by Ann Powers
The Blackwoods could be part of the South’s white-run “official” culture in ways that even the most entrepreneurial, assimilationist African American gospel artists could not. By 1954, they’d been declared Honorary Tennessee Colonels by Governor Frank Clement and had enjoyed an official Blackwood Brothers Quartet Day in Memphis. Their national fame surged, too; first, the group signed with Presley’s eventual home label, RCA-Victor Records, and then it won the televised Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts show, the American Idol of its time. When Elvis saw Cecil and his older brother James in the pews in East Trigg, they must have seemed like princes.
One reason the Blackwoods appealed to kids like Elvis and Dixie was that musically, the group retained an edge—in part by copying black quartets’ moves. They crooned dreamily on some hymns, but “Have You Talked to the Man Upstairs”—the one that won on Godfrey’s show—was a jazzy number also recorded by the hardest of the hard gospel groups, Archie Brownlee and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Though James Blackwood insisted late in life that black and white Southern gospel were two streams that rarely met, the music says otherwise. It’s hard to believe that the Blackwoods didn’t hear voices like Silas Steele’s growing up, especially considering eldest brother Roy lived in Gadsden, where the white Southern gospel tradition was centered but also just an hour from Birmingham. The musically curious Blackwoods must have checked out a few sides by the Famous Blue Jay Singers and other Jefferson County favorites.48
They certainly copped some of the choreography of those leaping, driving, God-serving seducers. In concert, the Blackwoods would often end up in a jumble of lanky limbs, one almost horizontal to the microphone, another on his knees, in a good-natured frenzy. Yet they always retained an air of elegance. As Christian family men, the Blackwood Brothers never pushed the limits of propriety, onstage or off. However, they were selling sex appeal in a package both mothers and daughters could appreciate. The “family albums” they’d sell on the road, Christian versions of fan magazines, featured pictures of the guys with their wives and children showing off the markers of wealth and modernity: ranch homes, shiny sports cars, golf clubs, pianist Jackie Marshall in an apron making biscuits.49
If their Christian orientation meant they couldn’t quite be Hollywood-style heartthrobs, the Blackwood Brothers found another way to be modern and the opposite of prim. They embraced the newest in transportation technology. The quartet’s core members had worked in a San Diego airplane factory during World War II, and R. W. Blackwood decided he wanted to learn to pilot a plane. The group became the Flying Blackwood Brothers in the early 1950s after acquiring both a Cessna 195 and a ten-passenger Beechcraft.50
Music critic James M. Curtis has suggested that the Blackwoods were something like the Beatles in their British Invasion moment—clean but representative of the future, with an element of risk built in—and that Elvis Presley’s other favorite gospel quartet was the pre-rock equivalent to the Rolling Stones.51 That group was the Statesmen, led by the boogie-woogie piano man Hovie Lister, known for throwing off his jacket and letting his curly hair fall in his face—moves that Jerry Lee Lewis would invoke when both he and Elvis made it to Sun Records. While the Blackwoods might have kept their interest in African American gospel hidden under their prep school–graduate suits, the Statesmen let it all hang out. They openly covered songs by African American artists—one of their greatest hits is a stomping version of Dorothy Love Coates’s “Get Away Jordan”—and had a stage act that sometimes veered dangerously close to minstrelsy, with Statesmen members adopting broad accents and eye-popping facial expressions.
Elvis Presley was a particular admirer of the quartet’s lead singer, Jake Hess, and of Statesmen bass Jim “Big Chief” Wetherington, whose pencil-thin moustache made him look like a tango pirate, and who had a habit of wiggling his leg when he sang. If Elvis saw in the Blackwoods a way to be classy and still hip, in the Statesmen he discovered both wildness and humor—a distancing effect that would become central to his own sex appeal. When Elvis shook his hips, especially early on, he’d always raise an eyebrow; it was like a burlesque move, studied, gaining power from his ability to pull back. The sizzle comes as much from the mastery of his self-suppression as it does from the revelation of his lasciviousness.
That’s what happened in the music of the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers: a channeling not just of African American musical influences but of the quickening eroticism of golden-era gospel, of the quartets’ drive, and the spirit queens’ sass and self-liberation, and the emotionalism of “Precious Lord.” Presley saw in Southern gospel exactly the kind of subversiveness that he could bear as a nice boy who loved his mama but who also needed to be modern and sexually open.
The Blackwood Brothers paid a huge price for their modern ways. Just two weeks after their national breakthrough on the Godfrey show, in the summer of 1954, they were playing a peach festival in Clanton, Alabama, when R. W. Blackwood and his navigator, Bill Lyles, decided to take the group’s plane up for a late afternoon spin. The plane crashed, leaving behind the burned bodies of Blackwood, Lyles, and the teenage son of the festival organizer. Five thousand people attended the funeral in Memphis, including African American fans, who sat in the balcony, their presence unusual enough that it was reported in the local newspapers. The Statesmen performed two songs—one, requested by R.W.’s widow, was the country-flavored hymn “Known Only to Him”; the other, Lyles’s favorite, “Does Jesus Care?,” had been recorded by quartets including the Soul Stirrers and the Pilgrim Travelers. Even in death, the Blackwood Brothers were pushing the envelope between black and white, between the church and the concert stage.
Presley came to the funeral, of course, with Dixie, a horrible kind of date. Was his belief in gospel music’s ability to overcome grief formed that day? A few years later, he turned to it in the darkest moment of his young life, when his mother Gladys unexpectedly died while he was in basic training for the army. The Statesmen and the reconstituted Blackwood Brothers both sang at the funeral. Elvis kept scribbling names of hymns on a piece of paper and passing it to James Blackwood—“Precious Lord” was just the beginning of what turned out to be more than a dozen songs he had them sing.52
By then, Presley had recorded some gospel songs himself, though he employed a different gospel quartet, the calm and collected Nashville group the Jordanaires, for sessions partly meant to combat the young rocker’s reputation as a troublemaker. “To a great many people, Elvis Presley has been a surprise,” the liner notes read on his first religious release, an EP whose lead track was the Dorsey gospel blues “Peace in the Valley.” “They have been surprised at his style of singing, at his disarming frankness, and most of all at his rapid success. To them this album will also be a surprise. But to any of the fortunate folks who have known Elvis, whether as a schoolboy, movie usher, delivery man or performer, ‘Peace in the Valley’ will be no surprise.”53
The only surprise to the many fans who had heard Elvis’s secular sound foreshadowed in both golden-era and Southern gospel might have been how tamely he interpreted the songs others had burned to the ground. In real gospel, the contradictions that often spun out of control in Presley’s newborn hits were resolved in a kind of joy that could embrace paradox. Elvis’s genuine piety kept him from giving the complex kind of gospel music performance that his idols like the Blackwoods and the Statesmen—and, more so, their role models, the African American quartets—allowed themselves.
But listen to another early Elvis song, the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller ballad “Love Me,” and you can hear how the singer’s time with gospel quartets paid off in a way that led directly to rock and roll. The song itself is a genre buster, written as a country music parody and first recorded by the R&B duo Willy and Ruth. Presley’s version signals itself as gospel derived through the Jordanaires’ gently pumping backing vocals. Ably supported, he dives down and leaps back in sensual slow motion, letting the song’s life force, desire, breathe on him.
&n
bsp; “I-I-I would be-e-g and steal . . . Ju-u-ust to feel . . . Yo-u-ur heart . . . BEATING close to mine . . . ” Presley is in a state of rapture, his longing its own satisfaction. He paces himself the way a good quartet member would, shaking rhythms out of the song’s smooth verses that dissemble the message. He’s falling apart but uplifted by the music. He is turning lust divine.
“Gospel music raises the alluring possibility that the outcast might find a single language through which both the desires of the heart and the habits of the soul can merge and find expression,” writes Douglas Harrison in his landmark book on Southern gospel and queer identities.54 Every contradiction Elvis would tap into—“rightness-wrongness, saved-lost, saint-sinner, white-black, straight-gay”—was in gospel at its most erotically charged. Faith was the element that resolved gospel’s disturbances. Downplay it, and you have a clearer picture of the human condition that deeply informed early rock and roll: the feeling of being, as Elvis so eloquently put it, all shook up.
4
TEEN DREAMS AND GROWN-UP URGES
© Sepia magazine
THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND, 1950–1960
In the mid-twentieth century, while gospel was schooling Elvis and many other young musical initiates about eroticism’s deepest elements, secular music continued to expand America’s vocabulary of sex. Jazz mutated in myriad ways, sometimes favoring the New Orleans street sounds that first gave it an identity at the end of the last epoch, sometimes going more Latin via Cuba, the Southwest, and immigrant New York, sometimes blending with the blues. Big-band swing kept people dancing as the fresh athletic steps of the Lindy hop and the jitterbug eclipsed the tango and the shimmy. Virtuoso soloists like Charlie Christian on guitar and Lester Young on saxophone showed how their instruments could share intimacies the same way human voices do. As for those voices—a major new tool, the ribbon microphone, gave singers like Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday a luxury Florence Mills never had. It was sensitive enough to pick up whispers and murmurs, and when the recordings that made use of it hit listeners’ ears via the radio, the experience was shockingly intimate. Defending Crosby’s slippery vocal technique in a 1932 Los Angeles Times article, the critic Isabel Morse Jones paraphrased a female fan’s gush: “When Bing sings, it seems as if he is singing just for me. There isn’t anyone else in the room.” The crooner’s move into the lover’s position had men “green-eyed” with envy, worried they’d never live up to the exquisitely gentle seductive pressure such a voice revealed was possible.1
Intimacy met explicitness in rhythm and blues, a catchall category that emerged in the 1940s to describe the music being sold via “race records” mostly to African American listeners. Stars of this scene, like Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris, projected an intense machismo in aggressive songs staking out sexual territory. “Battle of the Blues,” a two-part 1947 Turner and Harris duet, is emblematic of the form: the two men good-naturedly shout at each other about whose woman can last longer in a love session, who can “party” harder, and how “a chick” can’t be trusted, no matter how game she is in the bedroom. Women performers gave as good as they got: kiss-offs like Dinah Washington’s “Baby Get Lost” and proto-rockers like Ruth Brown’s “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” showed women to be armed with wit and soul and ready to cast light on male inadequacy and even brutality.2
If pop produced subtle romantics, and rhythm and blues created strong erotic warriors, the genre that would become country music excelled at describing the intimate sexual politics of the kitchen and the barroom. White rural and Southern regional artists connected with both blues and immigrant folk traditions to offer plainspoken accounts of love’s consequences, like the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” which reminded women that romance often led to burdensome young motherhood. Jimmie Rodgers, country’s first big personality, took listeners into illicit spaces, including the roadhouses known by the 1930s as honky-tonks, which formed a kind of scattered Storyville for male workers and their female night-companions throughout small-town America. “The wild side of life”—adultery, alcoholic excess, the loneliness of the wanderer—and how it impacted the family became a primary musical theme of country music, intertwining the genre thematically with the blues.3
America’s erotic life had been complicated in the first half of the twentieth century by cataclysmic events. The Great Depression of the 1930s halted the climb of the middle class and led working people and the poor into nearly unimaginable levels of privation. The African American Great Migration that laid the ground for gospel music affected every level of secular urban life, too, including the leisure realms where the language of romance kept developing. After the Depression, World War II stole away millions of American men and changed women’s standing at home. After the war ended, a new wave of peace and prosperity allowed Americans time and space to absorb these changes. Unsurprisingly, though, the mood beneath the economic boom of the 1950s was anxious—especially about sex, and about the young generation emerging, the first to proudly wear the title of “teenagers.” Into this confusing world came a new sound that was paradoxically wild and redolent of repression. The kids and their observers—their parents and other adults who just didn’t understand—called it rock and roll.
THE POMPATUS OF LOVE
Rock and roll was a big bang that came from a thousand small crashes. Chaos crept into virtually every corner of popular music: in gospel, as we’ve seen, but also in wild Western swing and scary hillbilly stomps; in the breakneck harmonies of the Boswell Sisters and other vocal groups; in the raw jump blues of Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88”; in Big Jay McNeely’s saxophone exorcisms, which made white and black kids scream in equal measure. And the list goes on. “What came first, the rock & roll chicken or the rock & roll egg?” mused the songwriter and critic Steve Leggett in a review of The First Rock and Roll Record, an eighty-two-track compilation of songs that have all been put forward, at one time or another, as the phenomenon’s starting point. “No matter. The chicken crossed the road, and that’s when rock & roll really started.”4
One way to tell the story of how rock and roll started is to follow a chick who crossed the road. This specific woman, who would have likely been fine with that hipster’s slang term for a female in the know about nightlife and new sounds, was named Nyla Van Rees, and in 1953 she was dating a DJ named Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg. Nyla was a beauty whose attentiveness in Hugg’s DJ booth caused one music journalist to remark, “The way Miss Rees was taking everything in looks like ‘Huggy Boy’ is trying to make a female deejay out of her.”5 She knew what she liked in music. That’s what got her back across the road, and got the Crows’ song “Gee” on Los Angeles radio, spreading a new sound that tipped America into the rock and roll revolution.
“Gee,” a tune written by the New York group’s baritone Bill Davis in less than ten minutes, is a frantic number that adds steroids to its message about the pleasures of hugging and squeezing and kissing with some aggressive doot-doot-doots. The extra syllables push lead singer Sonny Norton’s pleading into overdrive. This kind of music had no name until some revivalists named it “doo-wop” a decade after it had reached its early peak. Its playful carnality was breaking out all over American neighborhoods via gangs of young showboating singers who gathered to compete, impress girls, and maybe claim some fame. Huggy Boy was a popular jock who liked these new vocal groups. He worked out of the storefront of Dolphin’s record store on Central Avenue, the heart of mid-century African American Los Angeles. The first white DJ to broadcast from the black-owned shop, Hugg cultivated a fan base that crossed racial lines—he was particularly popular with the city’s young Mexican American crowd—and his endorsements turned songs into national hits.
That’s what happened with “Gee,” even though he’d tossed the song in his dud pile. “The ‘Gee’ story was quite an accident,” Hugg told the radio host and music historian Steve Propes in a 1985 interview. “When ‘Gee’ came out, 1953, I was dating a girl, I was on the night
shift. She liked that song, she found it in the box-o-bombs and she said, ‘Honey, will you play this record?’ She liked the record, we didn’t particularly play it a lot . . . it was going to be lost. We had an argument in the studio. She left. I found the record, played ‘Gee.’ I kept playing it over and over again. By the time she got to North Hollywood, she called the studio. ‘Gee, Huggy, you’ve been playing the same record for ten or twelve minutes. You’re going to get fired!’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I’m not going to stop playing this record until you come back here.’ She said, ‘I don’t want you to be fired.’ So, I took the record off. I went into the next record. Two days later, when I went into the distributor, they said, ‘Huggy, we got a smash hit.’”6
“Gee” is a funny song, like most early rock and roll records. It’s full of joy, but also nervousness, as if expressing emotions its makers know aren’t decorous but just can’t hide anymore. The first bursts of rock and roll sound like this: the return of the repressed. But it’s simplistic to call what rock and roll communicated liberation. It’s just as much a witness to confinement and confusion. This is especially true of how the music took on sexuality as subject and substance. Rock and roll contained all the ugly and problematic things about sex as well as its pleasures, demonstrating how yearning and sensual release could reduce a person to gibberish. The music’s much-touted craziness—many adults heard it as nonsense—changed America’s view of sex because it acknowledged desire’s ungainliness as well as its fun. In fact, it showed how those things were interrelated. It did so at a moment when sex, as embodied by teenagers, was being viewed as both a menace and a force that would remake the world in a new era.