A Natural Woman

by Carole King

  My introduction to Alan Freed’s music came through a fellow student at Shell Bank. When I met Joel Zwick* in homeroom I was delighted to discover that he was only a month older than I. Our shared affinity for music and theater was evident as we cavorted around the stage of the school auditorium in colorful costumes in extravagant productions of light operas by Gilbert and Sullivan. I had so much fun performing in The Mikado as one of several Japanese schoolgirls dressed in kimonos and wigs. It made me happy to be part of the enchantment my classmates and I brought to our audience, which consisted principally of parents, friends, and teachers. I loved transporting the audience (and myself) to another time and another country. I delighted in pirouetting and moving my handheld fan in synchronized choreography with the other girls while we sang this song:

  Three little maids who all unwary

  Come from a ladies’ seminary

  Freed from its genius tutelary

  Three little maids from school

  Three little maaaaids—from school!

  In 1955, Alan Freed announced his Easter Jubilee, a musical revue at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater that would run for a week. When Joel invited me to go with him I accepted with enthusiasm. When the day came, we got on the train at Sheepshead Bay and found it packed with teenagers. I thought, These kids can’t all be going to the Alan Freed show. But they were. Exiting the subway at Atlantic Avenue, we caught sight of and then became part of the teeming crowd forming outside the Brooklyn Paramount. The sense of anticipation rising in a hormonal crescendo was almost palpable.

  Other than a friend of my dad’s from the firehouse, I had rarely seen people of color in my neighborhood unless they were there to deliver furniture, clean houses, or perform other menial tasks. In April 1955, not only was Alan Freed’s stage integrated, the audience was polychromatic. As Joel and I advanced slowly through the ticket line, the entry line, and up the aisle to our seats, it struck me that there were more black teenagers than I had ever seen. Before I had a chance to reflect further, the band started playing. Backed by Count Basie’s Orchestra (minus Count Basie), act after act came out to perform either their latest hit or the song that would soon become their latest hit.

  The performance of a new song by one of Alan’s acts, reinforced by repeated plays on his radio show, was usually followed by a marked increase in sales. One could infer that the power and influence of a disc jockey with a sizable audience might be a factor in his ownership, credits, or royalties in connection with the products he promoted. This may not have been the case with Alan Freed when he was listed as a cowriter on the Moonglows’ “Sincerely,” or when he owned or co-owned an act’s record label. But in my teens I knew nothing of such practices, and had I been told that Alan was financially entangled with his artists, I wouldn’t have cared. I only knew that thanks to Alan Freed I was becoming aware of a new kind of music that spoke to and for me. He had assembled a parade of talented performers such as the Penguins, the Moonglows, the Clovers, Danny Overbea, Red Prysock, LaVern Baker, Mickey “Guitar” Baker (no relation to LaVern), and B.B. King.

  Alan called his music “the Big Beat.” It was exactly the right name. The Big Beat was bigger, louder, and more sexually stirring than any music I’d heard before. It surely was not “Three little maaaaids—from school!”

  During the show, as black and white teenagers danced in separate groups, each seemed to accept one another’s presence in the same audience without animosity. It’s possible that I’m remembering this racial harmony in 1955 through lenses turned rose-colored after more than fifty years, but I believe Alan Freed’s shows heralded the movement of my generation toward racial integration not only of popular music, but of American society.

  After the show I felt exhilarated and exhausted. Joining the stream of people leaving the theater, Joel and I found ourselves in the middle of a group milling around the stage door hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the performers. Suddenly the door opened and we were swept along with a group being ushered in. Through a space between two taller kids I saw LaVern Baker sashaying up the stairs past B.B. King and the Moonglows. I assumed Miss Baker was making her way to her dressing room, but years of experience since then have educated me to the probability that she had applied her makeup in front of a mirror shared with other performers, and that she had probably changed into her costume in the bathroom. Moving farther in, we saw Mickey Baker talking to a couple of the Penguins.

  At that moment I knew I wanted to mean something to these people. I didn’t want to be one of them. I just wanted them to know who I was and consider me worthy of respect. That ambition existed concurrently and in no way conflicted with my ambition to be an actress.

  After that my fiscal priority became saving up to attend as many of Alan’s revues as I could afford. I couldn’t attend every show, but I always knew who was playing because Alan promoted his shows nightly on his radio program by touting the lineup and playing the music of those artists.

  Over the next few years Alan presented many great acts, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Cleftones, the Harptones, Joe Turner, Jo Ann Campbell, Mabel King, Shirley and Lee, and George Hamilton IV. He also introduced Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (a forerunner of Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Marilyn Manson). Jay’s assertion of maniacally possessive love culminated in an agonizing shriek followed by a series of demonic groans and screams until he ended his turn onstage by collapsing into a coffin.

  Alan had a particularly delightful treat in store for us at his 1957 Labor Day revue at the Brooklyn Paramount. I was in the audience when Little Richard burst onto the stage. He began to sing and play the piano with an eruption of energy that continued unabated for decades. Though I knew nothing about the gospel music that had informed him, Little Richard’s powerful presence that night was suffuuuuused with the Spirit. It was a remarkable experience for this Jewish teenager to hear him sing nonsense syllables with the full capability of an astonishing vocal range that complemented the blazing rhythm coming out of his fingers. Had I considered myself a good writer of lyrics, I would have had to stop right there. I mean, what lyric could possibly say it better than this?

  A-wop wop-a loo-mop a-wop bam boom

  Tutti frutti, aw rootie, tutti frutti, aw rootie

  Tutti frutti, aw rootie, tutti frutti, aw rootie

  Tutti frutti, aw rootie

  A-wop wop-a loo-mop a-wop bam boom

  Little Richard’s music and presentation would influence artists and songwriters from James Brown and Elvis Presley to Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson—all exceptional songwriters and performers who themselves would influence future generations.

  Chapter Eight

  Rhythm and Blues

  My mother had exposed me to music while I was still in her womb. After I arrived she played Carmen and other operas while my father was on duty at the firehouse. Her record collection included show tunes, pop songs, and works by such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, and Schubert. I loved “Papa” Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, and my repeated, delighted exposure to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf taught me the sounds and personality characteristics of various orchestral instruments. But the music that set me on fire when I was thirteen resembled classical music about as much as a pride of lions resembles a sailboat.

  As my generation entered adolescence in a decade largely run by uninspiring men, the music Alan Freed brought to us seemed heaven-sent. To many of our parents—thankfully not mine—that music came from the cauldrons of hell. The predictors of doom said, “If Alan Freed is allowed to stay on the air, his ‘race music’ will lead to miscegenation, free love, drugs, and anarchy!” They may have been on to something. There was no doubt that the records Alan played aroused a sexual awareness previously unacknowledged among my age group. His revues were a welcome wagon of freedoms of style, expression, dress, message, and sex. References to sex didn’t need to be explicit. Sexuality was implicit
in both music and lyrics. To begin with, “rock and roll” was a euphemism in black slang for sexual intercourse. Parse the lyric “Roll me all night long” from “Let the Good Times Roll” and you won’t find a single objectionable word, but the meaning was unmistakable. And then there was that pulsing bass that drove the Big Beat.

  Before adolescence I had been naïve about sex. Suddenly I was feeling the pounding bass notes and the throbbing drumbeats viscerally in ways and places I’d never felt before. My discovery of rock and roll coincided with my increasing awareness of the lower half of my body. No wonder I couldn’t wait to stay up late and listen to Alan’s presentation of the original rhythm and blues recordings. Some of those songs were introduced to Middle America by white artists. The Moonglows’ version of “Sincerely” topped the R&B charts before the song became a pop hit by the McGuire Sisters. After Pat Boone’s recording of “Ain’t That a Shame” made it to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, Alan’s repeated spins sent Fats Domino’s version to #16.

  In the parlance of the period, records were called platters. The platters Alan played fed every cell of my body, mind, heart, and soul. The songs were simply written and simply recorded. The lyrics and the beat moved me. Though melody was present, it wasn’t as important as the beat. The fact that a lot of the songs sounded as if they could have been written by a kid—as indeed many were—inspired me to think, If they can do it, maybe I can.

  It wouldn’t be easy. The music that had informed the songwriters on the records Alan played was a lot more gritty and diverse than the simple pop ditties, show tunes, and classical music to which I had been listening for most of my life. But I was determined to learn, and the timing in popular music and political history was favorable.

  In the fifties, folk songs by the Weavers, Mitch Miller, and the Kingston Trio appeared on the pop charts, but folk would not become mainstream until the sixties when possession of a guitar, a pair of vocal cords, endless verses railing against the system, and a guitar case in which to receive spare change would be all a young man from as far from the pop scene as, say, Hibbing, Minnesota, would need to qualify as a folksinger.

  Following its relatively strong influence on popular music in the thirties and forties, jazz became marginalized in the early fifties. Jazz musicians were mostly black men whose music was appreciated by a relatively small audience compared to pop. Some were lucky enough to dip into the more lucrative world of studio pop and earn extra “bread” during the day as sidemen, but they couldn’t wait to jam with other musicians in a club until the wee hours. Jazz was a very different world from pop. Among other things, it was separate and unequal. With few exceptions, jazz players struggled economically, and marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were part of the culture. Sentences spoken in after-hours clubs were often as strung out as the speaker.

  “Coooool, man. Reeeeeal cool.”

  As with jazz, the world of rhythm and blues was inhabited mostly by blacks at the low end of the national economic scale. In the late 1940s, names such as “race music” and “race records” were used in Billboard magazine to categorize the music emanating from black communities. Jerry Wexler, a journalist with Billboard, came up with “rhythm and blues” to replace the “race” tags. Wexler later explained that although the word “race” was commonly used by blacks to describe themselves as a “race man” or a “race woman,” the appellation didn’t feel right to him. He viewed the term “rhythm and blues” as more appropriate for enlightened times.

  “Blues” referred to the traditional twelve-bar form with a I-IV-V chord progression. “Rhythm” derived from the strong 4/4 or 6/8 beat that drove most of the songs. With lyrics mostly about the lack of love, sex, cars, liquor, or money, it wasn’t surprising that R&B’s messages of adversity and alienation resonated with white teenagers.

  Higher up on the economic scale, white artists dominated the popular music charts. There were some black pop artists, notably Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and Harry Belafonte, but songs like Perry Como’s “No Other Love” and Patti Page’s “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window?” (“arf, arf”) were typical of what I heard on pop radio. Though other genres existed, pop had the widest and whitest audience. But popular music was only one facet of the social context that informed my generation.

  A strong undercurrent that would lead to the civil rights movement was already gathering momentum in the mid-fifties. At twelve and thirteen, I wasn’t paying close attention because I was white and my preadolescent concerns had little to do with racial injustice. But glimpses of the news on television kept me aware of such things as the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, which struck down the policy of “separate but equal” and required schools to integrate racially. And when newscasters reported the refusal in 1955 of a black woman named Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama so a white man could sit in it, after which they reported the white authorities’ reaction, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the blacks’ boycott of Montgomery buses.

  Film was another field in which an early call to racial integration was being sounded. Sidney Poitier’s performance as a student accused of threatening his teacher’s wife in The Blackboard Jungle awakened moviegoers to the fact that a black actor could do more than sing, dance, roll his eyes, and serve white people. Notwithstanding, or possibly because of, the presence of Mr. Poitier, the film’s appeal to white teenagers was tremendous. The Blackboard Jungle was such a convincing portrayal of juvenile delinquency that it frightened complacent adults who thought such things couldn’t happen in their neighborhood.

  My friends and I danced the Lindy (in boy-girl couples) to “Rock Around the Clock” in newly finished basements lined with knotty pine in the homes of kids whose parents could afford such improvements. (Knowing what teenagers typically did in basements, initially I thought the spelling was “naughty pine.”) Lindy stood for Lindy Hop, a joyous, bouncy dance that turned excessive adolescent energy into exhilaration. When we weren’t doing the Lindy, we were holding each other (in boy-girl couples) and slow-dancing to “Earth Angel” by the Penguins or “Pledging My Love” by the late, great Johnny Ace, who of course wasn’t late when he made the record.

  I was fourteen when Elvis Presley burst into national prominence from rockabilly in 1956. I didn’t realize then that Elvis was himself a form of racial integration. He was a white boy singing country music with an R&B influence and performing it with the visceral abandon of the blacks he’d observed around Memphis after his family moved there from Tupelo, Mississippi. With all the censors and sponsors controlling television in the fifties, I was glad it took the producers of The Ed Sullivan Show three appearances to decide to show Elvis only from the waist up. No one with eyes and ears, and certainly not this teenage girl, was unaware of Elvis’s effect on popular culture. I liked his music, and he was undeniably teen-idol gorgeous, but I must confess that Elvis’s music didn’t influence me as strongly as the pop hits that preceded his breakthrough, or the R&B hits that followed.

  I observed all these events from a place of self-centered adolescence. I didn’t listen to the news or read a newspaper unless a teacher made me do it. I liked English and math but had no interest in social studies. Later in life, when I realized that we live social studies every day, I would find history, geography, politics, and current events fascinating. But in the mid-fifties, I was a Brooklyn teenager who liked to read, sing, play the piano, go to movies, whisper in class, dance the Lindy, and cuddle with boys.

  Oh, and one more thing. I hadn’t given up on acting.

  Chapter Nine

  Salad Days

  They say if you want a career in theater, you gotta really want it. I must have really wanted it because when the opportunity presented itself to audition for Performing Arts a second time, I took it, and that time I was accepted.

  I had been pulled so strongly to music in the intervening year that I was tempted to ask the judges to give my place to someone else so I could go to hig
h school in Brooklyn with my friends. But several things kept me from doing that: first, I was confident that I could continue to be inspired by rock and roll and rhythm and blues while studying acting, with no loss of proficiency in either endeavor. Second, after failing the first time and then achieving admission, I was reluctant to turn my back on such an extraordinary opportunity. But perhaps the most compelling reason was that I knew that my studying drama at Performing Arts would make my mother happy.

  I was thirteen in the summer of 1955 and already primed to enjoy the long vacation days. Knowing that I would start tenth grade with new classmates, I relished every bit of time I could spend with my friends from Shell Bank. Every morning we congregated at the Avenue X playground across the street from my house. In order to get in or out of the playground I had to pass the omnipresent Butler and Bursch on their park bench. I had to be extra careful that they didn’t see me doing anything questionable or they would immediately report it to my mother. Really, my only such activity was smoking cigarettes, a habit I acquired to fit in and happily gave up fourteen years later. To earn money for cigarettes, movies, and other indulgences, my friends and I either did odd jobs for our parents, worked part-time in offices or stores, or babysat. When we weren’t working, sometimes we took a bus to Brighton Beach, rubbed each other with suntan lotion, and displayed our budding bodies in the noonday sun. This was before we learned about the perils of exposure to the sun without an SPF number.