by Bob Stanley
That was all yet to come. Let’s try to picture pop music at the dawn of vinyl, in the days before rock ’n’ roll, and see what we can learn from the very first hit parade. Though it was a Top 12, three positions were tied, and so the first chart featured fifteen singles.
1 Al Martino, ‘Here in My Heart’ (Capitol CL 13779)
The war had caused massive upheaval for the big bands that had dominated popular music in the thirties and forties. They had been decimated on three fronts: by individuals who had been called up and sometimes lost in service; by jazz’s leftfield move into bop, which was hard to dance to (tempos were often too fast or too slow) and consequently had less mass appeal than swing; and by financial constraints. The fall in cinema attendances hurt, too – in the thirties and forties many bands had played in theatres before a movie, which had effectively subsidised their performance. The rise of television after the war put paid to this. There were fewer venues, and consequently less money, available – out of necessity bands became smaller, or simply split. By 1950 the better-known singers, rather than touring the country and playing theatres with a big band as they had done, now played in exclusive clubs; radio and TV presence aside, they became almost invisible to the general public.
The new breed of solo singer who benefited in the post-war, pre-rock era included the voluble Italian American Al Martino. ‘Here in My Heart’ was his very first single, released in America on a tiny Philadelphia label called BBS. He’d been a bricklayer and was injured at Iwo Jima in the war, but his dream was to emulate family friend Mario Lanza. He got his break in 1952, when he came first on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, singing Perry Como’s ‘If’, a US number one from the previous year. ‘Here in My Heart’ went to number one in the States in June ’52, he was quickly signed by Capitol, and it was issued in the UK on a 78, where it would spend nine weeks at number one – to date, only five singles have spent more weeks at the top.
You’d have expected Martino’s career to be sustained, but his management contract was bought out by the mafia and he fled to Britain, where he headlined the London Palladium and had regular hits for the next couple of years (including the epically tortured ‘Rachel’, no. 10 ’53). But the London Palladium wasn’t Madison Square Garden. He returned to the US in 1960, scored a few more hits (‘I Love You Because’, US no. 3 ’63) and later starred in The Godfather. He did OK, but nothing was on the same scale as ‘Here in My Heart’.
Al Martino’s instant fame was unusual and – coming via TV – something quite new. His British light-opera counterpart was David Whitfield. Aside from his navy years, Whitfield had never made it out of Hull, where he worked in the concrete business before obtaining a deal with Decca. His blubbing, rubbery voice would ordinarily have been thought laughable, a disgrace to opera and pop alike, but instead he became the best-selling British star of the era.
How did this happen? Whitfield looked like a grandfather while still in his mid-twenties. He was from one of Britain’s dullest cities and had cement in his fingernails but, in pop, none of this mattered. What did matter was that Whitfield had entered the first Opportunity Knocks talent show on Radio Luxembourg, and won, which made him the godfather of an ignoble pop strand.2 He was Britain’s first Pop Idol, the original X Factor champion, and wasn’t off the charts for four years, scoring two number ones and nine more Top 10 hits between 1953 and ’57 by squashing Richard Tauber, religion and readymix sincerity into singles like ‘The Book’, ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and ‘My September Love’. In 1954 his ‘Cara Mia’ was number one for ten weeks. The week it hit the top, food rationing finally ended. Little else could explain a rash national leap into the arms of ‘Cara Mia’ and its feeble Italianate promise: overcooked spaghetti bolognese washed down with milky coffee. After so many battleship-grey years, this must have seemed exotic.3 ‘At home they used to say I was better than Tauber,’ Whitfield said. ‘Now the kids tear my clothes. I don’t mind really. It comes off income tax, for a start.’
2 Jo Stafford, ‘You Belong to Me’ (Columbia DB 3152)
If the war had any positive effect on pop it was to create a desire to stretch beyond Anglo-American music hall and the big-band set-up. The British working classes had been sent to far-flung parts of the world and, while they may have had no desire to return to Burma, it meant they had come home with tales of mischief and freshness. This was reflected in a bunch of hits that had a foreign intrigue: ‘Istanbul’, ‘West of Zanzibar’, ‘Cara Mia’, ‘Granada’, ‘Poor People of Paris’. They made no concessions to ethnic accuracy – Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Mambo Italiano’ spoofed them neatly – but they scratched an itch we hadn’t had before.
Best of the lot was ‘You Belong to Me’ by Jo Stafford, a gorgeous travelogue-cum-love song floating on a jetstream of marimbas. ‘Fly the ocean in a silver plane, see the jungle when it’s wet with rain.’ The performance was cool, and worked a treat if you found restraint sexier than blatant emotionality. Her delivery was languid yet precise, and her pitching was perfect, but there was steel in her seduction: ‘Send me photographs and souvenirs but just remember, when a dream appears, you belong to me.’ You didn’t mess with Jo.
She could have been singing to a high-flying executive – or maybe a representative of the newly formed United Nations – at the dawn of the jet age. Or her lover could have been a soldier. The music of 1952 was the music of the generation who had been in the war, and if some craved more of the same excitement and exotica, plenty craved calm, reserve and culture that hinted more than it blared. The later idea that modern pop was all about the spreading around of forbidden knowledge didn’t really count in the decade after the war ended, when there was pretty good reason for people not to be sharing the things they’d learnt in the Pacific or in Europe.
3 Nat King Cole, ‘Somewhere along the Way’ (Capitol CL 13774)
In the pre-rock fifties, for the first time, pop records were produced rather than just recorded. The prime concern of recording engineers had always been to replicate a live recording as closely as possible; 1950 brought the first hit records that faded out (Teresa Brewer’s ‘Music Music Music’, Bing Crosby’s ‘Mule Train’, Frankie Laine’s ‘Cry of the Wild Goose’). This was a technique which had been used in films to cut between scenes and on lengthy jazz recordings that were split over two sides of a disc, but never had it been done just because it sounded good. The same year had produced Patti Page’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’, on which ‘the Singing Rage’ was double-tracked, harmonising with herself. It was released on Mercury, whose head of A&R Mitch Miller was in favour of using the studio and its capabilities as an instrument in itself. Miller had been experimenting with overdubbing since 1948, but ‘Tennessee Waltz’ was an entirely new sound to most listeners and sold seven million copies. Guitarist Les Paul had previously double-tracked his playing on record; with his wife Mary Ford he went to town with overdubbing, both on their voices and his guitar, to create a string of atomic-age hits in the early fifties: ‘How High the Moon’, ‘Mockingbird Hill’, ‘Vaya con Dios’.
‘Somewhere along the Way’ features an arrangement by Capitol Records’ Nelson Riddle that plucks, sweeps and mourns beneath the despair of the singer. It’s autumnal, and has moments of both stridency (the severity of the intro) and intimacy – at times it almost disappears completely. It’s a full and remarkable production.
Nat King Cole had been a respected jazz pianist before switching to orchestrated ballads in the late forties, cutting a long string of records that were purpose-built to couch and caress his extraordinary voice. Whereas David Whitfield was keen for you to know that he was straining every sinew to get his point across, Cole had the knack of sounding as if he was ad-libbing songs as he went along. There is a richness to ‘Somewhere along the Way’, and his restraint is similar to Jo Stafford’s, but Cole was rarely a seducer. Usually, he was to be found in the near distance, there to accompany the wooing of other couples (‘When I Fall in Love’, ‘Let There Be Love’) or to tell stories of
other unfortunates and outsiders (‘Ballerina’, ‘Nature Boy’), but he was at his most effective when he had lost in love, was resigned and melancholy. This was where his silvered but weary voice excelled: ‘Pretend’ (UK and US no. 2 ’53), ‘Smile’ (US no. 10, UK no. 2 ’54), ‘A Blossom Fell’ (US no. 2, UK no. 3 ’55); ultimately, there was ‘Stardust’.
‘Somewhere along the Way’ has the same sense of unforgettable loss as ‘Stardust’, the definitive Cole ballad from his 1957 album Love Is the Thing. Cole runs his fingers lightly down the keys, echoing the line ‘I used to walk with you, along the avenue,’ and in his delivery you hear the deep-blue sounds of Roy Orbison and Scott Walker to come. At one point the brushed drums and Riddle’s understanding strings leave him alone at the piano, briefly, to sing, ‘I should forget, but with the loneliness of night I start remembering … everything.’ And in that last ‘everything’ there’s despair, possibly lust, a whole relationship wrapped inside three syllables. There is also more than a suggestion of soul. As much as David Whitfield and Al Martino look backwards, right back to Caruso, ‘Somewhere along the Way’ looks forward, to Marvin Gaye, to Luther Vandross, to R. Kelly.
4 Bing Crosby, ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ (Brunswick 04900)
Bing Crosby had been the king of the singers since the late twenties, the man who’d made an art form out of crooning. On the American charts, he had accumulated 341 hits between 1931 and the release of ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ in 1952, yet this single didn’t chart there at all and he would only have one more US Top 10 hit – ‘True Love’, a duet with Grace Kelly (UK no. 4, US no. 3 ’56). Crosby had been the single biggest singing influence in pop before 1952, thanks to the advent of electronic recording, which had allowed his warm, gentle voice to be preserved on 78.
As Crosby approached fifty, a crop of younger singers were set to usurp their elder. There was the buttery Don Cornell (‘Hold My Hand’, UK no. 1, US no. 3 ’54), the philandering Eddie Fisher (‘Outside of Heaven’ and ‘I’m Walking Behind You’, both UK no. 1 in ’53), Al Martino’s more mellow counterpart Dean Martin and, smoothest and most successful of all, Perry Como. Como had started out with the Ted Weems band in the early forties. He was a seventh son of a seventh son from Pennsylvania, and you couldn’t make up how clean and good he was. Aged eleven he was helping out in the local barber shop to supplement the family income; by sixteen he had his own shop and sang to his customers. The barber of civility. By 1943 Como had a solo contract with RCA and was made for life, selling sixty million records in his own unhurried way, only quitting in the eighties. ‘Magic Moments’, ‘Wanted’, ‘Idle Gossip’, ‘Catch a Falling Star’ – his voice was downy and comforting, never excitable or exciting. He communicated security and a short back and sides, and he summed up the early fifties’ friendly persuasion but also its lack of thrills, of any raw emotion. A 1956 poll claimed Como as America’s ideal husband, but he was no one’s ideal lover.
‘The Isle of Innisfree’ was a peculiar song. Irish ballads had been hits since the dawn of recorded music, there to provide a constant comfort, memories of the old world; they would remain an irregular chart presence right through to hits like the Fureys’ ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ (UK no. 14 ’81). Verdant fields, village greens, tall oak trees – their vision was defiantly non-urban. Bing had periodically recorded songs of old Ireland – ‘Tobermory Bay’, ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Galway Bay’, the last of which had been number one in the UK sheet-music charts for twenty-two weeks in 1948 – and ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ similarly brims with nostalgia and the trauma of separation.
The catch is that Innisfree doesn’t actually exist – William Butler Yeats created the utopian, fictional Lake Isle of Innisfree in an 1888 poem, and the song’s author, Dick Farrelly, borrowed its imagery. So when Bing Crosby is singing from the heart of a city in which he can ‘scarcely feel its wonder or its laughter’, he is Billy Fisher, dreaming of Ambrosia, or Richard Brautigan’s detective C. Card, adrift in his own Babylon. He isn’t escaping into the fog of the past, but into an imaginary wonderland. Modern pop would likewise follow him into new utopian ports of pleasure: Brian Wilson created Surf City, with two girls for every boy; in 1967 the Who’s dreamscape was Armenia City in the Sky (‘If you’re troubled and you can’t relax, close your eyes and think of this’); Martha and the Muffins’ Echo Beach was a new-wave escape route from the nine-to-five (‘my job is very boring – I’m an office clerk’); Lipps Inc found disco nirvana in Funkytown (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’80); while Guns n’ Roses’ Paradise City – ‘where the grass is green and the girls are pretty’ – sounded remarkably like Innisfree.
‘Soon I’m back to stern reality.’ Bing’s reverie – like any dream, like the greatest night of your life – couldn’t last forever. Reality in 1952 meant couples working things out after the inevitable infidelities of separation, families trying to patch themselves together after the horrors of war, at home and abroad. When Crosby sang about Innisfree offering ‘a peace no other land could know’, he may even have been singing about death itself.
5 Guy Mitchell, ‘Feet Up’ (Columbia DB 3151)
Another way through the post-war malaise was to celebrate the family – mums, dads and kids, just the way it used to be. There was a remarkable number of songs about babies in the decade after the war: Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Where Will the Dimple Be’ (UK no. 6 ’55), Alma Cogan’s ‘Twenty Tiny Fingers’ (UK no. 17 ’55), and this raucous singalong. On ‘Feet Up’, Guy Mitchell wasn’t shy in sharing his wayward past – ‘I’ve been known to gamble, take a little drink … but now my rootin’ tootin’ days are done. Gotta be the man that he thinks I am, ’cos I love my son!’ He dangled the poor kid in the air to ‘pat him on the po-po’, while bragging that he ‘knew a lot of women’ in his dog days; he also claimed ‘my girl Rosie ain’t that kind’, leaving you to ponder the kind of floozies he’d been spending time with.
In 1952 everybody in Britain secretly wanted to be American. You only had to hear a Guy Mitchell record to know what America was like, and it’s telling that he carried on having major hit singles in the UK after his star waned at home (‘Feet Up’ reached number two here but only number fourteen in the States). Mitchell was a man who always wore his hat at a jaunty angle, the kind of fella who would say ‘Sure!’ to pretty much anything. Though he usually painted himself as Jack the Lad, his songs were like Southern cooking, collard greens and biscuits, and everything loaded with sugar because the sun has got his hat on and life’s a beach: ‘Pretty Little Black Eyed Susie’ (no. 2 ’53), ‘She Wears Red Feathers’ (no. 1 ’53), ‘Cloud Lucky Seven’ (no. 2 ’54) – they oozed bonhomie. ‘Feet Up’ featured swanee whistles and a laughing solo. It was hard to believe there was a war on in Korea.
‘Feet Up’ was written by a man who could stake a claim to be the king of pre-rock, Bob Merrill. Legend has it that his first attempt at songwriting was rejected by a publisher as too complex, so he went home and wrote, ‘If I knew you were comin’ I’d have baked a cake, howdja do, howdja doo, howdja doo.’ It became a US number one for Eileen Barton in 1950.
By 1953 Bob Merrill was the best-selling composer in the world, the heir to Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and Sammy Cahn, with million-sellers like ‘Feet Up’, ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window’, ‘Mambo Italiano’ and ‘Where Will the Dimple Be’, all composed on a toy xylophone. The other perceived enemy of the Great American Songbook was A&R man Mitch Miller, by now at Columbia Records and Merrill’s number-one fan, who coerced his artists – Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Guy Mitchell, Patti Page – into singing these family-friendly novelties. The rise of the solo singer and the growing significance of record sales over sheet music in the early fifties had en abled record-label executives like Miller to wrest control of the music industry from the old publishing firms. Effectively he became the first pop manager, cultivating the careers of his charges and picking their singles; Miller’s approach would be a foundation stone of the new vinyl-based music industry
. Frank Sinatra, with his career at rock bottom, had been convinced to cut ‘Mama Will Bark’ with a pack of dogs in 1953; in 1954 he bought his way out of his Columbia contract rather than stay under Miller’s thumb. A few years later, with Sinatra in his Capitol-era pomp, the two met in a hotel lobby. As Miller extended his hand, Sinatra snapped, ‘Fuck you, keep walking.’
6 Rosemary Clooney, ‘Half as Much’ (Columbia DB 3129)
Of the female stars of the early fifties – too prim and preened to be called girls – Kay Starr, Doris Day, Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney were dominant. Once in a while they broke rank and caused a raised eyebrow – Jo Stafford sang ‘Make Love to Me’ in 1954 and got a BBC ban for her troubles – but largely they were as much a post-war comfort blanket as the men. Doris sang sweet, Patti sang country, Kay sang ‘Comes Along a Love’ (UK no. 1 ’53), a fabulous proto-rocker with a walking bassline. Part Native American, she had a strong dark look, like the older sister of a girl you fancied, and was clearly someone who wouldn’t stand for wallflowers at her house party. Rosemary Clooney, likewise, set herself up as more than a little saucy on ‘Come On a My House’, the biggest record of 1951, co-written by Armenian American novelist William Saroyan. Mitch Miller helmed it, backing Clooney with a manic, distorted harpsichord. ‘I’m gonna give you Easter egg,’ she sang, licking her lips. ‘I’m gonna give you everything.’