GUITAR PATTERNS

The double notes, bent notes, and syncopated patterns were features of the first important rock lead guitar style

VERSE/CHORUS BLUES FORM

Verse and chorus (both over the 12-bar blues progression) alternate throughout the song

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

42-2aChuck Berry Merges the Roots of Rock and Roll

In “Johnny B. Goode” we hear the three main influences on rock and roll come together. From electric blues Berry took the instrumentation, the thick texture, and the prominent place of the guitar. From boogie-woogie he took the eight-beat rhythm. From more rhythmic and up tempo R&B styles, he took the blues-based verse/ chorus form and the heavy backbeat.

At the same time, it’s clear that the song is more than just the blending of these influences. The guitar work, Berry’s voice, the content and style of the lyrics—all of these features were new elements, and all would prove extraordinarily influential. Berry’s guitar breaks and solos were on the must-learn list of every serious rock guitarist. His lyrics, among the first to discuss teen life, are humorous, irreverent, and skillful.

Both the content and the style of his songs were widely copied. The surfing songs of the late fifties and early sixties are an especially good example of Berry’s influence on song lyrics and musical style. No rock-and-roll artist was more covered by the creators of rock—the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, et al.—than Chuck Berry.

In 1959 Berry was arrested on a Mann Act violation and eventually sentenced to a two-year jail term, even as a new generation of rock musicians on both sides of the Atlantic were going to school on his music. From the 1960s, he toured the globe with only his guitar (“he used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack”), replaying his hits for the umpteenth time. Onstage, he would often make little attempt to hide his bitterness: he would stop in the middle of a performance if necessary to correct his pickup band. There have been moments of vindication: Berry seemed genuinely happy in his triumphal performance of “Johnny B. Goode,” backed by Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, at the 1995 concert celebrating the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

42-3The Evolution of Rock and Roll

Recall that the musical term “rock and roll” surfaced first as Alan Freed’s code for the rhythm and blues that he played on his radio program. It was a simply a new label for an existing sound, not a new style. Between 1954 and 1956, rock and roll began to develop an identity. It represented new looks, in the appearance and movements of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and others. It offered new sounds, in the music of rockabillies like Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Elvis, white cover acts like the Crew Cuts and (yes) Pat Boone, black crossover acts like the many doo-wop groups and Fats Domino, and in the initial rock-defining songs of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. It projected a fresh, impudent, attitude, expressed in image, lyrics, and sound that teens found appealing. And it gained a commercial presence, most prominently in the overwhelming success of Elvis Presley.

However, it wasn’t until the late 1950s that rock and roll developed a musical identity that distinguished it not only from pop but also rhythm and blues. Most crucially, the music of Little Richard and Chuck Berry defined a new more active rhythm—the rhythm that would define rock when it became common currency and its most pervasive feature—and Berry’s approach to lead and rhythm guitar playing became the primary reference point for the sound of rock. It is mainly in their music that we hear the kind of rock and roll that led directly and inevitably to rock.

1. 43

Buddy Holly and the Viral Evolution of Rock and Roll

Chapter Introduction

In the 1978 film, The Buddy Holly Story, there is a scene where Buddy, played by Gary Bussey, and his girlfriend Cindy, are in his car late at night listening to a song by the Five Satins on the car radio, which was being broadcast by KWKH, a clear channel radio station from Shreveport, Louisiana, that programmed rhythm and blues after prime time on Saturday night. In this scene at least, the film is true to life: According to a friend, Holly often drove around until he found a location where he could pick up the station. It was one of the few ways that Holly could hear rhythm and blues in west Texas during the early 1950s.

43-1The Viral Evolution of Rock and Roll

The passion of Holly and his fellow rock-and-rollers was the driving force behind the rapid evolution of rock and roll. But there were two other contributing factors: a shorter and more direct path between inspiration and result, and the novelty of the style. The contrast with the production path of pop is striking. A pop song, even a cover of a rhythm-and-blues or country song, typically involved input from several sources: the artist, the songwriter, the arranger, the musicians, the producer, the industry people, and more. Moreover, the result would be compared against three decades of popular song. In this context, novelty was not a virtue; change came slowly or not at all. By contrast, rock and roll musicians could listen to a recording or a performance—of any style—find something they liked, and copy it or use it as inspiration for something new, often with some help from a like-minded producer.

A second wave of rock-and-roll stars, including Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and the Everly Brothers, did just that. The most imaginative was Buddy Holly, the most creative mind in rock and roll’s second generation.

43-2Buddy Holly

Born Charles Hardin Holly, Buddy Holly (1936–1959) grew up in a musical family and appeared on local radio while in high school. After graduating, Holly formed the Crickets. They were a big enough hit locally that they opened a show for Elvis when he came through Lubbock in 1955, but their early records went nowhere. Holly scored his first hit late in 1957 with “That’ll Be the Day.” It would be his biggest hit, but not his most interesting.

Buddy Holly on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1958

When Holly began to play around with the still-brand-new elements of rock and roll, he found a helpful collaborator in an unlikely place. Norman Petty ran a recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, a small town about 100 miles from Lubbock. Petty encouraged Holly and the Crickets to go for new sounds, some of which Petty created himself (he was a master of echo and reverb). Still, it was Holly’s imagination that took rock and roll to a new level. We can hear this on one of his less popular but more enduring songs from 1957, “Not Fade Away.”

As in several of Holly’s songs, the lyrics introduce a new persona into rock and roll: the “I” in the song is not the big man on campus, but the gawky guy who loses his girl or who never had her in the first place. Holly wrote and sang for the rest of us; in his music and his appearance, he was rock and roll’s first everyman. However, it is the music, and in particular the beat, that makes the song so innovative.

43-3Beyond the Dance Floor in Holly’s “Not Fade Away”

The first sounds we hear are the offbeat rhythms of the guitar and the bass, soon reinforced by the backup vocals. Even as the song gets underway, with guitar, bass, drums, and Holly’s vocals all present, there is no instrument marking a steady beat. Instead, Holly borrows the “Bo Diddley beat” (virtually the same as the clave pattern of Afro-Cuban music), introduced by Bo Diddley in his song “Bo Diddley” about two years earlier, and the drum style associated with it, and uses it as the rhythmic reference point. The end of the song offers an ironic touch, fading away slowly even as Holly proclaims that his love will never fade away.

Listening Cue

“Not Fade Away” (1957)

Buddy Holly and

Norman Petty

Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

STYLE Latin-tinged rock ‘n’ roll ⋅ FORM Strophic: same melody sets multiple verses

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead and backup vocals, lead guitar, acoustic bass, and percussive sounds

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Holly’s hiccups vocal style is a rock-and-roll trademark; drummer Jerry Allison played on a cardboard box instead of a drum set

RHYTHM

The dominant rhythm—heard at first just by itself—is the Bo Diddley beat

Fast tempo, but no steady timekeeping; only Bo Diddley beat measures time

TEXTURE

Rich texture: voice/lead instrument plus secondary horn parts (riffs, sustained chords) and rhythm section

Remember …

TEEN LYRICS WITH FEELING

Lyrics like these project a more vulnerable image than the “mighty, mighty man” lyrics heard in so many rhythm-and-blues songs

BEYOND DANCE MUSIC

In a single stroke, Holly opens the door to a new world of musical possibilities—he elevates rock and roll from the dance floor to music just for listening

THE RAPID EVOLUTION OF ROCK AND ROLL

Holly’s apparent adaptation of the Bo Diddley beat suggests that recordings sped up the evolutionary pace: musicians would listen to a song, then use it as a point of departure for a new direction. “Bo Diddley” was a hit two years earlier

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

Most rock-and-roll songs begin by laying down a clear, steady beat. Even Bo Diddley meshes the “Bo Diddley beat” with a steady rhythm in the maracas and drums. By contrast, the beat in “Not Fade Away” is hard to find. It is clearly not music for social dancing. We can understand why “Not Fade Away” was not as popular as some of Holly’s other songs; most teens still wanted to dance to rock and roll. But we can also understand why songs like this one so profoundly influenced the Beatles and other 1960s rock groups. “Not Fade Away” is a great example of how creative minds like Holly’s recycled the sounds of first-generation rock and roll and sent a message that it could be more than dance music.

43-4The Day the Music Died

On February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash while en route from Iowa to North Dakota. As Don McLean noted in “American Pie,” it was “the day the music died.” The crash that killed Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson was one in a string of calamities that seemed to end rock and roll as suddenly as it had begun. The previous year, Elvis was drafted into the army. When he resumed his career two years later, he had lost the cutting edge that had defined his earlier work. Little Richard gave up his career to become a preacher. Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin without divorcing his previous wife, and the ensuing scandal seriously damaged his career. In 1959, Chuck Berry was arrested on a Mann Act violation and eventually sentenced to a two-year jail term.

The payola scandal of 1959 also contributed to the apparent decline of rock and roll. Because they controlled airplay of records, disc jockeys wielded enormous power. Some, like Alan Freed, used it to promote the music they liked. But many, including Freed, accepted some form of bribery in return for guaranteed airplay. The practice became so pervasive that it provoked a government investigation. Also at issue was the question of licensing rights. ASCAP, the stronger licensing organization, reportedly urged the investigation to undermine its major competitor, BMI, which was licensing the music of so many black and country performers. Establishment figures viewed the investigation results as proof of the inherent corruption of rock and roll.

By the early 1960s, it seemed as if rock and roll were just a fad that had run its course. In retrospect, it was just getting its second wind.

1. 44

Doo-Wop in the Late 1950s

 

Chapter Introduction

Muddy Waters once remarked that “the blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.” We might add that if rock and roll was the baby of the blues, 1950s rhythm and blues was its older brother. Although it had been around longer, it gained a firm toehold in the pop market only in the latter part of the fifties—about the same time rock and roll caught fire.

One reason was more variety. Late 1950s rhythm and blues encompassed a broader range of music, and most of the top acts—such as Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, the Coasters, the Platters, and Ray Charles—projected distinct musical identities. Many had crossover appeal, and appeared consistently on the pop charts—the Platters had four No. 1 pop hits—and R&B acts in general had a stronger market presence in the latter part of the decade.

44-1Gospel’s Influence on Rhythm and Blues

Perhaps the primary source of this increased variety was the deepening influence of black gospel music. Since its emergence in the late 1940s, rhythm and blues had been more than big-beat rhythm and blues; gospel and pop were often part of the mix. After 1955, however, gospel supplanted both big-beat rhythm and blues as the primary influence in the rhythm and blues that crossed over to the pop charts. Its impact is most evident and most pervasive in the vocal sounds and styles.

Gospel became a training ground for both doo-wop groups and solo singing stars like Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. The influence of gospel singing style was especially apparent in new versions of pop standards or new songs in a pop style; the vocal timbre of gospel singers was different from the pop and jazz singers of the 1950s, and the call and response exchanges between lead and backup singers were different from backup singing in pop.

As a result, the gospel influence stands out even in recordings that feature the more elaborate production techniques of pop, such as richer instrumental accompaniment and more complex arrangements. Even one- or two-hit wonders like the Marcels invested their recordings of pop material with a distinct personality.

The most commercially successful rhythm-and-blues style in the latter part of the 1950s was the music of vocal groups, retrospectively titled doo-wop. Doo-wop was not one sound, but several. Probably the most popular were slow romantic ballads. Some were radical remakes of modern-era pop standards; others were newly composed songs in a similar style. But there was also the dark humor of the Coasters, raucous remakes of pop standards by groups such as the Marcels (“Blue Moon”) and Clef tones (“Heart and Soul”), the upbeat puppy love of groups like Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, and much more. We sample two contrasting doo-wop sounds in the tracks discussed next.

44-2Slow Doo-Wop

It has been a given that there is no “right” way to perform a modern-era pop song. Recall that when a song became a hit, bands rushed to record their version, and if it became a standard, the top pop interpreters strived to put their personal stamp on it. Even still, there was no real precedent for the radical reshaping of popular songs by doo-wop groups. The Flamingos’ 1959 recording of the 1934 hit “I Only Have Eyes for You” is an exceptionally fine example of this practice.

The Flamingos were a Chicago-based vocal quintet: two pairs of cousins and a lead singer. They were among the more successful doo-wop groups in the late 1950s, charting steadily on the R&B charts and occasionally crossing over to the pop charts.

As originally conceived in 1934, “I Only Have Eyes for You” is a beautiful foxtrot ballad. The Flamingos’ version is a thorough preconception of the song, with several obvious differences from conventional pop. The sound of lead singer Sallie McElroy and the close harmony of the Flamingos as a group are different from the pop singers of the 1930s and 1940s; so are the frequent exchanges between lead and backup singers.

The tempo of the performance is much slower, so slow in fact that the recording, which lasts more than three minutes, includes only one statement of the chorus. Like the vocal styles and call and response between singers, the slow tempo has its roots in gospel style: It was common for black gospel musicians to perform conventional hymns like “Amazing Grace” at a markedly slower tempo than their white counterparts. Gospel-trained doo-wop singers simply transferred the practice to pop.

To energize this slow tempo, the pianist plays repeated chords in a triplet rhythm. The “doo-wop-sh-bop” riffs of the backup vocalists during the verse are the kind that earned doo-wop its name. The riff stands out in two ways: It is the main source of rhythmic energy in the song, and it replaces even the title phrase (“I only have eyes for you”) as the song’s melodic signature. In this respect it anticipates an important rock-era development: the distribution of melodic interest among several parts rather than concentrating it in the lead vocal line.

Listening Cue

“I Only Have Eyes for You” (1934, recorded1959)

Harry Warren and

Al Dublin

The Flamingos.

STYLE Pop ballad sung doo-wop style ⋅ FORM Pop song form (AA¹BA²), with verse and long tag

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead/backup vocals, plus full rhythm, with electric guitar prominent at beginning and drummer using brushes

RHYTHM

Extremely slow tempo, with piano triplets providing momentum

HARMONY

Static in verse; rich in chorus

MELODY

Pop song: melody built from opening riff

TEXTURE

Rich sound: low guitar, high piano, close harmony or lead and doo-wop in middle

Remember …

DOO-WOP VOCAL TIMBRE

The pleasant blend of a doo-wop singing group replaces the smooth crooning of a pop singer in the performance of pop standards

HALF-SPEED TEMPO

The song moves at about half the typical speed of a foxtrot: We hear the chorus of the song only once rather than two or three times

BIPOLAR HARMONY

Long stretches of a single chord contrast with lush harmonies, most notably on the title phrase

INSISTENT TRIPLET RHYTHM

Triplets inject rhythmic energy into the song, helping to balance out the slow tempo

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

The harmony in this performance is bipolar. For long stretches, such as the opening verse and the first part of the chorus, there is no harmonic change. Upon arriving at the title phrase, the harmony suddenly becomes lush, with new chords on almost every syllable of the lyric. This kind of harmonic practice is unique to doo-wop.

All four style features—the timbre of the singers, the slow tempo, the signature vocal riffs, and the static harmony—give the recording a distinctive identity; it’s not just another version of the song.

44-3The Producer in the Early Rock Era

“We don’t write songs, we write records,” said producers Jerry Lieber (1933-2011) and Mike Stroller (b. 1933). Lieber and Stroller’s remark sums up the new reality of music making in the rock era. Increasingly, a song was not just a melody, which singers could perform “their way,” but the entire sound world captured on disc.

With this shift, the producer assumed an increasingly important role. The first producers wore several hats—A&R man, songwriter, arranger, contractor—as well as recording engineer, in several cases. Because producers controlled so many elements, they often put their own stamp on the sound of a recording. For example, the New Orleans sound was the product of a distinctive arranging style played by the same nucleus of musicians. Dave Bartholomew at Imperial Records (who produced Fats Domino’s sessions) and “Bumps” Blackwell at Specialty Records (who produced so many of Little Richard’s hits) favored a heavy sound. To achieve this, they would often have saxes, guitar, and bass all play a low-register riff. Little Richard’s “Lucille” is a clear example. It could be part of the sound, regardless of the featured artist. Indeed, behind virtually all of the major fifties stars was an important producer. Sam Phillips oversaw Elvis’s early career and Jerry Lee Lewis’s rock-and-roll records, while Leonard Chess produced Chuck Berry’s hits, and Norman Petty, most of Buddy Holly’s.

44-4Leiber and Stroller

Lieber and Stroller stand apart from the others because they wrote so many of the songs their acts recorded and in general exerted more control over the final product. Knowing that they operated within strict time constraints—by their measure, no more than 3 minutes 40 seconds (3:40) and no less than 2:20 (the upper and lower time limits of a 45 single)—Lieber and Stroller wrote a song with the recording session in mind. They crafted every aspect of the song—not only the words and melody but also the sax solos, the beat, the tempo, and just about every other element of the recorded performance.

They began as songwriters in love with the sound of the new black music. Among their first hits was “Hound Dog,” originally written for Big Mama Thornton and covered a few years later by Elvis Presley. For Presley, they wrote and produced such hits as “Jailhouse Rock.” However, they left their imprint most strongly on the recordings of the Coasters and the Drifters.

Leiber and Stoller were among the first to elevate record production to an art. They were meticulous in both planning and production, often recording up to sixty takes to obtain the result they sought. Their most distinctive early songs were what Lieber called “playlets”—songs that told a funny story with serious overtones; Stollery called them “cartoons.” As with print cartoons, the primary audience was young people—of all races—who identified with the main characters in the story. These were humorous stories, but with an edge. 44-5The Coasters

The Coasters—so named because they came from the West Coast, unlike most of the other doo-wop groups—were really doo-wop in name only, because their music was so different from that of almost all the other groups of the time. They had formed as the Four Bluebirds in 1947 and became the Robins in 1950, singing backup behind Little Esther. They re-formed in late 1955, renaming themselves the Coasters.

The group’s fortunes changed when they began working with Lieber and Stroller in 1954. The following year, Atlantic signed Lieber and Stroller as independent songwriters and producers. Together, they and the Robins/Coasters ran off a string of hits: “Smokey Joe’s Café,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Young Blood,” which topped the R&B charts and reached the Top 10 in the pop charts in 1957.

The story told in “Young Blood” deals with youthful infatuation, but it is a far cry from the starry-eyed romance found in songs like “Sh-Boom.” As “Young Blood” shows, the Coasters’ songs were the opposite of most doo-wop: steely-eyed, not sentimental, and darkly humorous. The Coasters’ singing sounds slick, but not sweet. Although the Coasters have a black sound, the theme of the song is universal. Teens of all races could relate to it, and did.

The musical setting is a distinctive take on fifties rhythm and blues. The core instrumentation is typical: full rhythm section plus saxophone behind the vocal group. A shuffle rhythm with a heavy backbeat provides the underlying rhythmic framework. But the most prominent rhythm is the repeated guitar riff, which has a distinct rhythmic profile, and there are numerous shifts in the rhythmic flow—breaks that showcase the Coasters’ trademark humorous asides that drop down the vocal ladder, with bass singer Bobby Nunn getting in the last word, and sections where the rhythm players sustain long chords instead of marking the beat. These and other features separate “Young Blood” musically from more straightforward R&B songs, just as the lyrics separate the song from both blues-oriented lyrics and romantic doo-wop.

Lieber and Stollery laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of producers. Such major figures as Phil Spector, Berry Gordy, George Martin, and Quincy Jones trace their roles back to Lieber and Stollery and the other producers of the 1950s who helped transform the making of popular music.

44-6Doo-Wop and Black Pop

Doo-wop was unique among the rock and roll and rhythm-and-blues styles that emerged during the late 1940s and 1950s because it was both old and new at the same time. Unlike electric blues, big-beat rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and the high-intensity rock and roll of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and so on, doo-wop was strongly connected to—even dependent upon—the pop music that rock and roll and rhythm and blues were reacting against. At the same time, however, it presented pop in a radically new way: different vocal sounds, new tempos, different rhythmic foundations, richer textures, plus the frequent nonsense syllables that became the signature of the style.

Doo-wop died out suddenly around 1960, as new and more up-to-date kinds of black pop emerged: girl groups such as the Shimeles and the Crystals, and slickly produced vocal groups like the second incarnation of the Drifters.

Listening to doo-wop is often an exercise in nostalgia. Because its sounds are so distinctive and its peak period of popularity so clearly circumscribed, it easily evokes a keen sense of time and place. However, doo-wop also served as the bridge between pre-rock pop and the black pop of the 1960s and beyond. It preserved the romance of earlier pop styles through the emphasis on tuneful melody and rich textures, while simultaneously introducing features that anticipated the black pop of the 1960s. More than any other music of the 1950s, it helped bring new sounds and new faces to rock-era pop.

Listening Cue

“Young Blood” (1957)

Jerry Lieber and

Mike Stollery

The Coasters.

STYLE Doo-wop ⋅ FORM Large-scale AABA form, with A = verse/chorus

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Vocal group (solo and together), plus electric guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Contrast in vocal timbres an effective device, especially when voices heard in sequence

RHYTHM

Swing/shuffle rhythm at moderate tempo with strong backbeat

Repeated riffs and stop time in rhythm section in lieu of steady timekeeping

MELODY

Both verse and chorus-like sections built from short, slightly varied riffs

Remember …

WRY TONE OF LYRICS

A story of youthful infatuation that leads nowhere but trouble

DISTINCTIVE SHUFFLE RHYTHM

The loping guitar/bass riff and heavy backbeat give this shuffle-based rhythm a more open sound. There is no instrument consistently marking the shuffle rhythm

SOUND OF THE COASTERS

The Coasters use the “down-the-ladder” breaks to showcase all of the voices, not just the lead singer and the bass

PRODUCERS’ IMPACT

Lieber/Stollery input is evident not only in song, but in setting: varied supporting rhythms and textures, including stop-time effects and strong contrasts

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

1. 45

R&B Solo Singing in the Late 1950s

 

 

Chapter Introduction

Among the songs that topped the R&B charts in 1955 was Ray Charles’s first hit, “I Got a Woman.” Charles did not write the song; rather, he gave the gospel hymn “Jesus Is All the World to Me” new words and a new beat. His transformation of the sacred into the profane scandalized members of the black community. The blues singer Big Bill Bronzy summed up what Charles had done and why it outraged so many when he said, “He’s crying, sanctified. He’s mixing the blues with the spirituals. He should be singing in a church.”

45-1Solo Singers

Charles was the most important and influential of the black solo singers who fueled the growth of rhythm and blues in the late 1950s. Many, like Clyde Mc Phatter and Jackie Wilson, launched solo careers after starting as lead singers in doo-wop and R&B singing groups. (Both Mc Phatter and Wilson sang with Billy Ward’s Dominos.)

Sam Cooke, the golden boy of black pop, bypassed doo-wop, going directly from gospel to a solo career. Jerry Wexler, who by this time was a partner in Atlantic Records—the label that had Charles, the Coasters, and several other top R&B acts on their roster—commented on Cooke’s singing:

Sam was the best singer who ever lived, no contest…. He had control, he could play with his voice like an instrument, his melisma, which was his personal brand—I mean, nobody else could do it—everything about him was perfection.

Cooke seemed to have it all: looks, charm, and one of the truly superb voices in popular music history. Recognizing this in 1960, RCA brought him to their label, where he produced a stream of hits. But his career ended abruptly one night in 1964 when he was shot and killed by a woman in a Los Angeles hotel room.

Cooke, like Elvis, made his contribution mainly with his remarkable singing. That was not the case with Ray Charles.

45-2Ray Charles

Ray Charles (born Ray Charles Robinson, 1930–2004) lost his sight at age seven to an undiagnosed case of glaucoma. The onset of blindness may well have stimulated his voracious appetite for music. Charles grew up listening to and playing everything: blues, gospel, country, jazz, classical, pop. He launched his professional career in the late 1940s; in his first recordings, he emulated the style of Nat Cole, the most popular black vocalist of the era and a fine jazz pianist. In 1952, Atlantic Records bought his contract from Swing time, the label that had released his first recordings. For about two years, he recorded rhythm-and-blues songs distinguished mainly by the unique quality of his voice.

Ray Charles

He broke through as a rhythm-and-blues artist in 1955 with “I Got a Woman” and followed it with several No. 1 R&B hits, including “A Fool for You,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and “What’d I Say,” which also reached No. 6 on the pop charts. During this time, he also gave expression to his interest in jazz, performing at jazz festivals as well as R&B events and recording with major jazz artists like vibraphonist Milt Jackson. In this respect, he was the main rhythm-and-blues link to jazz’s “return to roots” movement.

Like many R&B artists of the period, Charles included a few Latin numbers in his act and helped bring Latin music into rhythm and blues. The Latin numbers had an obvious effect on songs like “What’d I Say.”

45-3“What’d I Say”

“What’d I Say” is not one song, but three: an instrumental, a solo vocal, and a rapid-fire call and response dialogue between Charles and The Raclettes. The instrumental section features Charles’s take on Latin rhythm. The opening piano line sounds like an American cousin of the piano montuno’s of Afro-Cuban music, and the drum part is much closer to Americanized Latin drumming than it is to standard rock drumming, ca. 1959. In most other respects, the song is straight rhythm and blues.

Listening Cue

“What’d I Say” (1959)

Ray Charles

STYLE 1950s R&B gospel/blues/Latin fusion ⋅ FORM Twelve-bar blues

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Solo singer, backup vocals (at end), electric piano, bass, drums, horn section (trumpets, saxophones)

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Charles’s vocal style fuses blues and impassioned gospel

RHYTHM

Americanized Latin rhythm (no clave pattern)

HARMONY

Blues progression used throughout

TEXTURE

Frequent call and response at the end: first horns, then backup vocalists

Remember …

FROM INSTRUMENTAL TO VOCAL

Full version of “What’d I Say” begins as instrumental featuring Charles; middle section = solo vocal; end features full band, backup vocalists

AMERICANIZED LATIN RHYTHM

Drumming, Charles’s montuno-like opening riff shows adaptation of Latin rhythm to R&B. Rhythms less insistent, more complex alternative to rock rhythm.

BLUES + GOSPEL + JAZZ

Charles brings together several streams in black music: jazz-like improvisation in opening, blues theme, style, and blues harmony, gospel-like call and response and screams, moans, and so on, in Charles’s singing

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The solo vocal section alternates between stop time and the instrumental riffs, which are now part of the background. Although the solo vocal section uses the by-now venerable verse/chorus blues form, it does not tell a story. Instead, it offers a series of images, mostly of dancing women. The sequence of the images in the live recording differs from the studio version, further suggesting that the real message is in the feeling behind the words, not the words themselves. The final section, where Charles’s moans often transcend verbal communication, confirms this impression.

Charles’s late 1950s music, and “What’d I Say” in particular, marked a crucial juncture in the relationship between gospel and blues. The song revisits a blues tradition—in subject matter (the joy of sex), narrative style (pictures, not a story), upbeat mood, and form (verse/chorus blues)—that began with songs like Thomas A. Dorsey’s “It’s Tight Like That.” Dorsey brought the blues into African-American sacred music. Charles closes that particular circle by bringing gospel music into an upbeat blues song.

After establishing himself as the most important, innovative, and influential rhythm-and-blues artist of the 1950s, Charles abruptly switched gears—not once, but three times—with excursions into pop (1960), jazz (1961), and country music (1962). These new directions brought him unprecedented success. Although his gospel/blues fusions made him a top artist among blacks, his gospel/blues/jazz/pop/country fusions made him one of the most successful and influential artists in all of popular music during the early 1960s.

Charles’s influence on rock-era music is substantial and diverse. His country recordings influenced a number of important country musicians, including Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. He was the first major rock-era performer to record an album of standards, a practice that subsequent generations of singers, such as Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, and Rod Stewart, have followed.

However, his most far-reaching contribution was his fusion of blues and gospel. In his late 1950s hits, Charles merged rhythmic and blues-drenched R&B with the most fervent kind of gospel singing, the kind one might hear in black Pentecostal churches. The use of the fervent gospel style is functional; it adds a dimension to the blues that was not there before. Sexual relations (and the lack of them) have been the most recurrent theme in blues, as we have noted. The infusion of ecstatic gospel style enabled him to communicate the agonies and ecstasies of love so characteristic of the blues with even more deeply felt emotion. His music, and particularly his singing, would become the most important influence on the soul music of the 1960s.

1. 46

Rock and Rhythm and Blues in the Early 1960s

Chapter Introduction

It was a unique fusion that Wilson had been tinkering with in the family garage where, inspired by The Four Freshman and their complex vocal blends, and armed with a multitrack tape recorder, he’d spent hours exploring the intricacies of harmony and melody. By overlapping his own dynamic voice (which peaked in a soaring falsetto) and various instruments, he could create the effect of a full group.

This third-person account, from a previous iteration of his website, describes Brian Wilson’s initial experiments in multitrack recording. In the early 1960s, multitrack recording was a still new technology that enabled a new creative process. Previously, musicians typically had to imagine the sounds they wanted, write them down in musical notation, then rely on their fellow musicians to realize their musical conception. By contrast, in multitrack recording, musicians like Wilson were working with actual sounds throughout the entire creative process. Further, they are able to experiment with their work at every stage of the process; they can add a part, and if it is not the desired result, they can remove it. Today, creating music in a sound-only environment is commonplace; fifty years ago, Wilson was on the cutting edge.

Wilson would use this new technology to glorify the surfer’s fun-in-the-sun lifestyle. Such contrasts between musical and technological sophistication and the seemingly simpleminded results it produced are often evident in rock and rhythm and blues in the early 1960s.

46-1The Adolescence of Rock: The Early Sixties

Rock and roll and rhythm and blues grew up quickly. Both were music mainly for teens through the fifties; in the early sixties, both music and audience matured. The difficult adolescence of rock and rhythm and blues is evident in virtually every aspect of the music—its diversity, its themes, its lyrics, and in the music itself. Suddenly, rock-related music covered much more musical territory: the high-minded and idealistic music of the folk revival and the barbed commentaries on the inequities of contemporary society by Bob Dylan and others; Roy Orbison’s one-man rockabilly revival; the slickly produced music of the Drifters; the garbled garage-band sounds of the Kings men; the seeming hedonism of surf music; the sophisticated silliness of Phil Spector’s music (what does “Da Doo Ron Ron” mean anyway?) and much more.

The complement to this broadening of rock’s base was more thorough integration: white songwriters writing songs for black girl groups, whose recordings of them had widespread appeal; Dick Clark, a white promoter/television show host, enlisting Chubby Checker, a black performer, to teach Americans how to “do the Twist,” which seemingly everyone from the president on down did; and Billboard suspending the rhythm-and-blues chart from late 1963 through early 1965 because there had been so little difference between the R&B and pop charts.

Songs from rock’s musical adolescence typically feature an often appealing mix of innocence and immaturity with innovation and sophistication, as is evident in songs by the Shimeles and the Beach Boys.

46-2The Shimeles and the Rise of Girl Groups

The Shimeles were a female vocal quartet—Shirley Owens, Micki Harris, Beverly Lee, and Doris Coley—who formed as the Piquillo’s in 1958 while still in high school. Their rise to the top of the charts is another of the happy accidents of the rock era. The group had won over the crowd at a high school talent show with a song they wrote themselves, “I Met Him on a Sunday.” A classmate, Mary Jane Greenberg, introduced them to her mother, Florence, who, after some haggling, signed them to record the song for her fledgling label, Tiara Records. It was a local hit—big enough to be picked up by Decca. When released by Decca, the song charted nationally; it was the Shimeles’ first hit.

After a few more Decca-released recordings that went nowhere, Greenberg re-formed Tiara as Scepter Records and brought in Luther Dixon to produce the group. From 1960 to 1963, the Shimeles were almost always on the charts. Their biggest hit came in 1960 with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” a song written by Carole King and Gerry Coffin, her husband at the time. The song, written and performed by women, gives a woman’s perspective on the fragility of new love.

Carole King’s song gives us the other side of boastful, male R&B songs (“Good Rocking’ Tonight”). The man thinks only of tonight; the woman worries about tomorrow. There is no mistaking the message of the song—the lyrics are simple and clear. In its frankness and distinctively female point of view, the song had no significant precedent in pop. Its most direct antecedents were the classic blues of Bessie Smith and others, and country “response” songs like Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tank Angels.”

The music reinforces the message of the lyrics, not because it presents a coherent setting, but because its main components send such different messages. There are three groups of sounds: the rhythm section, the string section, and the Shimeles. The rhythm section lays down a rather mundane rock beat, one that was fashionable during these years in rock-influenced pop. It remains constant throughout the song; there is almost no variation. But the string writing is bold and demanding—the most sophisticated part of the sound. The intricate string lines stand in stark contrast to the Shimeles’ vocals, especially Shirley Owens’s straightforward lead.

And therein lies the charm. The instrumental backup, and especially the skillful string parts, contrasts with the naïve schoolgirl sound of the Shimeles (none of whom was yet twenty years old when the song was released). All of this meshes perfectly with King’s lyrics, the song’s simple melody, and the group’s look. Shirley sounds courageous enough to ask the question and vulnerable enough to be deeply hurt by the wrong answer. She, like the lyric, sounds neither worldly nor cynical.

The song and the singers reflect the changing attitudes of the early 1960s. It was written by a white woman, produced by a black man, supported with white-sounding string writing, and sung by young black women. The Shimeles crossed over consistently partly because of the changing racial climate (the civil rights movement was gathering steam) and partly because they were teens like their audience. In songs like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the Shimeles sang peer to peer about a meaningful issue. The message of the song is color-blind: teens of all races could relate to it.

Listening Cue

“Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (1960)

Carole King and

Gerry Coffin

The Shimeles.

STYLE Early 1960s girl group ⋅ FORM Considerably expanded AABA form

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead and backup vocals, full rhythm (piano, bass, electric guitar, and drums), and full strings (violins and cellos)

PERFORMANCE STYLE

The Shimeles’ singing has a girl-next-door quality: their voices are not classically trained or modeled after mature pop, blues, or jazz singing

RHYTHM

Moderate tempo; straightforward rock rhythm, with rebound backbeat (two taps on the snare drum rather than just one)

MELODY

A section grows out of the opening riff-like phrase, forming an arch, with the peak on “so sweetly”; strong push toward the title phrase

TEXTURE

Distinct layers: lead vocal, backup vocal, violins playing an obbligato, and low strings and rhythm instruments laying down steady patterns

Remember …

VULNERABLE LYRICS, VULNERABLE GIRLS

Innocent-sounding girls’ number one question; the Shimeles’ vocal style and look enhance the question in the lyric

DRESSING UP

String writing adds a layer of sophistication to simple vocal sounds and rhythm-section accompaniment

SIMPLE ROCK RHYTHM

The state of rock rhythm ca. 1960: straightforward rock beat in drums, slightly liberated bass line

BETWEEN ROCK, R&B, AND POP

Teen-themed song, black pop vocal style, simple rock rhythm, pop-like string writing

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46-3Surf Music

For teens who had grown up with snowy winters and dreary, late-arriving springs, the beaches of southern California seemed like a hedonist’s paradise: sun, surf, cars, babes—the endless summer. They learned about the surfing lifestyle through films like Beach Party and the lyrics of songs by the Surfers, the Ventures, Jan and Dean, and—above all—the Beach Boys.

Surf music added two immediately recognizable sounds to rock’s sound world. High-register close harmony vocals were a trademark of the Beach Boys and, to a lesser extent, Jan and Dean. An array of new guitar sounds found wider traction; they included intense reverb, single line solos in a low register (most famously in the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run”), and down-the-escalator tremolos and other virtuosic effects popularized by Dick Dale (the “king of the surf guitarists” and one of rock’s first cult figures,) and those who imitated him.

In large part because of these distinctive sounds, surf music acquired an indelible regional identity. A single vocal harmony or descending tremolo was all that was needed to put a listener on a Malibu beach, watching the waves or cruising along the Strip. This was the first time in the short history of rock where the music evoked a strong sense of place.

Rock and roll developed first in the center of the country, from Chicago through Memphis to New Orleans, but the music did not evoke these locales. By contrast, surf music is a sound about a place and a lifestyle. It would not be the last. The new sounds coming out of California were the first clear signal of the geographic diffusion of rock. The British invasion would be a far more potent sign, because it made an American music international. It is in this early sixties development that we see the first stages in what would become the global reach of contemporary rock-era music.

46-4The Beach Boys

The most important and innovative of the surf music bands was the Beach Boys. Their band was a family affair. The original group consisted of three brothers, Carl (1946–1988), Dennis (1944–1983), and Brian Wilson (b. 1942); their cousin, Mike Love (b. 1941); and a friend, Al Jardine (b. 1942).

The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys’ first recordings point out their debt to rock’s first generation, and particularly the music of Chuck Berry. It’s blatantly evident in their hit “Surfing’ USA,” which is such a faithful reworking of Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” that Berry sued Wilson for writing credit. At the same time, they transformed the sound and updated the rhythmic conception: their reworking of Berry’s riffs and rhythms are rock, not rock and roll. In their recordings released between 1963 and 1965, they glorified the surfer lifestyle in songs that subtly varied their innovative, immediately recognizable sound.

“I Get Around,” a song that reached the top of the charts in June 1964, shows key elements of their style and the variety possible within it. The song begins with just voices, presenting the essence of the Beach Boys’ vocal sound. In order, we hear unison singing, tight harmonies, and a soaring single line melody layered over harmonized riffs—all sung with no vibrato.

The refrain follows, its split melody supported by a driving rock rhythm played by the entire band. Unlike this rhythm, the distinctive vocal sound of the Beach Boys came from outside rock. Its source was the Four Freshmen, a slick, skilled, jazz-flavored vocal group who navigated complex harmonies as nimbly as Count Basie’s saxophone section. Wilson, who admired the group and acknowledged them as a source of inspiration, used their sound as a point of departure. The song goes well beyond the blues-based harmony of most rock and roll. Wilson charts a distinctly new path in the fresh new chord progressions underneath the vocal.

The scene-painting verse sections are set off from the chorus by the substitution of an open-sounding, loping rhythm for the straightforward rock rhythm of the refrain. Even the instrumental solos have a characteristic, clearly defined sound. The short interlude in the verse combines a doubled organ and bass line with double-time drums, while the guitar solo is supported with sustained vocal harmonies.

The “fun in the sun” lyrics belie the considerable sophistication of the music, in harmony, rhythm, and texture. This sophistication was mainly the work of Brian Wilson; in their peak years, the sound of the Beach Boys was Brian Wilson’s conception. Wilson’s conception would continue to evolve through the 1960s, reaching a peak with the release of the landmark 1966 album Pet Sounds.

Listening Cue

“I Get Around” (1964)

Brian Wilson

The Beach Boys.

STYLE Rock ⋅ FORM Verse/chorus form, with first statement of chorus framing first verse

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead and backup vocals; electric guitar, electric bass, drums, organ

PERFORMANCE STYLE

High lead singing plus closely spaced vocal harmony

RHYTHM

Basic rock beat, reinforced by guitar, bass, and drums, predominates

HARMONY

Rich harmony: well beyond I-IV-V

TEXTURE

Considerable variation in texture: a cappella vs. full band, steady timekeeping vs. loping rhythm or stop time, melodic interplay between lead and backup vocals

Remember …

DISTINCTIVE VOCAL SOUND

The high lead singing with intricate, important backup vocal parts gave the Beach Boys’ songs an unmistakable and virtually inimitable sound

CLEAR ROCK RHYTHM WITH CONSIDERABLE VARIATION

Strong rock beat in chorus, with bass, drums, and rhythm guitar moving at rock beat speed. An open, loping long–short rhythm in verses provides contrast, as does the lack of an underlying rhythm during the a cappella introduction.

SOUND VARIETY IN INSTRUMENTATION AND TEXTURE

Overall low register of the instruments balancing high-register vocals; innovative sound combinations such as the organ doubling the guitar in the verse

STRONG BASS LINE THROUGHOUT THE SONG

The bass moves at rock-beat speed in the chorus and lopes along in the verses. This is the development that, more than any other, effects the musical transition from rock and roll to rock.

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.