These men were brought together in the late 1930s by a radical organizer named A. J. Muste, whom Time magazine had labeled “America’s number one pacifist.” In 1942 they formed their own organization, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which also involved white war resisters such as George Houser.
CORE had as an adviser an Indian disciple of Gandhi, Krishnalal Shridharani. In 1943 they used sit-ins to force the integration of an all-white cafeteria in Detroit and movie theaters in Denver. Many of these men were sent to prison for refusing to serve in the war, including Farmer, Rustin, Houser, and David Dellinger, who later became a key organizer in the resistance to the Vietnam War. Rustin could have been exempt from the draft as a Quaker but refused to apply, believing that going to prison made a stronger statement. The draft resisters were sent to two minimum-security prisons, one in Danbury, Connecticut, and one in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There they organized hunger strikes to force the integration of the prisons. Once released from prison, they continued their work, which included recruiting Martin Luther King Jr.
The war had another huge impact, because it pushed the rapid expansion of technology. Both the technology and the early civil rights movement had a profound influence on music. There probably would have been no Motown or at least it would have been something very different and less memorable, without these changes, and popular music would have taken some very different turns. The greatest technological change in music was the development of tiny transistors to replace large tubes. The transistor was the beginning of the semiconductor revolution that has led to the microchip computer world. It was a way of making communications devices smaller and began with the needs of radar technology in World War II.
Until the transistor, conduction of electronic impulses had been accomplished with gaseous materials contained in tubes. These large tubes, essential to radios, among other devices, did not work well for the military purposes of radar, and so solid conduction was developed. Numerous suitable materials, most notably silicon, were found to transmit electronic impulses. Such conductors, including the transistor used in radios, were far smaller than tubes. The radio transistor was less than a half inch long and turned the radio from a piece of living room furniture into something that could be carried in a pocket. It also made radios far less expensive. Small and portable became highly commercial ideas in the 1950s, and led to the shrinking of other products that didn’t use transistors, such as record players. Up until then, young people had never had their own music, because they could listen to records and radio only when seated with the family in the living room. But now they could take their music with them.
Records themselves changed. In 1948 Columbia records introduced the long-playing record. Up until then music had been recorded in shellac with wide grooves. It was played at 78 revolutions per minute. During the war there was a shortage of shellac, because it was needed for military purposes and record producers were forced to look for a new material. Vinyl allowed a much smaller groove and a slower playing time, 33⅓ rpm, and therefore allowed far more music on a record. The record album, a compilation of songs, was invented. Vinyl also led to the replacement of the 78 rpm shellac single with the 45 rpm vinyl single, although this did not become entrenched until ten years later, at about the time Motown was created.
The cheaper 45 rpm single records became the disc of the more marginal, while the album was for the more established, the Frank Sinatras. Black music from independent studios and most R&B was recorded on 45s. The singles charts generally featured artists very different from those on the album charts. So now black people and soon young people had their own radios, their own record players, and their own record. In 1952, for the first time, records outsold sheet music in America.
New technology, of course, not only creates new ideas but undoes old ones. Live performances disappeared from radio, and radio became entirely focused on records. Jazz was one of the great victims. Long improvisation fit only on LP albums. Because it did not fit on 45s, it was seldom heard on radio. Without radio and 45s it lost its traditional black market. It became music for white people, and an elite form at that.
The technology also changed other black music. It stifled the time-honored tradition of improvisation because that made songs too long. R&B became the first musical genre to exist principally through getting radio stations to play their records, and so an R&B song had to be short and hard-hitting.
Cousin Brucie recalled the challenge of his times. “So there was a new technology. Now we needed some new music.”
• • •
The postwar establishment, General Dwight D. Eisenhower as president, upholding the official order with a famous smile and conventional steadiness, the Cold War dividing the world between only two countries, each prepared to annihilate the planet with nuclear weapons, the persecution and silencing of anyone who deviated from the norm on the grounds that they might be “Communist,” expanding middle-class affluence and dull middle-class values reflected in the growth of uniform suburbs, the literal and metaphoric spread of new plastics—all of these things that were 1950s America made it a repressed nation ripe for rebellion. Because of that rebellion, the 1950s were much more interesting than they were supposed to be.
In art and literature there were the Beats, with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and LeRoi Jones redefining poetry and Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs redefining fiction. Abstract Expressionist painting splashed colors and forms that refused to be shaped by anything in the physical world. Hollywood churned out great mountains of pablum while the baby food industry literally did. Packaged baby food was needed for the new largest generation in history and an increasingly industrial food industry produced equally bland products for adults. But amid all the films promoting establishment, praising war and law enforcement and sexless romance, the image of the rebel emerged especially in the performances of Marlon Brando and James Dean. In Stanley Kramer’s 1953 film The Wild One, directed by Laslo Benedek, Marlon Brando in the role of Johnny, the leader of a motorcycle gang that attempts to take over a small dull California town, established the image of the 1950s rebel. When a town girl asks him, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” he answers, “What do you got?”
In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause, parents, police, the established community are perplexed by James Dean, a troubled young man named Jim Stark, who says, “I don’t know what to do anymore. Except maybe die.”
Viewed today, these films are somewhat unsatisfying. They seem to be struggling to understand a social phenomenon that they never completely grasp. According to historical orthodoxy, the 1950s is the decade of conformism and the 1960s is the decade of rebellion. But the rebelliousness began in the 1950s, even the late 1940s. The restlessness of southern black soldiers who returned to Jim Crow racism are only one particularly poignant example. Many soldiers coming home from the war could not adjust to repressed American life.
Nineteen fifties rebels, like Johnny the wild one, expressed an aimless rejection of what the established order expected from them. Often, especially in the South, this rebellion was expressed by embracing the culture of the most marginalized people—black people. Working-class white youths could go to the wrong side of town and listen to R&B music on jukeboxes or they could just tune in to black radio stations. For a black to cross the racial divide was literally to invite death, but whites could cross over to the black part of town—perhaps the origin of the music term crossover—with complete impunity while at the same time feeling the pleasure of breaking the rules. It is often suggested that what made Elvis Presley unusual was his love of black music but in fact this was not at all unusual for a Southerner of his age and economic class. Soon white people all over the country and from all economic classes were taking an interest in black music.
By 1954 black R&B recordings were garnering enough sales to occasionally slip onto the white pop charts, and by 1955 R&B music had gone
from a backwater subculture of popular music aimed at ghettos and southern villages to a $25-million-a-year industry. The established record industry noticed this but generally dismissed it as a passing trend. Blacks making inroads on white music charts were no more welcome than blacks moving in on any other established white turf. It was when whites started taking prominent positions on the charts with what seemed to be black music, even sung and performed in a somewhat black way, that the record industry started to react. This happened in 1955, when Decca released a white group, Bill Haley and the Comets, singing “Rock Around the Clock,” and again in 1956 when RCA scored a phenomenal commercial success with Elvis Presley. This was music that appeared to have equal appeal to blacks and whites, a new phenomenon in the music industry that suggested both money (good) and social change (bad).
The record industry seemed eager to find an alternative.
The most promising was Latin music, which led to the mambo craze. Mambo was anything but white, having its origins among Haitian immigrants in Cuba. From Cuba the music traveled to New York, primarily to the Palladium Ballroom on Fifty-Third Street and Broadway. Most of the biggest Latin stars were black, including Beny Moré, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Arsenio Rodriguez, and Machito. The music had strong African roots. Arsenio Rodriguez often sang about Central African religions, a belief system known in Cuba as Palo Monte. But in the same way some dark Latinos were allowed to play major league baseball when black Americans weren’t, this music was considered Latin, not black. Even the white performers such as Desi Arnaz, a wealthy Cuban who was a popular bandleader before marrying a white actress, Lucille Ball, and becoming the television version of the white Latino, sang black music. How many Americans understood that the conga line dance that he popularized in American clubs was African or that his signature song was to Babalu, a Yoruba religious spirit from Nigeria? But these foreigners would not threaten the American social order.
By the mid-1950s, Latin music had spread from the Palladium across the United States, and mambo led to other dance crazes such as the cha-cha, which was a step and three steps. But despite the many so-called mamboniks, it never really competed with the rapid growth of R&B, and the craze only lasted about ten years. Most historians believe that while Americans loved the music, few had the dance skills for these relatively difficult steps. With black music, people could simply feel the driving beat and move to it in any way they felt. RCA Records, a leading record company, became an important producer of Latin music in the early 1950s, leaving the new R&B to small independent companies. But in 1955, seeing how tastes were developing, they purchased Elvis Presley’s contract from Sun Records for what was then an astonishingly high price of $35,000, making them a leading rock ’n’ roll company overnight. They opened a studio in Nashville for Presley, but, being in Nashville, it became a leading country-and-western studio, where many of the biggest country stars would record.
The big promoters of R&B tried to play down its black roots, just as promoters of mambo did. Alan Freed started playing R&B on his Cleveland WJW program in 1951 and later when he moved to WINS in New York. But he stopped calling it R&B and named it rock ’n’ roll to give it a name that was not specifically black. This may have deceived white people, but to black people, rock ’n’ roll was a black term usually referring to sexual intercourse.
Unquestionably, rock ’n’ roll was born from rhythm & blues, but there were also Latin influences and pronounced country and western influences, which, when most noticeable, gave rise to a style labeled “rockabilly.”
Because of this evolution, it is not really clear what was the first rock ’n’ roll song. “Sh-Boom,” released by the Chords, is often suggested. This recording by a black group from the Bronx is based on an old jailhouse song and released on Cat, an Atlantic Records subsidiary created for such music. What distinguishes it is its crossover history. Released in March 1954, by the first week of July it had reached number 8 on Billboard’s black rhythm & blues chart, at which point it also made the white pop music chart.
It was a crossover season, some music historians argue. On May 17 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schools were “inherently” unequal. The decision, which rejected the school system and by extension much of the way of life of the entire South, gave new militancy to both southern racism and a civil rights movement that had been smoldering since World War II. It is not a coincidence that the age of civil rights and the age of crossover in music unfolded simultaneously.
“Gee” by the Crows, released the year before “Sh-Boom,” is often cited as the first. And there are earlier contenders, including Ike Turner’s 1951 “Rocket 88” performed by the now-forgotten Jackie Brenston. Also in 1954 Big Joe Turner recorded the original version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Bill Haley is often remembered as the first rock ’n’ roller for his 1952 “Rock the Joint” and especially for his 1953 hit “Crazy Man, Crazy,” which sold more than a million records. Haley demonstrated the commercial potential of white rock ’n’ roll. A white artist could get exposure on radio stations and in venues not open to black artists.
How Bill Haley of Michigan, neither southern nor black, became the leading performer of this new music was a sign of the times. Haley liked guitars that were suggestive of cowboy music. After the commercial success of “Crazy Man, Crazy,” Decca, a top popular music label, signed him and his group, the Comets. Their producer, Milt Gabler, reworked the group. Gabler had started in music by turning his father’s shop into New York’s leading retailer of jazz recordings. In the late 1930s he produced Billie Holiday recordings, including “Strange Fruit,” the bitter condemnation of lynching and southern racism that became one of the classics of black protest music. He also produced Louis Jordan, and when Bill Haley and His Comets went to Decca, he tried to shape them into a sound that resembled Jordan’s famous group, the Tympany Five. The result was white R&B, otherwise known as rock ’n’ roll. To ensure access to white radio, Haley, or Gabler, cleaned up black music, which traditionally had raunchy lyrics full of humorous sexual innuendos. When Bill Haley redid, or covered, to use the musical term, Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” it was cleaned, whitened by slightly altering lyrics to eliminate any hidden sexual references. The original began in the bedroom—“Get out of that bed and wash your face and hands”—which Haley changed to “Get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans,” because a bedroom was too suggestive. A line about the sun shining through dresses was changed to a line about “hair done up so nice.”
The record did reasonably well but Haley’s next recording, “Rock Around the Clock,” made history. When first released, the recording did not appear destined for notable success, but then it was used dramatically in Richard Brooks’s 1955 film Blackboard Jungle. This was not a small independent counterculture film. It was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release starring Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, Richard Kiley, and a very young Sidney Poitier. It was another 1950s film attempting to understand rebellious youth, in this case in an inner-city school. Rock ’n’ roll was widely believed to lead to juvenile delinquency, the very problem the film was addressing. Some theaters muted out the song in the opening credits. But it also played in the opening scene, mid-film, and at the end and these parts could not be easily expunged.
The film made the recording a huge hit. Blackboard Jungle is credited with establishing the social position of rock ’n’ roll, though it probably would have happened without the film. It became the music of those young fifties rebels that the establishment could not understand—even though it was led by a balding Bill Haley who was about to turn thirty.
It also debuted a disturbing social phenomenon known as rock ’n’ roll “riots.” Riot is a curious word that took on increasing use and significance in the 1960s, but the term first became widespread in the 1950s in connection with “rock ’n’ roll rioting.” The problem with the word is that it has a whiff of the pejorative, a kind of di
smissal, because the sense is that this is an uprising with no rationale behind it. In reality the absence of reason may often be attributed to a journalist or observer not being able to grasp it.
Certainly the reasons behind the uprisings at movie theaters where Blackboard Jungle played were difficult to understand. It seemed related to the sound track. The music would play and young people would begin tearing up the movie theater. This happened especially with the rebellious young, long-haired toughs of urban England known as teddy boys. Most of the British had never before heard rock, and British journalists, clergy, educators, and politicians were at a loss to explain the troubling violent response. But it seemed certain to them as it did to their American counterparts that this new music was dangerous.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 3