What Do You Know? necessary factors for the rise of
rock and roll
Hitting the Books! rock and roll begins
Learning in Action Elvis websites
How Did You Do? send in your findings
Making Connections from many styles to one
What Do You Know?
Keeping in mind the historical context described in Lesson 2, what do you think needed to change before rock and roll could arrive? List technological advances and social changes, as well as any other factors you can think of.
Hitting the Books!
“It’s not music, it’s a disease” - Columbia Records executive Mitch Miller
“The effect of rock and roll on young people is to turn them into devil worshippers, to stimulate self-expression through sex, to provoke lawlessness, impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.” - Reverend Albert Carter, Pentecostal minister”
The rock and roll explosion of the early 1950s began on a
number of fronts. Some of the rhythm and blues bands of the 1940s were exhibiting
stylistic traits of rock and roll early on, like a driving rhythm section and
aggressive, shouting singers. In Memphis, Tennessee, Sam Phillips was experimenting
with rockabilly, a combination of rhythm and blues and country music. His artists
included Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. In Hollywood,
Art Rupe of Specialty Records was recording Little Richard, and in New Orleans,
Cosimo Matassa was helping to craft a particularly New Orleans brand of rock
and roll with Fats Domino. The influential early recordings of these artists
were to set the stage for the decisive change in popular music that was well
underway by 1955.
But rock and roll is more than an amalgam of musical features. Like any artistic
expression, popular music is a social transaction; rock and roll by definition
was a youth movement, with implications far beyond the record business. Rock
and roll represented freedom, in terms of crossing racial and class boundaries
and in terms of freeing the body. It was not only music, but a way of dressing,
dancing, walking and talking. For mainstream America, it was the crucible for
the mixture of black and white cultures, as not only African-American musical
aesthetics, but clothing, speech and dance intermingled with European-American
aesthetics.
Rock and roll was a large part of a momentous change in U.S. culture: the creation
of the modern teenager. This was coincident with the arrival of the baby boom
children into adolescence in the mid 1950s and after. The significant increase
in the teenage population was combined with postwar prosperity and increased
leisure time to create a new youth market.
This new teenage consumer was not only different from the previous generation’s
youth in terms of numbers or economic clout, but also in attitude. Technological
and social changes were occurring at a steadily increasing rate; the invention
of television in the late 1940s had changed popular culture immensely. Civil
rights activism was changing white mainstream views towards African-American
culture, albeit slowly. While their parents sought a quiet, suburban, conformist
life in the years following World War II, the teenagers hoped to break out of
their stifling environments. Restricted by conservative schooling and an unappealing
job market, they worked out their frustrations during their leisure time, with
music and dance.
The products to feed this burgeoning demand were coming together in recording
studios around the country. In the meantime, rhythm and blues records began
to cross over to the formerly all-white pop charts. Rock and roll has been described
as a combination of white country and western with black rhythm and blues, but
the mixture was more uneven than that description suggests. Early rock and roll,
in terms of musical features, was simply rhythm and blues that had crossed over
to a white audience, and sometimes played by white performers. As Robert Palmer
has commented, “musicians had been rocking out across America for years”
by the time the rock and roll explosion hit in 1955. The country and western
aspects of the music were quite minuscule compared to the rhythm and blues aspects.
Various industry changes precipitated the rise of rock and roll as well. Starting
in the early 50s, record companies were converting from the heavy, fragile shellac
78s to lighter, more durable vinyl 45s. This new format was more cost-effective
for the independent companies that were to dominate rock and roll in the 50s.
Magnetic tape, a technology stolen from Germany following World War II, was
replacing disc recording. Tape recording, with its capacity for splicing and
editing, helped to reduce costs and changed the ways that music was to be recorded.
The great depression had decimated the ranks of the 1920s specialty independent
labels, and the major companies were hit hard as well. The road back to prosperity
began with the rise of the jukebox, which in 1935 accounted for 40% of all record
sales. In 1932, a cheap turntable, the Duo Jr., was introduced, and the upstart
Decca company started a record price war by slashing their single record prices
to 35 cents from the usual 75 cents. The Columbia company started to gain prominence
after their 1938 purchase by CBS. They were helped along by a series of big
band successes and the savvy signings of talent scout John Hammond, who over
the course of his career had a hand in the careers of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday,
Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Meanwhile, Tin Pan Alley was far past its prime. The TPA-composed pop songs
of the 50s were a vapid and artless lot for the most part, and in any case unsuited
for the teenage temperament of the time. When rock and roll became available
to teenagers, they seized on it because they recognized the sound of excitement
- the more forceful beat, the relative sexual explicitness, the noisy and raucous
sound seemed to mirror the frenzy of the changing world.
Sun Records and Elvis
“I’m not kidding myself. My voice alone is just an ordinary voice. What people come to see is how I use it. If I stand still while I’m singing, I’m dead, man. I might as well go back to driving a truck.” - Elvis Presley, 1956
In Memphis, Tennessee,
a former radio engineer named Sam Phillips (1923- ) started the Memphis Recording
Service in 1950. This was a recording studio where, for a fee, anyone could
come in and make a one-off demo record. By the early 50s, Phillips had launched
Sun Records to showcase some of the local black rhythm and blues talent. At
various times, he released discs by Rufus Thomas and Junior Parker. As well,
he recorded some seminal R&B discs for other labels, including the rock
and roll precursor “Rocket 88” (#1 R&B, 1951) by Jackie Brenston,
a hit for Chess that, with its honking, raspy saxophone and shouted vocals,
is sometimes cited as the first rock and roll song.
In late 1953, a white teenager walked into Memphis Recording Service to make
a record as a gift for his mother. Phillips was away at the time, so his secretary,
Marion Keisker, cut the record. The teenager, a Memphian named Elvis Presley
(1935-1977), accompanied himself on guitar, singing an old Ink Spots tune called
“My Happiness”. Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi into a poor
sharecropping family. His early musical education came from the church, where
he absorbed white gospel music. After high school, he worked as a truck driver
in Memphis, where his family had settled in 1948.
Keisker thought that Presley had an interesting style, so she kept a copy of
the record to play for Phillips. Phillips, who is reputed to have said “If
I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could
make a million dollars” decided to call Elvis down to the studio to try
out some songs with a couple of local country musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore
and bassist Bill Black. After a few unproductive hours, the musicians took a
break. At that point, Elvis began to fool around with a version of Arthur “Big
Boy” Crudup’s blues song “That’s All Right. Mama”.
Phillips immediately heard something exciting in Elvis’ fusion of gospel,
country and R&B and recorded the song.
After cutting an acetate disc of the song at the studio, Phillips brought the
record to a popular Memphis DJ, Dewey Phillips (no relation), who began playing
it over the air. By the end of the week, Sun had over 1000 advance orders for
the record. When it was issued, Phillips placed Elvis’ rocking version
of the bluegrass standard “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the flip side.
This was the beginning of a pattern for Elvis Presley’s Sun singles, the
strategy of putting a white country song on one side and a black R&B song
on the other.
Elvis was an instant local star, but some radio listeners assumed that he was
black because of his rhythmic, flamboyant singing style. Incessant touring throughout
the South helped to dispel this misconception; he was billed on his early tours
as “The King of Western Bop”.
“When I first
knew Elvis he had a million dollars worth of talent. Now he has a million dollars”
- Colonel Tom Parker
“I’d rather try and close a deal with the devil”
- Hal Wallis, producer of nine Elvis movies, on Colonel Tom Parker
By 1955 Presley had signed
a management deal with “Colonel” Tom Parker. Tom Parker, who, in
fact, was not a Colonel at all, had started his career in travelling carnivals.
Eventually he took control of the career of Hank Snow, a country star. He signed
with Elvis for an incredible 50% share of total earnings - most standard management
contracts provide the manager with 20% or less of the artist’s total earnings.
Parker did not waste any time engineering a major label deal for Elvis. RCA
bought out Elvis’ Sun Records contract for an unprecedented $35,000. In
1956, with the clout of a major label, Elvis made a series of national television
appearances. Sensational appearances on the Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan shows
brought Presley to national fame, and sealed his status as an embodiment of
rock and roll style.
Presley had a number of assets that helped to ensure his meteoric success. His
versatile voice was equally at home with a bawdy rhythm and blues song and a
tender ballad. His ability to project sonic personae both dangerous and sweetly
innocent ensured that both boys and girls idolized him. Elvis’ visual
style was also very effective. His hair was styled in a slick pompadour that
would nonetheless fall rakishly across his forehead with the slightest provocation.
He dressed in garishly coloured clothes and gold lamé in his early appearances.
Most notorious was Elvis’ dancing. When he sang an uptempo number, his
leg would twitch uncontrollably. When freed from his singing duties with an
instrumental break, Elvis would pose, shimmy, and swivel his hips, to the hysterical
reactions of teenage girls and the consternation of parents. Elvis’ movements
seemed unbelievably provocative in the conservative 1950s, and his dancing became
a favourite subject of controversy in the media, to the point that he was nicknamed
“Elvis the Pelvis”.
Elvis scored hit after hit on the national charts, starting with “Heartbreak
Hotel”, which, in an unprecedented charts sweep, achieved #1 status on
the pop, rhythm and blues and country charts simultaneously. His star continued
to rise over the next few years, with hits like “Jailhouse Rock”
(#1 pop, #1 R&B, #1 C&W, 1957), “Don’t Be Cruel” (#1
pop, #1 R&B, #1 C&W, 1956) and “All Shook Up” (#1 pop, #1
R&B, #3 C&W, 1957), and he began to act in films, starting with Love
Me Tender in 1956.
In fact, after a stint in the army in 1958-60, Elvis stopped touring altogether,
though he continued to release records and make movies. He continued to enjoy
strong sales, but there was a growing perception that Elvis was out of touch.
Even though his fans stayed faithful, the quality of Elvis’ records had
declined by the mid 1960s, and his movies were worse. By 1968, his reputation
was at a low ebb.
As Colonel Tom prepared a Christmas television special for Elvis, featuring
slick production numbers with dancers and orchestra, Presley insisted, in perhaps
the only example of his taking a stand against Parker, on the inclusion of a
segment where he would perform informally in front of an audience, with some
of his musicians from the 50s. This show has become known in Elvis mythology
as the “Comeback Special”. Elvis appeared in black leather and long
sideburns, tearing up the stage with renditions of his rock and roll classics.
He thus showed the world that he could still cut it as a live performer, and
as if to underscore the point, he resumed touring shortly after, this time with
a lavish show and large band. He became a fixture in Las Vegas, alongside Sammy
Davis Jr. and Wayne Newton.
But depression and addictions were beginning to take their toll on Elvis, and
he became more and more reclusive, his behaviour increasingly erratic. Constantly
surrounded by a coterie of protectors and yes-men (nicknamed the “Memphis
Mafia”), Elvis spent much of his time behind the walls of Graceland, his
ostentatious home in suburban Memphis. By the time he died in 1977, Elvis had
become a caricature of himself, practising his karate kicks onstage in a white
sequined jumpsuit.
Elvis’ estate made many millions more after his death that Elvis ever
did when he was alive. Colonel Tom Parker continued to handle Elvis’ business
after his death, collecting his 50% commission until his own death in 1997,
commenting shortly after Elvis’ demise, “Nothing has changed”.
Along with Elvis, Sam Phillips was developing other rockabilly stars in the
early 1950s, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. These
performers would ensure the wide dissemination of the Sun rockabilly sound as
the primal sound of early rock and roll.
Jerry Lee Lewis (1935- ) was a white piano player and singer from Ferriday,
Louisiana. He had grown up surrounded by the Pentecostal church, a hellfire-and-damnation
Protestant sect that preached strict adherence to the tenets of the Bible. This
was balanced by early exposure to black boogie-woogie piano players, the descendants
of the ragtime piano professors. Jerry Lee, with some prodding from Phillips,
developed a showy boogie-woogie piano style and a leering, flamboyant vocal
persona.
Lewis was even wilder than Elvis, his blond pompadour splayed over his face
as he pounded the piano keys with his fists, his feet and his elbows. He did
not achieve the level of Elvis’ success, partly because he lacked Elvis’
across-the-board appeal, but largely because his career was derailed in 1958
as the result of a scandal involving his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin,
Nora. The marriage became public when Nora accompanied Jerry Lee on a tour of
Britain. The notoriously tough British reporters descended on the pair like
vultures, and Lewis was too proud to keep the marriage quiet. In the deep South,
it was quite commonplace for women to marry young, and marrying cousins was
also not unusual. Even so, Lewis’ career dried up almost overnight. He
was relegated first to a career as a country singer, in which he met some success,
then on to the “oldies circuit”, where he occasionally tours to
this day. In 1989 a Hollywood film, Great Balls of Fire, starring Dennis Quaid
and Winona Ryder, was made about Jerry Lee’s life. This helped to revive
interest in his music somewhat.
Carl Perkins (1932-1998) was born into a dirt-poor farming family in Tiptonville,
Tennessee. One of the key figures of early rock and roll, Perkins wrote songs
that depicted a specifically teenage world and fused country picking and blues
in his exciting electric guitar style. He also contributed a seminal rock and
roll anthem, “Blue Suede Shoes” (1956), later reworked by Elvis
Presley. He once described the process of writing this seminal rock and roll
anthem:
“’Blue Suede Shoes’ was the easiest song I ever wrote. Got up at 3:00 am when me and my wife Velda were living in a government project in Jackson, Tennessee. Had the idea in my head, seeing kids by the bandstand so proud of their new city shoes - you gotta be real poor to care about new shoes like I did - and that morning I went downstairs and wrote out the words on a potato sack. We didn’t have any reason to have writing paper around.”
Perkins learned guitar
from a black sharecropper and in turn taught his two brothers, who joined him
in the Perkins Brothers Band. After Elvis left Sun for RCA, Perkins’ recording
of “Blue Suede Shoes” topped the R&B and country charts and
got to #2 on the pop charts, very nearly achieving the same coup as Presley’s
“Heartbreak Hotel”. Perkins’ career was halted, however, by
a car accident in 1956 that kept him off performing for nine months. By the
time he returned, the momentum was gone and he had been overshadowed by labelmates
Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. Perkins alternated between country records
and rockabilly revival records through the next three decades. The reissuing
of his Sun material in the 1970s proved influential to younger revivalists like
the Stray Cats, but Perkins had already made a strong impact on the Beatles
and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Johnny Cash (1932- ), along with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee
Lewis, was the fourth member of Sam Phillips’ “Million Dollar Quartet”.
He took up the guitar while stationed with the Air Force in Germany, then formed
a trio in Memphis in 1954 called Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. Signed to
Sun in 1955, they had an immediate country hit with “Cry, Cry, Cry”
(#14 C&W, 1955) and a pop hit with “I Walk The Line” (#2 pop,
1956). Moving to Columbia in 1958, Cash was paired with Don Law, who had produced
Robert Johnson as well as bluegrass act Flatt and Scruggs. Law, who was sympathetic
to traditional music, encouraged Cash’s folk music leanings. After a series
of albums which showcased a surprising variety of American styles, Cash met
mainstream success with his live album Live at Folsom Prison. After a chequered
and varied career through the 70s and 80s, Cash recorded a couple of stripped-down
albums for Rick Rubin at American Recordings, American Recordings and Unchained,
in which he contributed a version of Soundgarden’s grunge hit “Rusty
Cage”. Today Cash is battling persistent health problems, and it is doubtful
that he will return to performing.
Little Richard
Perhaps the most flamboyant
and transgressive of the early rock and roll stars was Little Richard, who was
born Richard Penniman in 1932 in Macon, Georgia. A black man, Richard was a
teenage runaway who had travelled with medicine shows before winning a contest
where the prize was a recording contract with RCA Victor. The contract led to
nothing, but after a move to L.A. label Specialty, Richard stumbled onto “Tutti
Frutti”. It was during a break in a recording session that Richard began
to fool around with an obscene ditty called “Wop Bop Aloo Bop”.
The engineer saw the potential of the song and quickly brought in local songwriter
Dorothy La Bostrie to clean up the lyrics. The final version of “Tutti
Frutti” (1956) was a raucous bit of nonsense with a wild vocal performance
and a rolling and tumbling rock and roll groove. It reached #17 (#2 R&B)
on the pop charts, a significant crossover showing.
He continued with a series of hits, including “Long Tall Sally”
(#6 pop, #1 R&B, 1956), “Good Golly Miss Molly” (#10 pop, #4
R&B, 1958) and “Rip It Up” (#17 pop, #1 R&B, 1956), for
Specialty, a Hollywood-based label. Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Richard balanced a
love of rock and roll with a strict Pentecostal background. And like Lewis,
Little Richard saw his career screech to a halt in 1958. There had always been
tension in Richard’s life between religion and the “devil’s
music” that he was performing. So while on tour in Australia, he threw
his gold rings off a bridge and renounced his career as a rock and roll singer.
“If you want to live with the Lord, you can’t rock and roll, too.
God doesn’t like it” he told an Australian interviewer. Richard
enrolled in a Bible college, with an aim towards becoming an evangelist. He
did become an ordained minister, but he returned to rock and roll in the early
60s. By that time musical styles had changed, and he never reclaimed his former
glory. He continued to tour, for a time employing a young guitarist named Jimi
Hendrix. In the 1990s, he has become more of a free-floating “celebrity”
than a musician, making frequent appearances on late-night talk shows (usually
singing his own praises as “the real king of rock and roll” and
screaming “Shut up!” at the studio audience) and in movie cameos
(Down and Out In Beverly Hills, The Last Action Hero).
By 1955, rock and roll had become the predominant American popular music. The
commercial conquest of the music was marked by the success of “Rock Around
The Clock” (#1 pop, #3 R&B, 1955) by Bill Haley and the Comets, a
white band that had formerly played country music. The song had been originally
released in 1954 to little notice, but after it was prominently featured in
the teen rebellion film Blackboard Jungle, it became the top selling record
of the year.
Cover Versions
A number of record companies
attempted to cash in on the rock and roll craze by recording white “cover
versions” of rock and roll and R&B songs originally by black artists.
They reasoned that a successful record by a black artist would have even more
appeal for a white audience if it was rerecorded by a white artist, with any
potentially offensive lyrics or excessively “rough” musical features
removed. Probably the most notorious of the cover artists was Pat Boone, a white
singer with a squeaky-clean image. Boone recorded for Randy Wood’s Nashville
company Dot, a label well-known for its white cover versions of R&B originals.
His cover version (#12 pop, 1956) of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”
not only altered lyrics where a sexual connotation might be inferred, but it
erased almost all of the African-American musical aesthetics from the song.
Richard’s rough shout and gospel-influenced vocal turns were replaced
by Boone’s smooth baritone and simpler, four-square melody.
For a while, this strategy worked. If a black-performed song was rising up the
charts, a white cover version would be recorded and released within a few days,
often rising higher than the original version and sending it plummeting down
the charts. Indeed, this is what happened with Boone’s version of “Tutti
Frutti”.
By the late 50s, though, cover versions were becoming less successful. Presumably
this was due to the increasing sophistication of the rock and roll audience,
who recognized the superiority of the original versions.
Learning In Action
Find five fan websites dedicated to Elvis. How do they portray Elvis’ life and career? How much do they focus on his music? Write a short commentary about each site under each web address.
How Did You Do?
Send in your annotated list of websites for feedback.
Making Connections
One of the things that happened with the rock and roll explosion was a narrowing of stylistic breadth in favour of mass sales of one style. How did this benefit or harm the music business? Write down a few thoughts.