Читать книгу Transmission and Transgression - Gary Kenton - Страница 16
ОглавлениеWith the passage of time, it has become more difficult to appreciate the cataclysm that was rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. The new sound of rock ‘n’ roll—loud, unruly, often beyond logical understanding—epitomized everything that gave adults pause, and was personified by the pelvic gyrations and curled upper lip of Elvis Presley, whose bass-thumping rockabilly sound and his lubricious movements “drew a line between itself and everything that came before it” (Marcus Lipstick 64). Where the youngsters heard a joyful noise, full of flirtation and frolic, the adults saw a snarl, promiscuity, and menace. Rock music became the lightning rod for the expression of a deep apprehension that festered beneath the surface of American society. According to Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, “Adults resisted teen culture in order to regain their authority over the young…the battle took place in many areas, but nowhere was the conflict more intense than in music” (14). Adult animus was directed not only at the music, but projected onto the young people who embraced it, turning differences of opinion and taste into an unbridgeable cultural chasm.
Susan McClary reminds us that music has always represented a danger to those who feel that social order is threatened by unfettered personal expression: “Denouncements of these twin threats—subversion of authority and seduction by means of the body—recur as constants throughout music history” (30). In Ancient Greece, Plato worried that poetry and music, which appealed to the emotions rather than to reason, would disturb social harmony. “The introduction of novel←27 | 28→ fashions in music,” he said in the 4th Century B.C., “is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society” (115), leading to “insolence, frenzy, and other such evils” (88). Religious leaders from Saint Augustine (354–430 A.D.) to Billy Graham (1918–2018) warned against the hedonism and immorality that they saw as intrinsic to the music of their time. Music’s capacity to loosen inhibitions and unleash passions has always posed a threat to the protectors of order and decorum, and the democratic and proletarian nature of rock ‘n’ roll clearly disturbed adults in the 1950s.
The bar for becoming a rock ‘n’ roll musician was low. The accessibility and relatively short learning curve of the electric guitar and drums made it conceivable for any modestly ambitious and talented group of adolescents to form a band. Amateurishness was of little concern to teenagers, but a source of disdain to adults, which only served as a further impetus for youngsters to find a garage and start making their own joyful noise. Belz’s definition of rock ‘n’ roll as a folk idiom is underscored by the fact that almost every city and town spawned its own rock bands, and every region of the country developed its own unique sound—rockabilly in the South, surf music in the West, doo-wop in the Northeast, blues-rock in the Midwest, etc. In every locale, a special relationship developed between the creators and the consumers of the music. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians “held a key position within the culture,” says Richard Mills. “They helped minister and uphold that experience of transformation which underlay it, [and] provided the forms and rituals through which its goals and values found expression…” (in Frith Taking 18).
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the various strains of American music underwent a parallel transition. Independently, blues, R&B, and jazz picked up electricity and speed. Seminal rockers such as Hank Ballard, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, and Chuck Berry assimilated elements of these established genres, but also injected the music with a new immediacy and urgency. Rock music acted on the culture like a cluster bomb, rearranging the landscape of popular culture and driving a wedge that further separated young from old, hip from square, modern from traditional. As Lawrence Grossberg puts it, rock ‘n’ roll “marks its fans as others, as outsiders, even while they continue to live within the dominant cultural structures of meaning” (“In Search” 169). And being “other” is to be feared. According to Martin and Segrave, “No other form of culture has met with such extensive hostility.” (3) It may seem preposterous in hindsight, but in the 1950s there was a widely held perception, amplified in the media, that rock ‘n’ roll represented a serious threat to the social fabric.
For most Americans, rock ‘n’ roll was a hot topic of media coverage before it was attached to an actual song or a singer. In 1956, Time magazine informed its readers that rock ‘n’ roll “underlines the primitive qualities of the blues with mal←28 | 29→ice, aforethought” and that teen dances “bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings” (“Yeh”). Frank Sinatra castigated rock musicians as “cretinous goons” and their sound as “the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth” (Samuels 19).1 Other “serious” musicians, including Mitch Miller and Pablo Casals, expressed indignation. It is ironic that Sinatra and Miller were so vocal in their condemnation of rock ‘n’ roll, since both played pivotal roles in laying the foundation for the new sound. Sinatra’s career transition from band singer to teen idol became a template for rock ‘n’ roll stardom, and the intimacy he established with his audience through his use of the microphone was a starting point for rock singers.2 As for Miller, Albin Zak points out that “he spearheaded a blasphemous conception of record production that prized novelty of song, arrangement, performance, and sound” (5), values that would be applied most routinely by rock ‘n’ roll artists and producers. As much as any two figures, the success of Sinatra and Miller signaled the end of the Tin Pan Alley era and pointed toward something new.
But musical objections were the least of it. Demagogic figures such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover often conflated the fear of takeover from without, in the form of Soviet communism, with the fear of takeover from within, in the form of delinquency and rock ‘n’ roll. Religious leaders such as Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York and the Very Reverend John P. Carroll in Boston suggested that law enforcement agencies should crack down on musicians and disc jockeys. The Irish Catholic Redemptionist Record called rock music “an instrument for the propagation of immorality” in an article under the heading “Knock the Devil out of Dancing,” while numerous pastors called from their pulpits for the destruction of rock records.3 WISN in Milwaukee was one of dozens of radio stations that hopped on the anti-rock bandwagon, promoting ritual record burnings and other anti-rock rallies (Martin and Segrave 41–58).
“The antipathy expressed toward rock and roll in the mainstream media did not prevent the beat from seeping into and burrowing under all aspects of life, especially advertising, but it did require that the most virulent, transgressive elements of the music had to be watered-down and suppressed” (Kenton “Come See” 280). Three areas of sociological inquiry help to put these overreactions in context. The first is sex, which became a greater focus for parents as many childhood behaviors were liberalized, and was irrevocably connected to rock ‘n’ roll. Second is race, an undercurrent that impacts all facets of American life but which had special resonance in relation to a genre of music that was birthed by Black and White procreators. And third is modernism, the idea which gained currency in the 1950s that society had made a momentous break with the traditions of the past.←29 | 30→
Sex
In addition to considerable hand-wringing over such by-products of rock ‘n’ roll as hair styles, fashions, high volume, and slang, rock ‘n’ roll heightened parental fears about sex. In hindsight, their over-reaction may seem laughable, but it is not hard to understand how it looked to the older generation. Sexuality really was (and is) an intrinsic part of the rock ‘n’ roll experience. The churning guitar of Ellas McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley, and the piano thumping of Jerry Lee Lewis were scarcely metaphorical; they were libido incarnate. Diddley and Lewis never sang, “We’re coming for your daughters!” but they might as well have. Just as American slaves created coded, poetic lyrics for their music to express ideas and sentiments that could not be stated openly, the bluesmen, jazz hipsters, and hillbillies of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s devised a rich vocabulary, finding endlessly creative ways of describing sexual relations. Rock ‘n’ roll drew upon this rich reservoir of euphemisms and double entendres. In fact, the phrase “rock and roll” itself was used in the African American community to refer to sexual intercourse long before disc jockey Alan Freed appropriated the term in 1951.
What is surprising, listening now to many hit records of the 1950s, is that most teenagers remained innocent of the full implications of the words of the songs, even as they danced to them. It is rather startling that a song by Otis Blackwell entitled “Great Balls of Fire” not only received mainstream airplay in 1957, but became the Number Two hit in the country for Jerry Lee Lewis. (It wasn’t about meteors.) Lewis, who hailed from a Pentecostal background, wrestled with his conscience,4 and many older people were aghast, but there was a willful ignorance at work at the time among radio and television programmers; if a song could plausibly be about something other than sex (“great balls of fire” was a common exclamation in the rural vernacular), it was generally assumed to be so.
A deep strain of Puritanism, implanted in the American psyche in the Colonial Era, periodically expressed itself in waves of rigid moralism, recrimination, and retribution. After World War II, this righteous distrust reached a peak of paranoia directed at communism, in general, and the Soviet Union, in particular. But even more than the Red Menace, it was the thought that the freedom symbolized by rock would inevitably find a non-symbolic, physical expression that struck fear into the hearts of parents. Ground zero for the so-called sexual revolution is most commonly situated in 1960, when the birth control pill became widely available, but the public fixation on sex, and the sexualization of the culture, became a preoccupation of the media in the 1950s. Playboy magazine, which published its premiere issue in 1953, was one of the prominent signs of a new value system, and although Seventeen was hardly the female equivalent of Playboy, it also extolled new ideas about female sexuality.←30 | 31→
One of the myths of the 1950s is that American teenagers were not engaging in sex. Alfred Kinsey’s first scientific study of sexuality, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” issued in 1948, shattered this illusion. But it was Kinsey’s second report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” released in 1953, which set off a firestorm. Due to a strict double standard, Kinsey’s frank discussion of male sexuality barely made a ripple beyond academia, but the revelation of the quantity and variety of female sexual activity came as a shock. Startled by Kinsey’s data, parents not only demonized the messenger but found evidence of permissiveness in every aspect of the culture to blame for the wanton ways of their children. Rock ‘n’ roll, with its inescapable sexual component, was a convenient target.
Public alarm over the sexual activity of teens has fluctuated, even though many studies indicate that actual sexual activity among U.S. youngsters changed little in the 1950s and 60s. (A decrease in such activity began in the 1990s.) If the concern was muted in the 1940s and early 1950s, it may be attributable to the so-called “shotgun wedding.” In comparison to subsequent decades, societal pressure was such that many young people opted for the sanction of marriage rather than seek abortions or risk exclusion from family and community networks. In the 1950s, America had the highest rate of teen marriage in the Western world. Judith Levine redirects our attention away from sex toward the assumptions and attitudes that surround it. It is the counterproductive suppression and censorship of sex that resulted in what she calls the sexual politics of fear. “America’s drive to protect kids from sex protects them from nothing,” she says, concluding, “instead, often it is harming them” (introduction np). The tendency to simultaneously hide, sensationalize, criminalize, and condemn sexual activity served to prevent a constructive response to the problems that accompanied adolescent sexual activity in the 1950s and beyond.
Regardless of the realities, adult sexual paranoia was sufficient to create a cottage industry in the 1950s. Sid Davis became renowned for the production of didactic, cautionary “social guidance” films with titles such as The Terrible Truth, Girls Beware, and Seduction of the Innocent,5 all of which attempted to inculcate captive students with parental values regarding hygiene, health, and dating. But while the preaching and posturing had a predictably counter-productive effect on young people, the scare tactics worked only too well on adults, who were convinced that their teenage offspring were one kiss or toke away from becoming sex and dope fiends. In their hysteria, they unwittingly contributed to a cultural obsession with youth and their mating rituals. The more parents and educators roiled the more attractive rock ‘n’ roll became, simultaneously offering the means of throwing off authoritarian strictures and expressing a nascent sexuality that generally stayed within the parameters of social acceptability.←31 | 32→
Although expurgated, American Bandstand and similar teen dance programs of the 1950s gathered young people in living rooms across the land, unified in a powerful tribal experience that encompassed music, fashion, politics, and a trove of cultural information. The dancing featured on these afternoon shows served as an especially strong catalyst, joining groups of teenagers in a physical activity that was fun to do, entertaining to watch, and sexually suggestive. Throughout history, of course, one of the functions of dance has always been seduction, a form of ritual mating and sanctioned foreplay. Simon Frith recalls that the Great Depression had helped to spread dancing beyond ethnic enclaves to the White working class, when it became “an escape, a suspension of real time, a way in which even the unemployed could enjoy their bodies, their physical skills, the sense of human power their lives otherwise denied” (Sound Effects 245). Learning dances made every 1950s teenager a participant in the rock ‘n’ roll adventure, part of the zeitgeist, and the energy was unleashed whenever and wherever teens congregated.
However tame the dancing on TV tended to be, it still carried sexual implications for parents and television producers, who shied away from anything suggestive, closely adhering to a National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters6 code, modeled after the strict Motion Picture Production Code that was a response to the realism and film noir of the 1940s. There was virtually no enforcement of the television code, but vigorous self-censorship made it unnecessary. The rules dictated, among other things, that couples could not co-occupy a double bed and that in scenes with couples in a bedroom at least one foot had to remain on the floor at all times.7 Books, movies, and magazines of this period evolved from the raciness of the 1940s to far more graphic fare, but television depicted a world largely devoid of sex. The televised presentation of rock ‘n’ roll, with sexuality in its very fiber, had to be carefully screened. Dancing, of course, was a key element on American Bandstand and other teen TV shows, but the producers and hosts of these programs were diligent gatekeepers and overt sexualizing was strictly forbidden.8 In this way, these shows maintained a strong voyeuristic element but reflected the priorities of the television industry.
Gender, of course, is a very different subject than sex, but it is clear that the networks’ phobia regarding sex had a negative impact on female musicians and fans. Although women in rock have always been a minority, one might think that the televisual arena might be one in which they might have an advantage. “Bring on the girls” has always been a fallback position in the theater, and television, partly due to its place in the home, has invariably included women in its shows, regardless of genre, if only as window-dressing. But parents did not want to associate rock ‘n’ roll with women in any fashion; rock ‘n’ roll was something that young girls needed to be protected from, not participate in. The young women who were fea←32 | 33→tured dancers on the teen dance shows were invariably prim, proper, and palatable. Even as late as the 1990s, an artist as successful as Alanis Morissette complained about sexism in the music industry, saying that “rock ‘n’ roll is not even a men’s club…it’s a boy’s club” (White 37).
But rock ‘n’ roll never occupied a large portion of the television schedule, and its impact on sexual mores and behaviors pales in comparison with that of advertising. As Neil Postman observed, television might have refrained from explicit displays (compared to movies and magazines), but trafficked shamelessly in titillation. “Television,” he says, “stresses a kind of egalitarianism of sexual fulfillment; sex is transformed from a dark and profound adult mystery to a product that is available to everyone…like mouthwash or underarm deodorant” (Disappearance 137). Although rock ‘n’ roll was condemned for fanning the sexual fires, and certainly contributed to perception that sex was prevalent and accessible in the 1950s, there is little evidence to support the suggestion that music contributed to increased sexual activity. If anything, the repression of the libidinous aspects of R&B and rock music in the 1950s led to a pent-up sexual energy that emerged in full-blown free love flower-power in the 1960s.
Race, Part 1
All six of the musical streams identified by Philip Ennis—pop, Black pop, country pop, jazz, folk, and gospel—played an important role in the development of rock ‘n’ roll. In the 1950s, rock musicians drew as readily from sources dominated by Black musicians as they did from sources dominated by White musicians, and ethnomusicological evidence traces elements of the blues back to Africa and the British Isles. The most immediate progenitors of rock ‘n’ roll were the twin hipster strains of the 1940s and early 1950s: rhythm and blues (Black) and western swing (White). Young musicians found these genres appealing not only for the music, but because of the attitude of the singers and the social realism reflected in their subject matter. This pedigree, as Nelson George, Robert Palmer, Peter Guralnick, Greg Tate, Simon Frith, Stanley Crouch and others have established, makes rock ‘n’ roll a living form of miscegenation, and considerations of race are inherent to the subject. Any attempt to parse a single, seminal influence—no less its skin color—is both futile and self-defeating. But there is no question that the obvious influence of Black music on rock ‘n’ roll had a great deal to do with how the music and its purveyors were regarded and treated, and no getting around the fact that the great majority of the rock ‘n’ roll music presented on television was performed by White artists. Racist resentment was a significant social force that served to foment rockaphobia.←33 | 34→
An argument can be made, articulated by Michael Bertrand and Nelson George, that rockaphobia as described here is a perpetuation of the racist backlash against rhythm ‘n’ blues that preceded the advent of rock ‘n’ roll. For many White adults, however distasteful rock music may have seemed, it was preferable to R&B, a sexually and often politically charged musical expression of the Black experience in America. As George indicates, the adoption of the term rock ‘n’ roll “dulled the racial identification and made the young White consumers of Cold War America feel more comfortable. If rhythm & blues was ghetto music, rock ‘n’ roll, at least in name, was perceived to be a ‘universal music’” (67). From this point of view, the crowning of Elvis Presley as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was less of an acknowledgment of Presley’s crossover talent, or his status as a cash cow, but as a way of assuring that rock ‘n’ roll would have a White face. According to Bertrand, “television had done its part in both bringing Elvis to the attention of, and then legitimizing him the eyes of, the American mainstream…while it would be a stretch to argue that the entertainment industry had conspired to concoct an entity capable of bringing down R&B, it is fair to say that it had stumbled upon one that would do just that…” (304, 307). Television may have emasculated rock ‘n’ roll, but it represented an existential threat to rhythm ‘n’ blues.
Even as rock ‘n’ roll presented its own unique characteristics and challenges to the status quo, three factors made rock ‘n’ roll a surrogate for racial animosities. First, the Black influence on the music was obvious and irrefutable. Second, the forbidden, sexualized aspects of rock ‘n’ roll, most readily associated with Black artists, were hugely attractive to White teenagers. And third, just as the music itself was a hybrid, it carried the obvious potential for bringing the races together. As Bertrand relates, White kids had been turning out at Black music venues since the late 1940s; he cites a concert in Knoxville, Tennessee at which White teenagers had filled the balcony of a “Negro dance hall” and demanded “the right to go onto the floor, mingle with the negroes and get a better look at R&B singer Bull Moose Jackson” (174–75).9
Especially in the South, where a social and economic hierarchy based on White supremacy was deeply entrenched, any event that drew numbers of Whites and Blacks together triggered fear. Anti-integration groups, in a defensive mode after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawed segregation in schools, and seized upon rock ‘n’ roll as a Trojan horse sent to insinuate Black styles and ideas into the mainstream. Asa Carter, leader of the North Alabama White Citizens Council, decried “be-bop” music as a plot by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to encourage integration and pull the White man “down to the level of the Negro” while attempting to have rock records removed from jukeboxes in and around Birmingham (Martin and Segrave 41).←34 | 35→
But television was a fledgling industry, with many hours to fill with content. As Murray Forman points out, “black musicians were regular and prominent participants in early television” (One Night 232). But there were strict limitations; even when all they did was play music, Black musicians were required to play the role of “Black musician,” accepting a supporting, if not servile, status. But rock ‘n’ roll posed a further problem. Television producers took steps to suppress rock’s sexuality, but the racial makeup of the artists could not be hidden. “On records,” Evan Eisenberg says, “the Black musician was no longer a minstrel with shining eyeballs, but simply a musician” (Angel 90), but this blessed anonymity was lost on television.10 When television became more prevalent in the late 1940s and local stations relied on local talent to fill time, numerous jazz, R&B, and blues artists made guest appearances, but they were sequestered in one-off segments that Black audiences relished but White audiences could dismiss as novelties.
In the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll established a beachhead on television teen dance shows but, with few exceptions, these programs were strictly segregated. An overwhelming preponderance of rock ‘n’ roll presented on television in the 1950s was performed by White artists. In order to satisfy television programmers and avoid a racist backlash from radio broadcasters, distributors, and retailers, record companies began the practice of having White artists record “cover” versions of songs by Black artists.11 Albin Zak identifies two kinds of cover, or crossover, songs. The first is a long-established industry practice revolving around sheet music and designed to maximize the value of a copyright by getting as many versions recorded as possible. This practice was common in the 1920s and 1930s, when almost any big hit would be recorded multiple times by a wide range of artists. The second kind of cover uses different arrangements and styles to adapt a record that is successful in one segment of the market to another audience. This kind of cover version gained currency in the 1940s with the appropriation of “hillbilly” music by pop singers but became a routine tactic with rhythm ‘n’ blues records in the 1950s. Poet Langston Hughes referred to this practice as “highway robbery across the color line” (9–10). It is no accident, as Michael Coyle demonstrates, that a significant increase in the recording of White artists covering songs that originated with Black artists took place when rock ‘n’ roll became visible on television.
One of the first such cover songs was Kay Starr’s 1952 version of “Fool, Fool, Fool,” an R&B hit by The Clovers. Two years later, Mercury Records signed The Crew-Cuts (guess their skin color) for the express purpose of making a pop copy of The Chords’s inventive R&B hit “Sh-Boom.” A notable victim of this practice was R&B artist LaVern Baker, who never recovered after her songs “Tweedle Dee” and “Tra La La” were hijacked by Georgia Gibbs, who was White and appeared regularly on television.12 Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of this trend was Pat Boone,←35 | 36→ whose 1955 rendition of “Ain’t That a Shame” far outsold the original by Antoine “Fats” Domino, thanks largely to Boone’s television exposure. Fans were far more likely to witness Boone’s excruciating, rhythm-challenged version of “Tutti Frutti” on American Bandstand in 1956 than Little Richard’s rousing original.
While the appropriation of songs represented a real transfer of assets from Black to White hands, the impetus for this practice cannot be tagged as inherently, universally racist. The cross-fertilization between genres blurs clear-cut distinctions between legitimate interpretation and exploitation.13 June Valli’s 1953 version of “Crying in the Chapel” might be considered a clear case of White appropriation of the R&B hit by Sonny Til and the Orioles, but “Crying in the Chapel” was written by a White man, Artie Glenn, and first performed by his son Darrell in a country “sacred” style that enjoyed some success with pop and country audiences. It must be recalled that many record buyers in the 1950s were still oriented to songs rather than singers, as indicated by the continued viability of Your Hit Parade, a radio show that made the transition to television (NBC 1950–58; CBS 1958–59) with its practice of offering “treatments” of hit songs by in-house regulars rather than the recording artists. Plus, at this time, it was a rarity in the popular arena for artists to write their own songs (this dynamic would not change until the arrival of The Beatles in the mid-1960s), so all material was fair game. But it is also clear that the imperatives of television, including a clear preference for White faces, had a significant influence on what was recorded and by whom. Jerry Wexler, producer of R&B artists such as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin at Atlantic Records, identified the sponsors as the faction that dictated policy. “It was mostly the advertisers…they controlled what could sell in a White market. The ad agencies were Jim Crowing the business” (Clavin).
One Black group that did turn up on television with some frequency in the early years was The Treniers, a group that revolved around the talents of twin brothers Claude and Cliff Trenier. Renowned for their kinetic dancing and contemporary reworking of jazz standards, they were billed as “The Rockin’ Rollin’ Treniers” as early as 1949. Variety described their live act thusly: “They jump all around the room, dance wildly, play their instruments with equal vigor and create a clamor that will appeal to those that like a desperate vein of entertainment.”14 The Treniers appeared on The Red Skelton Show (CBS 1951–71), The Jackie Gleason Show (CBS 1952–70), The Ernie Kovacs Show (NBC 1951–52, 1955–56, CBS 1952–53), The Steve Allen Show (CBS 1950–52, 1967–69, NBC 1956–60, ABC 1961, Syndicated 1962–64, 1967–69, 1976), and Tonight Starring Jack Paar (NBC 1957–62), among others. On a May 1954 episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour (NBC 1950–55) hosted by Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, the brothers performed “Rockin’ Is Our Bizness,” an update of Jimmie Lunceford’s 1930s jazz swing hit “Rhythm Is Our Business,” a clear symbol of the passing of the torch from swing to rock.15←36 | 37→
Source: Don’t Knock the Rock. Directed by Fred F. Sears. Clover Productions, 1956. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq6PcZRWDVM
In addition to the fact that The Treniers put on a terrific show, their histrionics could be tolerated on television because they were perceived more as a novelty, in the neo-minstrelsy mode of Cab Calloway, than as a harbinger of greater musical havoc to come. Consequently, they were able to bring some of the most frantic, unalloyed rock ‘n’ roll that has ever been shown on television. As Jake Austen puts it, “Because the teenage girls weren’t clamoring for Cliff Trenier, his wildness could be read as peppy instead of virile” (9).
By comparison, there were more openings for Black music on radio at this time. In 1949, a survey conducted by the Research Company of America appeared in Sponsor magazine (a trade magazine for radio advertisers) revealing the untapped potential of the African American consumer market. Shortly thereafter, numerous radio stations in cities with substantial Black populations, led by WDIA-AM in Memphis, which had an all-Black roster of DJs as early as 1949,16 reoriented their programming to capitalize on the popularity of rhythm & blues and gospel music. Most of these stations were owned by Whites, but by 1952, William Barlow estimates that there were over 100 Black DJs and a handful of stations under at least partial Black ownership (cited in Gomery 154). By comparison, television was a closed shop.←37 | 38→
But even on TV, absolute segregation policies could not be maintained across-the-board; too many of the most popular and influential pop and rock artists were Black and their songs increasingly demonstrated “crossover” appeal (selling to mixed audiences). In 1947, the multi-talented Lorenzo “Larry” Fuller became the first African American performer to be given his own television series, a 15-minute show on NBC called Man about Music, which he reprised on the Dumont network in 1951. Fuller got his first media exposure at the age of 8, playing the harp on the radio show of radio pioneer and charlatan John R. Brinkley. More than two thousand people came out to hear his solo senior recital at the University of Kansas. After moving to New York, he appeared on Broadway in Kiss Me Kate and Finian’s Rainbow, and played the role of Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. He performed opera alongside Leontyne Price, composed music, and played multiple instruments. He also co-starred with Rosamond Vance Kaufman in a local New York TV show called Van and the Genie (WPIX-TV 1950), perhaps the first television show with a Black male to star opposite a White female.
In the fall of 1949, CBS aired an all-Black variety show that used three different names over the course of five episodes, going from Uptown Jubilee to Harlem Jubilee to Sugar Hill Times. Hosted by Willie Bryant, the show provided a brief showcase for Harry Belafonte, Timmie Rogers, Maxine Sullivan, and Don Redman and his Orchestra. Several local stations aired all-Black revues around this time, evoking the atmosphere of a nightclub, a setting in which Black performers were valued for providing entertainment for an audience presumed to be majority White. On Club Ebony, broadcast in 1949 from St. Louis (WAVE-TV), host Odell Baker doubled as bandleader and nightclub waiter, with Lionel Hampton appearing on the premiere. In Newark that same year, Club Caravan (WATV-TV 1949–54) aired weekly, hosted by Bill Cook and featuring several up-and-coming doo-wop groups such as The Orioles and The Ravens, as well as established artists such as Dinah Washington and Roy Hamilton. In 1951, the first all-Black female show, The Cats [or Chicks] and a Fiddle, was shown briefly on KTLA-TV in Los Angeles. In New York, an “all-Negro variety show” show called 11:30 Club Mantan debuted in 1953 (WOR-TV), hosted by well-known actor/comedian Mantan Moreland. The show featured the dynamic Slim Gaillard and the bi-racial Claude Hopkins jazz combo but was roundly criticized for the broad, vaudevillian antics of Moreland (the name of the show was changed to 11:30 Revue before it went off the air in 1954).
Because it was a decided underdog to NBC and CBS, the Dumont network was more adventurous than the established competition. In New York, Amanda Randolph became the first Black woman to host her own daytime program when Dumont aired Amanda on WABD-TV in 1948. A multi-faceted talent, she record←38 | 39→ed blues and jazz piano rolls for the Vocalstyle company in the 1920s; appeared in several Broadway musicals, including Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s The Chocolate Dandies in 1925; and made records for the Gennett and Bluebird labels in the 1930s. Before hosting Amanda, she became the first African American actress to appear in a recurring role on a series in the role of Aunt Martha, the family maid on The Laytons situation comedy (Dumont, 1948). When Amanda was cancelled in 1949, she returned to roles as a domestic on Beulah and Make Room for Daddy.
Hazel Scott was another Black artist whose talents were so prodigious that a modicum of television exposure was inevitable. Known as the “Darling of Café Society” in New York in the late 1930s for her sophisticated jazz and classical repertoire, she made her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 20, scandalizing some by starting Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in a traditional mode but shifting into an up-tempo jazz rendition. In February 1950, The Hazel Scott Show debuted in New York (WABD-TV) and was so well received that Dumont began airing it nationally three nights a week that June. But Scott was married to the activist pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and was associated with civil rights causes in Harlem, leading the editors of Red Channels, the notorious pamphlet that named names of entertainment industry performers with supposed “communist sympathies,” to include her (along with Paul Robeson and others) on its list of undesirables. Her show was cancelled in September.
On the strength of numerous cabaret successes and his million-selling version of “That Old Black Magic,” Billy Daniels became the second African American performer to be given a national television series in 1952.17 Another 15-minute affair, The Billy Daniels Show (ABC) enjoyed the sponsorship of Rybutol vitamins. One of Daniels’s frequent accompanists was Nat King Cole, who made the transition from jazz pianist to popular crooner and, in 1956, followed Daniels to become the third (but by far best known) African American to host a network music program, The Nat King Cole Show (NBC 1956–57). But, despite Cole’s substantial crossover appeal, a majority-White guest list, and a repertoire that rarely strayed from the middle-of-the-road, he was unable to attract a sponsor, and the show was cancelled after one season. Cole was widely quoted as saying that “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark” (Gates). Frequent guest Eartha Kitt suggested that it was the very sophistication of the show that made it unpalatable to White audiences. “At that time,” she said, “I think it was dangerous…it was too early to show ourselves off as intelligent people” (Watson 1595). Probably the most notable rock ‘n’ roll moment on Cole’s show was a performance by The Sparkletones of their rockabilly classic “Black Slacks.” According to Jake Austen, “the juxtaposition of their wild kinetic energy with the tuxedo-and-gown vibe of the rest of the show made The Sparkletones sparkle more intensely” (314).←39 | 40→
It is hard to know with precision how many Black performers might have been given the spotlight on local TV shows in the 1950s. Venerable blues pianist Roosevelt Sykes hosted his own 15-minute TV show in Mobile, AL in 1954–55 called The Toast of the Coast. This anomaly is probably best explained by the popularity of the blues in that Deep South city and by Sykes’s ability to convey even the most downtrodden blues in a convivial manner.18 No footage survives from this show, and it’s likely that other African American artists may have made similarly historic appearances that are lost to posterity. Until she made a comeback in the 1990s,19 few remembered the name Hadda Brooks even though she had been among the first African American women to host her own television show, The Hadda Brooks Show (KCOP-TV) in 1957. She used “That’s My Desire” as her theme song, but she was best known for her 1945 single “Swingin’ the Boogie.”
Race, Part 2
In 1957, R&B artists gained visibility on network TV when American Bandstand went national. While most of the dancers who appeared on camera came from two predominantly White Philadelphia Catholic schools—at one point management issued membership cards in order to limit the number of African Americans in the studio audience—the talent took on a more national scope, including many R&B artists. The preference for neo-doo-wop, pop-leaning Black groups such as The Five Satins, Lee Andrews & the Hearts, and Little Anthony & The Imperials was clear, but Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, and Chuck Willis were among dozens of seminal Black artists who also had their turns.20 Ruth Brown, who appeared on American Bandstand exactly once (performing “Lucky Lips,” her biggest hit if not her best record), summed up the situation succinctly. “Rhythm ‘n’ blues became rock ‘n’ roll,” she told Rolling Stone, “when white kids danced to it” (Jeske).
Brown was undoubtedly more comfortable when she appeared on The Mitch Thomas Show, a local program out of Wilmington, Delaware (WPFH-TV 1955–58), the first dance show with a Black DJ/host and a predominantly African American audience. In the DC, Pennsylvania, Delaware region, it was often referred to as “the Black Bandstand.” Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Frankie Lymon were among the other artists who performed on the Thomas show. Another local program oriented to Black artists was Teenage Follies (WRAL-TV, Raleigh, NC, 1958–83), a long-running show hosted by Raleigh disc jockey J.D. Lewis. The show was able to withstand attacks by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms primarily because Pepsi, in competition with Coca-Cola for Black customers, maintained its sponsorship. A third R&B-centered show, Teenarama Dance←40 | 41→ Party (WOOK-TV, Washington DC, 1963–70), hosted by Bob King, benefitted from proximity to the Howard Theatre, often one of the first stops for Black artists touring the Southern “chitlin’ circuit.”
Although overshadowed by the powerful country music establishment, Nashville’s Jefferson Street was a mecca for Black musicians much like Beale Street in Memphis, and a rollicking Friday night TV show, Night Train (WLAC-TV, 1964–67), fed off this scene. Hosted by Noble Blackwell and boasting Robert Holmes as Musical Director (who also worked at Excello Records, Nashville’s superlative blues label), Night Train showcased artists such as Jimmy Church, The Hytones, The Spidells and others who made the show must-see local viewing but never achieved national prominence. Among the nationally known artists who made appearances on the show are James Brown and the underexposed Dyke & the Blazers.
Another R&B-oriented show with Nashville roots, and one that achieved some level of national syndication, was The !!!! Beat (1966), which emanated from WFAA-TV in Dallas due to the fact that no TV station in Nashville could shoot in color at that time. The host was the entrepreneurial DJ William “Hoss” Allen, one of several White DJs who played a great deal of Black music on Nashville’s clear-channel WLAC (others were Gene Nobles and John “John R” Richbourg). Some of the lip-syncing on The !!!! Beat is cringe-inducing, undermining the immediacy and personal power of the singers, but roughly half the performances on the show were done live. The greatest strength of the show was the house band, among the best in TV history, led by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman (a young Jimi Hendrix also played guitar in this band for a brief period).
Artists performing on The !!!! Beat were paid little or nothing. They were grateful for the exposure, but they were also mindful of Allen’s influence as a disc jockey, booking agent, and record producer. Among those who showed up were Etta James (nee Jamesetta Hawkins), Louis Jordan, Lou Rawls, and Little Milton (nee James Milton Campbell). Unfortunately, The !!!! Beat lasted only 26 episodes, but the last one was memorable. With Allen indisposed and many of the regular musicians having jumped ship, Otis Redding stepped in as host and The Bar-Kays provided back-up for a lineup that included Sam & Dave, Percy Sledge, The Ovations, Garnett Mimms, and Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles.
Similar experiments unfolded in Chicago, “the home of the blues.” In the 1940s, Al Benson (nee Arthur Bernard Leaner) was a groundbreaking DJ on WGES, known as “the Godfather of Black Radio” and “The Old Swingmaster.” Christine Acham credits Benson, an ordained minister, with being among the first DJs to bring the oral tradition from the pulpit into broadcasting, and making no←41 | 42→ pretense of “passing or sounding white on radio” (57). Wildly popular with Black Chicagoans, he was on the air at all times of day and night, hosting more than 40 shows each week, and gradually extending his reach to include concerts, record labels, and merchandising. In 1950, WKBK gave him his own TV show, called Spotlight Talent, with Ruth Brown and The Dozier Boys appearing on the debut. The following year, he moved over to WGN-TV with The Al Benson Show, but it was short-lived. Benson’s radio empire remained intact well into the 1960s.
Another DJ at WGES, Richard Stamz, also took a stab at TV. Stamz had been in the entertainment business for years, having performed in minstrel shows alongside Ma Rainey. Adopting the persona of a prince, replete with crown, scepter, and ermine cape, he drove around Chicago in his sound truck, playing music and advertising products on behalf of local merchants. Having proved himself on the streets, in 1955 he caught on with WGES, where he helped Al Benson build the station into a powerhouse, with his show called Open the Door Richard, taken from the title of a 1947 hit by vaudeville star Dusty Fletcher. The following year, WKBK-TV gave him a 30-minute variety show called Richard’s Open Door which ran for 13 episodes. In 1963, Stamz was one of the Black DJs who got caught up in the payola scandal and he ended up serving a short prison sentence for tax evasion. After doing his time, Stamz briefly returned to WGES before moving on to WVON (owned by Leonard Chess) and other radio endeavors.
One Chicago youth who came of age listening to Benson and Stamz was Don Cornelius. Starting as a fill-in DJ on WVON, he moved to local UHF station WCIU-TV as a sportscaster. After he put a travelling group of R&B artists on what he called a “soul train” tour of area venues, he pitched WCIU on what he unabashedly acknowledged was a Black version of American Bandstand. Offered his own weekly live show in the summer of 1970, Cornelius was not only a natural in front of the camera, but a gifted salesman behind it. Within a year, Soul Train was syndicating “the hippest trip in America” to 25 markets across the country. He later explained the immediate appeal of his show by saying, “there is an inner craving among us all…for television that we can personally connect to” (Meisler). Finally, a national Black audience had a television show that belonged to them.
“A dance show is a dance show is a dance show,” Cornelius insisted to The New York Times (Meisler), but this was a Black dance show, and the path was not smooth. Frustrated by the difficulty of breaking into larger markets, Cornelius moved Soul Train to Los Angeles in 1971 while continuing to oversee a local Chicago edition, hosted by Clinton Ghent. Despite the show’s success, it took almost four years for Soul Train to reach into 100 markets. This was a Black enterprise from its production team to its show-stopping dancers, and there was little precedent for niche marketing to a Black audience. Soul Train (Syndicated 1970–2006) served as an important←42 | 43→ reflection of Black culture at a time when there were still relatively few non-White faces on network television. Checking out Soul Train for the latest dances, sounds, and styles became a daily ritual for generations of African American viewers.
Source: VH1 Rock Docs. Season 1, episode 26, “Soul Train: Soul Train—The Hippest Trip in America.” VH1, February 6, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8sJobVw5vc
Cornelius also found ways to include other subjects of interest to his audience. He gave over an entire 1977 episode to Marvin Gaye much of which was devoted to watching Gaye playing basketball, for example. Often, the discussions were more topical. As Christine Acham points out, Soul Train was imbued with the spirit of Black Nationalism, developing a symbiotic relationship with musicians such as Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder, as well as iconic figures such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Melvin Van Peebles with inescapably political and counter-cultural associations. This symbiosis was clearly manifested in 1973 when James Brown did a live performance (most songs on the show were lip-synced) of his 1968 anthem, “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” engaging the dancers in call-and-response. Acham describes this is “a clear moment of black self-affirmation and self-pride, helping to transition national television into a highly visible black communal space” (64).21
By 1973, Soul Train was in direct competition with American Bandstand for Saturday afternoon viewers. Dick Clark responded by creating Soul Unlimited (ABC 1973) to replace Bandstand every fourth Saturday, with Black Los Angeles DJ Buster Brown serving as host. Cornelius countered by enlisting the Rev.←43 | 44→ Jesse Jackson and influential Black producer Clarence Avant to convey the message to ABC-TV management that Soul Unlimited was viewed as an existential threat to Soul Train and its supporters. Clark felt that he was the aggrieved party, telling Rolling Stone, “that’s my time period…[if ABC] wants to put on a black Bandstand, then I’ll do it” (Fong-Torres 10). But by the summer, Clark had been convinced to drop the show. Soul Train and American Bandstand continued to compete with one another for many years. In addition to driving airplay and sales of R&B records, the show also featured gospel groups such as The Mighty Clouds of Joy, and Cornelius was the first TV host to provide an outlet for rap and hip hop artists. There are many factors that contributed to the increasing influence of Black music and fashion in the 1980s, but Soul Train deserves credit for bringing a lot of people on board.
Soul Train remained in syndication until 2006, making it one of the longest-running TV shows of all time. Peerless dancing enabled the show to better withstand competition from MTV and music videos than American Bandstand. But Cornelius never got his due in terms of recognition for his achievement as a musical trend-setter and entrepreneur. As he put it to Vice magazine in 2006, “Most of what we get credit for is people saying ‘I learned how to dance from watching Soul Train’ but what I take credit for is that there were no Black television commercials to speak of before Soul Train” (Davis 123). Over the years, several offers to buy Soul Train fell through because of Cornelius’s insistence that control of the brand remain in Black hands. Financial stresses were cited as a contributing factor when Cornelius committed suicide in early 2012.22
American Bandstand remained the mainstream prototype, promulgating a limper, Whiter version of rock, turning the likes of Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon and Connie Francis into teen idols while progenitors such as Little Richard, Ruth Brown, and Bo Diddley received scant air time. Even when Bandstand promoted a Black artist, Chubby Checker (nee Ernest Evans), it bypassed a more authentic Black rocker, Hank Ballard, the author and performer of the original version of “The Twist.” In addition to being considered more telegenic than Ballard, Dick Clark’s preference for Checker was no doubt influenced by his close relationship with Checker’s label, Cameo-Parkway. In fact, it was Clark’s wife Barbara who had suggested the name Chubby Checker to echo Fats Domino.
Similarly, The Coasters, a Black vocal group with a theatrical bent, made regular appearances on Bandstand, delivering their classic pop culture vignettes (often written and produced by the White songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller), with great humor and spirit. But their stage antics were considered demeaning by some, redolent of minstrelsy. African American artists who were not recognized as safe, sanitized, and submissive seldom appeared on Bandstand, and←44 | 45→ once this national model was established, other possibilities for presenting Black rock ‘n’ roll on television were closed off, at least until Soul Train came on the national scene in 1971.
Some television producers recognized the folly of excluding African American performers, but for several years artists such as Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, and The Coasters had the surreal experience of being featured performers on afternoon dance programs on which theirs were the only Black faces. American Bandstand was merely the best known of many teen dance shows that showcased African American artists but maintained discriminatory policies that prevented Black teens from dancing on air. Even though Dick Clark credited American Bandstand with “charting new territory” in terms of integrating its audience, Matthew Delmont documents how the show used dress codes and unwritten admission policies to severely limit the participation of Black kids from the West Philadelphia neighborhood where the program was broadcast (Nicest). Moreover, the few Black teenagers who were allowed in the studio were seldom seen on camera.
If what American Bandstand practiced was quite different from what it preached, the fear of a backlash if they were to show Black and White teenagers dancing together was hardly paranoid. Rock ‘n’ roll became a surrogate target for racist attacks, part of a broader divide-and-conquer strategy to keep Whites and Blacks at a distance. Several incidents in the career of the disc jockey and impresario Alan Freed, who is often credited with coining the term rock ‘n’ roll, are revealing. Freed was among the first to play rhythm ‘n’ blues records alongside pop fare on his Moondog’s Rock and Roll Party radio show on WJW in Cleveland (1951–54). Sensing a growing audience, he tried his hand at producing a live concert, Moondog’s Coronation Ball, at the 10,000-seat Cleveland Arena in March, 1952, featuring The Dominoes, Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. When approximately 25,000 kids showed up, a riot ensued and fire marshals shut down the event. The scene scared the daylights out of municipal officials, who brought fraud charges against Freed, the first of many legal obstacles thrown in his path by detractors who saw him as a catalyst for juvenile delinquency. Undeterred, the event confirmed to Freed that he was the driving force of a new cultural movement. “What really upset the establishment,” say Martin and Segrave, “was not the sheer numbers who had shown up but that the group was roughly half White and half Black at a time when Cleveland was largely a segregated city” (95). Rock ‘n’ roll music was the personification of integration.
Freed moved from Cleveland to New York in 1954 to do a radio show called Rock ‘n’ Roll Party on WINS and started promoting live shows at the Brooklyn and New York Paramount Theaters. By the end of 1955 he had established himself—and the new music—to the extent that his ambitious 12-day “Rock ‘n’ Roll←45 | 46→ Holiday Jubilee” at the NY Academy of Music in downtown Manhattan broke box office records. Along with doo-wop groups such as The Wrens, The Cadillacs, and The Valentines, performers included LaVern Baker and Count Basie’s Orchestra with Joe Williams. Freed became a national figure in 1956, playing a pivotal role in the production of the first rock ‘n’ roll movies, beginning with Rock Around the Clock, starring Bill Haley and His Comets. The follow-up, Don’t Knock the Rock (1956) has Freed playing himself and ardently defending “the new sound.” Outshining Bill Haley, Little Richard wows the film audience with performances of “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.” Both films were directed by Sam Katzman. A third movie, also starring Freed, Rock, Rock, Rock had a skimpier plot but more music, including performances by Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon, and Johnny Burnette. All three films were big winners at the box office, in the U.S. and overseas.
After doing two half-hour specials for ABC-TV in March, Freed’s Friday night prime-time show, The Big Beat, debuted in July, featuring more White artists (The Everly Brothers, Ferlin Husky and Connie Francis) than in his live shows. The next show featured Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon, alongside Andy Williams and The Fontane Sisters. At the end of that show, when the artists and dancers joined together on the dance floor, the young African American Lymon was caught on camera dancing with a young White girl. Although little was made of it locally, southern ABC affiliates were outraged, demanding that only White acts appear on the show. Freed would not go along, and the show was skating on thin ice. Two more episodes of The Big Beat were broadcast, featuring Clyde McPhatter, Fats Domino, Dale Hawkins, Mickey and Sylvia, and a memorable performance by Jerry Lee Lewis that culminated with him standing on his piano, before the show was cancelled after its fourth telecast on August 2, 1957. Coincidentally, American Bandstand made its national debut three days later.
Freed continued to mount live shows, expanding across the northeastern United States. But when violence broke out after a show in Boston in May, 1958, local authorities moved to indict him for inciting a riot. Eventually, these charges were dropped, but not before forcing the cancellation of a series of announced shows, resulting in a series of legal and contractual struggles. Then, in November 1959, he was served a subpoena backstage at a New York show for allegedly accepting money in return for playing records. The accusation cost Freed his radio show and ushered the word “payola” (a contraction of “pay” and “Victrola”) into the lexicon. Eventually convicted on charges of payola and tax evasion, Freed was never given another major market radio or television outlet. Though race was hardly raised as an issue with Freed as far as the general public was concerned, it was the driving force behind the industry campaign against him. Eight years later, a bankrupt Freed died of causes related to alcoholism.←46 | 47→
While local media outlets often echoed the hysterical demagoguery of ministers, politicians, and other civic leaders on the topic of race, the Freed saga follows the general pattern for the television industry in the 1950s, holding to strict discriminatory policies behind the scenes while programming proceeded as if race were not an issue in America. Only in the context of news did television producers begin to cover race-oriented stories, often following the lead of progressive film and print media that portrayed the attendant problems of racism from a perspective that suggested bigotry, not race-mixing, was the problem. Social problems were not entirely absent from consideration on television in the 1950s—Kraft Television Theatre and Ford Theatre were among the “Golden Age” dramas that dealt with a wide range of topics, including adolescent disillusionment and dysfunction—but television was essentially a bystander on the race issue at this point, neither exposing bigotry nor exploiting it as other media did. Aversion to giving offense to any potential viewing block would prevent television producers from tackling race head-on until well into the 1960s.
This dilemma is recreated in John Waters’s 1988 film Hairspray, which revolves around a fictional television dance show, The Corny Collins Show, based on the popular Buddy Deane Show in Baltimore (WJZ-TV, 1957–64). The conflict arises when Black and White kids, who were accustomed to dancing together at school and neighborhood sock hops, insist on doing so on camera, in contradiction to strict, if unwritten, segregation policy. In Waters’s rose-colored rendition, the adults relent and The Corny Collins Show is peacefully integrated. The unfortunate reality is that The Buddy Deane Show was cancelled within weeks of airing an episode in which White students unexpectedly joined a Black group during a live broadcast. According to media activist Danny Schechter, this was “the first and probably last civil rights ‘dance-in’”23 (77). What Hairspray lacks in verisimilitude it makes up for by capturing the liberating exuberance of the pre-Bandstand era of televised rock music. A remake of Hairspray in 2007 (following a successful run on Broadway) keeps the same rose-colored ending, but foregrounds the civil rights battle. The central character is Motormouth Maybelle (portrayed by Queen Latifah), who is both the host of The Corny Collins Show once a month on “rhythm and blues day” and a community civil rights activist.
But as the reality gap between Hairspray and the actual history attests, integration was not only slow in coming, but came at a cost. For all the dramatic progress made by the Civil Rights Movement in forcing integration of the armed forces (1948) and public schools (1954), less visible (especially to Whites) was the way in which opportunities for African Americans to move into the mainstream undermined the Black institutions that had developed as a self-reliant alternative to Jim Crow segregation. As Black artists became more accepted in concert halls,←47 | 48→ local clubs catering to an African American clientele, including many on the chitlin’ circuit, could no longer compete with White promoters in booking big name artists. As major labels belatedly added Black artists to their rosters, many of the independent labels that nurtured R&B fell by the wayside. But one area in which Black families were uniformly denied mainstream opportunities was in housing. The post-war GI Bill and other loan programs supported White flight from cities to suburbs while Federal Housing Administration policies and “red-lining” practices guaranteed that Black families could not take advantage. Suburbia became synonymous with the White middle class, and the media naturalized this “dreamhouse” environment (Spigel).
One measure of the success of the whitewashing of rock ‘n’ roll on television is the extent to which the music became associated with the suburbs. The version of rock music presented on American Bandstand was embodied by the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, who epitomized the kind of wholesome teenagers Dick Clark espoused. The pair was so affable that they were cast together in a series of lightweight films that constituted a new genre: Beach Party musicals, beginning with Beach Party in 1963.24 This new image of rock ‘n’ roll—kids frolicking on the beach concerned with little more than cars and dating—effectively severed the music from its urban (R&B) and rural (blues and country) roots. If you were not a White suburbanite, you were not in the equation, until Soul Train opened the door. But for young White hipsters, this sanitized version of rock ‘n’ roll became an object of ridicule, of a piece with manicured lawns, plastic appliances, and TV dinners. Plus, as Norma Coates points out, in addition to racializing and suburbanizing rock ‘n’ roll, American Bandstand also genderized it, reinforcing the public image of youth music as “a predominantly male and heterosexual preserve” (“Elvis” 243).
Divorced from its origins in rural areas and inner cities, rock ‘n’ roll was being packaged for middle-class suburban families. In addition to the persistent issues of race, there was also a class dimension. Charlie Gillett, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, and others have recognized that rock ‘n’ roll, in its original expression, emanated from disenfranchised communities. As Robert Barry Francos put it, “rock ‘n’ roll started with the poorer financial strata,” only reaching the middle class through the mass media (159). But for all the reassurance offered by its televised iteration, rock ‘n’ roll was a facet of a larger cultural upheaval that was bringing sweeping social change and threatening traditional standards of thought and conduct. The underlying fear, felt by many Americans in the post-war years, even with no racial or economic axe to grind, was of losing social control. This instinct to resist modernism and preserve hegemony was expressed, though rarely overtly, in myriad ways through television.←48 | 49→
Modernism
Much of the animosity expressed toward rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s may be seen as an expression of a deeper, generalized fear of modernism. Although modernism is often used in reference to a specific historical period with particular features, especially in regard to art and music, for our purposes the term will be used primarily in the sense that is interchangeable with modernity, including various aspects of contemporary life. Citing the art historian John Walker, Paul Grosswiler describes modernism as an aesthetic ideology that embraces technology and values new forms of expression over tradition. To the average parent in the 1950s, this ideology translated to a headlong sprint into unchartered territory and a breakdown of social cohesiveness.
In the post-war years, the new music became a visible, audial, and powerful embodiment of what Marshall McLuhan called the “Electric Age,” in which everything seemed to be getting faster and louder, and, as such, became the focus of resentment. Few people articulated modernism as a point of contention, but rock ‘n’ roll served as a surrogate for more generalized anxieties about technology, industrialization, and the acceleration of other changes in American society. Unlike expressions of modernity in literature and the fine arts, rock ‘n’ roll did not sit passively on a page or on a wall—it was loud, boisterous, and provocative. It could not be relegated to a museum or a library; it was on the streets and in the air. If rock ‘n’ roll represented what Marshall Berman called a “heroic expression of modernity as an adventure,” television was one of the forces in the 1950s that served as “a dismal emblem of modernity as a routine” (248).25 While rock music ecstatically celebrated the technology and energy of modernism, the controllers and conventions of television expressed a clear desire to corral those energies. But modernism, according to Berman, is “the realism of our time” (122), demanding a freedom of individual response to deal with technological and sociocultural changes. Resistance is denial, and denial is futile.
Embedded in his groundbreaking media analysis, McLuhan reflected the puritanical attitude of his generation toward rock ‘n’ roll, referring to it as “a central aural form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment,” going as far as to say that “If Homer can be wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock” (Video McLuhan).26 While part of the anti-modernist backlash stems from a sense of loss of the primacy of book-based linearity, and the capacity for logical reasoning that it encourages, rock music can hardly be isolated from television, radio, computers, or other media for its role in ushering in a new era of instability and relativism. But, an argument can also be made for a certain body of rock music as a relative bulwark against further erosion of a literary orientation. McLuhan recognized art and tribalism as two resources with the capacity to provide some insulation from the onslaught of electronic media, and rock ‘n’←49 | 50→ roll combines these qualities. Rock music is an integral part of the contemporary hyper-mediated matrix—it can be loud and intrusive—but it can also play a palliative role for young listeners as a response to the overall thrust of media messages controlled by adults and commercial interests.
Rock music is seldom considered in the context of modernism because of its folk roots and its hedonistic tendencies, but rock ‘n’ roll not only thrived on what Berman called the “moving chaos” of modernism, it gave it a palpable form, comprised of electrified sound, energy, speed, fashion, and attitude. But 1950s rock ‘n’ roll was more of a symbol of modernism than a reflection of it. It carried the banner of discontinuity, but rarely strayed from the established themes and preoccupations of imagination and emotion associated with romanticism.
In the 1950s, modernism found its dissonant musical expression in the jazz and classical avant-garde, led by such artists as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage.27 Just as the instant “reality” of photography liberated painters in the nineteenth century to embrace abstraction and other experimentations, twentieth century modernism turned the arts toward the conceptual and the theoretical. In this respect rock ‘n’ roll was, if anything, anti-modernist, a visceral response to what Jonathan Franzen called “the sadness of modernity” (92). Even as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s was perceived by adults as a break with the past and the foremost manifestation of modernism, the music itself did not represent a great leap from Tin Pan Alley in terms of form or its romantic subject matter, and the fullness of the relationship between musician and audience was one of naïve transparency, a generally wholesome expression of joy, sincerity, and innocence. Borrowing vocal stylings from blues and R&B, rock ‘n’ roll singers often sounded knowing and libidinous, but the lyrics were rarely much more sophisticated than the doe-eyed, june-moon-spoon poetics of the previous era. Doo-wop music epitomized this self-absorption, more concerned with harmonies, arrangements, and sound than lyric content.28 Rock artists may have appropriated the urgency of singers such as Muddy Waters (nee McKinley Morganfield), B.B. King, and Robert Johnson, but their music reflected little of the suffering that informs the blues. If the blues is a music borne of sorrow and redemption, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll is a music of joy and abandon; it had nothing to redeem.
Only in the 1960s, behind the more cerebral contributions of Bob Dylan, The Who, The Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention, and others, did rock music acknowledge the interface of various recording and performing technologies, self-consciously and purposefully adopting the tools and aesthetics of modernism. In many ways, the 1960s hippies, with their alternative lifestyles, could be seen as representing a great cultural compromise, embracing both the utopianism and high-flying creativity of modernism and a down-to-earth folk tribalism.←50 | 51→
Like his contemporary, McLuhan, Lewis Mumford was a keen observer of technological effects, but lacked an appreciation for the interplay between rock music and modernism. Observing the phenomena of rock festivals in the 1960s, he saw an inconsistency between the revolutionary urge of youth to “drop out” of consumer culture and their reliance upon mass-produced and mass-mediated products and messages. But reducing this phenomenon to a “purely megatechnic primitivism” (Myth 373) oversimplifies and undervalues the cultural and political movements from which rock drew much of its power and to which it lent significant support and energy. W. T. Lhamon Jr. refers to the seedbed and source material that nurtured rock ‘n’ roll as poplore, which “behaved like folklore and sometimes had folk traditions. But identifiable individuals were making this lore in the city now, assembling it with cameras and electric instruments, propagating it on television and radio and records…” (98). Also lost on academics such as Mumford was the quality of rock ‘n’ roll that joined romanticism to the folk process and reflected diffidence as much as defiance. Lhamon uses the term “congeniality” to describe the ability of rock ‘n’ roll (and other art forms of the 1950s) to find common ground with its audience even as it aspired to originality and innovation.
When the advent of rap music and hip hop in the 1980s revived the debate about the content of lyrics in popular music, social scientists conducted content analyses that demonstrated how benign the words in most 1950s rock songs actually were. Lorraine Prinsky and Jill Rosenbaum cite several quantitative studies that found that “songs from the 1950s tended to reflect more traditional values of love and sex” and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that social protest, drugs, and “nontraditional views of relationships” became commonplace (385).
Unlike the blues, suffering was not the starting point for rock ‘n’ roll. The genius of the blues was transforming misery into consolation and gratification. Rock ‘n’ roll was a joyful expression of a burgeoning youth culture that helped to define what Melvin Tumin called a “cult of happiness” (554). As Simon Frith indicates, despite rock’s reliance on mediating technology and its later tendency toward social commentary, it retains a fundamental adherence to romantic and folk ideals. “From Romanticism rock fans have inherited the belief that listening to someone’s music means getting to know them, getting access to their souls and sensibilities. From the folk tradition they’ve adopted the argument that musicians can represent them, articulating [their] immediate needs and experiences…” (“Art” 267).
Although the young people of the baby boom generation were considered non-conformists, it was not until the 1960s that this attitude gained political currency and became widespread. As Steven Chaffee points out (citing Lull and Christenson), “if it had any clear social goals, rock music was intended to insulate young people from the rest of their own society much more than it was to build an←51 | 52→ international following” (415). Plus, as many psychologists have documented, the spirit of teenage rebellion is tempered by the strong desire to belong. From this perspective, the embrace of rock ‘n’ roll by 1950s teens can be seen as less defiant and more romantic, less of a rejection of mainstream values and more of a participatory communion with their peers. Leo D’Anjou calls the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s “a rebellion without rebels” (np), arguing that teenagers did not see themselves as renegades until television and other media portrayed them that way.
According to John Mundy, “rock ‘n’ roll created a cultural space in which these dichotomies [rebellion and conformity] could be given expression, explored, and, symbolically at least, resolved” (99). Observers as divergent as Dylan Thomas and George “Shadow” Morton understood that the “rebel without a cause” was not a threatening figure, but representative of the contradictory aspects of modernity. In his 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, Thomas referred to “the good bad boys,” while Morton’s song “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” a hit for The Shangri-Las in 1965, famously referred to a male love interest as “good, bad, but not evil.”
Young people in the 1950s may have been self-absorbed, but they were not immune to the general anxieties of society, and paranoia in the form of bomb shelters and air raid drills was part of the psychological landscape in the 1950s. In the content of its songs, early rock ‘n’ roll was fundamentally romantic and escapist, but it was also an inchoate response to an increasingly complex and frightening world. 29 Jim Curtis attributes much of the early appeal of rock to the fact that it served as a “release from political tensions” (38) associated with McCarthyism, the H-Bomb and the Cold War. The older generation was alarmed by the pugnacity of the music and the immodesty of the dancing, but it was joy and impetuousness more than impropriety that motivated the baby boom kids, a move toward a reassuring set of forms and symbols, and away from nihilism, rather than the opposite.
Henry Jenkins suggests that “the story of American arts in the twentieth century might be told in terms of the displacement of folk culture by mass media…folk culture practices were pushed underground” (139). But if this was true of the culture as a whole, the more common trend among young people, especially as the 1950s wore on, was to embrace the folk and tribal aspects of rock ‘n’ roll, and to follow the folk culture as it moved underground. In this process, the music became more than an entertainment, but a powerful symbol of larger ideas and strivings. Rockaphobia not only failed to curb the popularity of rock ‘n’ roll, but imbued it with greater power to express and represent teenage discontent. In the latter part of the decade, when rock ‘n’ roll emerged from the margins and became a dominant musical genre, it not only reshaped the musical landscape, but helped to provide a philosophical basis for what would become the counterculture.←52 | 53→
Notes
1. Albin Zak suggests that Sinatra’s antipathy toward the music of the next generation may have begun with his stint as host of the radio version of Your Hit Parade, on which he was called upon to sing the top hit of the week, including such ditties as “Too Fat Polka” and “Woody Woodpecker.” This was in 1947, before rock ‘n’ roll, but Sinatra became contemptuous of the shift in emphasis from “classicism” and “professionalism” to novelty and a more overt sexuality. The licentiousness of rock was hardly off-putting to Sinatra’s Rat Pack pal Dean Martin, whose “Wham Bam, Thank You Ma’am” was banned from radio airplay in 1951 along with Dottie O’Brien’s explicit “Four or Five Times” and any number of rhythm & blues songs.
2. Lenny Kaye discusses how the crooners that predated Sinatra, including Rudy Vallee and Russ Columbo, first figured out how to use the microphone, “this vibrating metallic device” (52), as a tool for creating intimacy.
3. Another charge first leveled by religious leaders in the 1950s was that rock lyrics contained embedded satanic messages. This myth was so persistent that a study was conducted (Vokey and Read 1985) in order to demonstrate that, even if such messages existed, they would have negligible effect on listeners.
4. A studio recording was made of Lewis arguing with Sun Records’ Sam Phillips about the song being the work of the devil. For an account of that dialogue see Nick Tosches’ Hellfire, pp. 129–33.
5. The title Seduction of the Innocent was first used by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham for his 1954 book that warned of the power of comic books to turn teenagers into delinquents.
6. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) was called the NARTB for seven years in the 1950s.
7. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to have their beds pushed together on the first two seasons of I Love Lucy only because it was a well known fact that they were married in real life, not just on TV.
8. This blockade presented only a mild inconvenience for many artists, but for those whom physicality was a logical extension of their music, such as the young Elvis Presley, it presented a major obstacle. One entire strain of rock ‘n’ roll that was suppressed due to this puritanical strain was the gay rock subculture from which Little Richard emerged. By sheer force of personality, he was able to persevere, but cross-dressing stars of the gay clubs such as Esquerita and Bobby Marchan were off limits as far as TV was concerned.
9. Jackson (nee Benjamin Jackson) specialized in the kind of risqué material that White adults were particularly worried about. Among his most requested songs were “I Want a Bowlegged Woman” and “Big Ten Inch Record.”
10. This visual “outing” cut both ways. While many radio listeners were surprised to find out Elvis was White, The Mar-keys had the opposite problem. Based on their 1961 hit instrumental “Last Night” and the Stax label affiliation, the group was assumed to be Black, which caused some problems when they showed up for gigs at Black clubs.
11. In addition to playing cover versions of records, radio had its own equivalent behind the microphone with what might be called “cover DJs.” Alan Freed’s success in appropriating Black music and slang inspired Wolfman Jack (nee Robert Smith) and others to follow suit.←53 | 54→ Denied a job himself, Vernon Winslow was paid by White station owners in New Orleans to train White DJs to “sound black.” Another enterprising DJ, John R. Richbourg, actually ran a school for DJs who were White but did not want to in sound like it. See Hilmes, pages 151–3.
12. In several interviews, Baker slyly claimed that, when she took out an insurance policy for an overseas trip, she named Gibbs as her beneficiary out of concern that, without Baker’s songs to cover, Gibbs would lose a major source of her income.
13. See Under African Skies, the 2012 documentary about the making of Paul Simon’s 1986 Graceland LP for an extended dialogue on this subject.
14. Quoted in Bill Millar’s liner notes to the Edsel Records reissue album The Treniers: Rockin’ is Our Bizness.
15. Unable to resist the mayhem, comedian Lewis joined The Treniers on stage, actually sitting in on drums, thereby claiming his own small slice of rock history.
16. WDIA’s motto at the time was “The Black Spot on your Radio Dial—50,000 Watts of Black Power.”
17. Interestingly, Billy Daniels had a small acting role in the 1959 film The Beat Generation, subtitled “Behind the weird, way-out world of the Beatniks!” (The movie was also shown under the title This Rebel Age). Also, his daughter, Yvonne Daniels, was a disc jockey known as “The First Lady of Radio” at several Chicago stations from the 1960s to the 1990s, including a stint on WSDM-FM, “the All Girl Jazz Station” owned by Leonard Chess. There is a street named after her in downtown Chicago.
18. Sykes’ charm earned him the nickname Honeydripper, which he memorialized in his 1931 song of that title; it became a national hit for Joe Liggins in 1945.
19. Brooks’ revival came after actor/director Sean Penn used her song “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” in his 1995 film The Crossing Guard.
20. According to Nelson George, DJ Zenas “Daddy” Sears helped Willis to get his own weekly Atlanta TV show in the early 1950s. It was on these shows that Willis, seeking a visual gimmick, took to wearing a turban (46–7).
21. Inspired by this event, Brown hosted his own syndicated show, Future Shock, recorded at Ted Turner’s UHF station WTCG from 1976–79. In addition to displaying emerging dance styles, the show featured segments on African American history. But Brown’s politics were mercurial. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he was widely credited with quelling riots in Boston and Washington D.C. But he was roundly criticized for publicly befriending President Richard Nixon, hardly a supporter of civil rights.
22. The story of Don Cornelius and Soul Train is explored in the TV series American Soul (BET 2019– ).
23. After this protest, the Baltimore County Executive told protestors that they had “set back race relations by 20 years” (Schechter pers. corr.). The Executive was Spiro Agnew.
24. Sometimes called the Beach Blanket movies, this series also featured music from Dick Dale and the Del-Tones and other progenitors of a new rock sub-genre: surf music.
25. Berman was speaking specifically about architecture, but the description is applicable.
26. The view of rock music as anti-literate has had a long (shall we say) shelf life. In the 1980s, Allan Bloom devoted a chapter in his best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind←54 | 55→ to the insidious impact of music. “It is not only not reasonable,” he said, “it is hostile to reason,” going on to compare rock music to junk food and pornography (71). He also asserted in 1987 that Mick Jagger’s star was fading.
27. Cage had been defying musical conventions throughout the 1940s. By the late 1950s he was experimenting with random or chance composition where the “choices” were made by the technology rather than the composer. He was already a post-modernist.
28. The name doo-wop was not coined until the 1960s when the first wave of nostalgia for this music demanded a packaging label. In the 1950s it was just vocal groups doing rock ‘n’ roll. It is worth noting that the vocal groups that produced the genial and tenderhearted doo-wop sound emerged largely from the same population of urban “greasers” (often Italian and Hispanic) ill-reputed for their sideburns, swagger, and switchblades. In 1957, the play West Side Story helped to reinforce this stereotype, minus the rock music. That same year, leading doo-wop group Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers sang “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” in the film Rock, Rock, Rock, but adults were not convinced.
29. On an episode of the ABC-TV news program Our World in November, 1986, Jimmy Keyes, a member of The Chords and co-author of “Sh-Boom,” said that the idea for the title was inspired by 1954 headlines regarding the hydrogen bomb.
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