Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  The French music hall was an altogether harsher environment than its English equivalent. Likewise its chansons, which did not hesitate to confront life at its most bitter. Its compelling stars were réalistes, who played out their personal dramas in their songs – perhaps insulting their audiences, perhaps breaking down into tears, while depicting scenarios too vivid for the delicate tastes of London or New York.

  What brought audiences to the British or American theatre was not a stark confrontation with reality but the promise of entertainment. The pull was the lustre of a star name: a performer as reliable as Marie Lloyd, Harry Lauder, Albert Chevalier or Harry Champion – or as exotic as the conjoined twins Rosa and Josefa Blažek, who played dulcimer and violin respectively. Much of their appeal lay in their familiarity: Miss Lloyd could be guaranteed to stretch the boundaries of good taste with her risqué humour, Mr Champion to chronicle the traumas of working-class life with such ditties as ‘Have You Paid the Rent?’ But for fail-safe reputations to endure, the performers also required a constant turnover of material: woe betide the comic who returned with the same parodies and sketches he had offered the year before. Hence the need for the admitted ‘hack’, the songwriter who could turn out several hundred almost identical comic songs or sentimental ballads every year, each hinged around an instantly accessible and (they hoped) uniquely unforgettable hook or chorus. The themes were perennial – errant husbands, nagging wives, lonely old mothers, faithful lovers – but the variations were endless. One London composer claimed to have penned no fewer than 17,000 music-hall songs, ‘writing up to three a day22 and selling them for a shilling each’.

  Once a song had ‘settled’ with the public, it was assured of a decent lifespan. ‘A repertoire such as Florrie23 Forde would build up lasted her a full year or two,’ recalled recording pioneer Herbert Ridout in 1940, ‘adding new successes and dropping old ones as she went along. There were no dance bands, as we know them, to adopt them to dance rhythms. No radio to popularise them in a week and kill them in three months or so. No hero-worship of American composers, such as the wireless has brought in its manufactured “build-ups”.’ For touring performers, there were two key periods: Christmas, when pantomimes would feature the hit songs of the season; and summer, when stars were showcased in ‘runs’ at seaside resorts – a tradition that was still intact when the Beatles began touring Britain in 1963.

  At the height of the music hall, in the late Victorian era, before safety considerations forced the closure of the more nefarious venues, there were nearly 400 theatres, halls and public houses offering variety bills in London alone, and at least one in every town across the country. Those numbers paled alongside the thousands of variety theatres in the United States before the First World War – many of them offering material only suitable for men of the world. The American equivalent of London’s classiest music halls was vaudeville, providing family entertainment with just enough innuendo to satisfy the racier members of the audience.

  The vaudeville stage provided much of the early output of the recording industry: Steve Porter’s or Dan Kelly’s comic Irish monologues; the lugubrious songs of Edward M. Favor (such as ‘His Trousers Would Bag at the Knee’); the boldly contemporary ditties of the baritone J. W. Myers (‘Come Take a Trip in My Air-Ship’) or the tenor Harry Tally (‘Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine’); Harry Lauder’s countless re-recordings of his signature tunes, ‘Stop Your Ticklin’, Jock’ and ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’; the more delicate ballads of Leslie Stuart (‘The Lily of Laguna’ and ‘Tell Me, Pretty Maiden’); and hundreds more, some still preserved as national folklore, most squeezed dry of novelty within weeks of their birth.

  As arguably the most successful composer of the era, Charles K. Harris published a brief guide to his craft, How to Write a Popular Song (1906). ‘Only a few years ago a sheet24-music counter in a department store was unheard of’, he wrote. ‘Today in the largest dry goods emporiums and department stores in New York, down to the smallest in every city in the United States, can be found a music counter where all of the popular songs of the day are on sale.’ What qualified a song for that status? Its ‘ultimate success or failure25’, Harris determined, rested in the refrain (or chorus), which was ‘the kernel of the song’. Equally urgent was an arresting title: ‘the shorter and more concise’, the better. The mass audience demanded ‘a song with a story – a story with a moral’. To that end, the aspiring composer must ‘Avoid slang or double entendre26. They may seem witty and clever, but they ruin the chances for the song to sell well. Refined people do not care to have songs containing such words or allusions seen in their homes, or used by members of the family.’ There was one further restriction: no syllable should command more than one note:fn3 on precise diction and rapid intelligibility did the appeal of a song depend. Harris’s pamphlet also made the earliest known attempt to categorise the modern popular song, by themes that were, at turns, timeless or soon destined to seem outmoded:

  A –The Home, or Mother27 Song

  B –The Descriptive, or Sensational Story Ballad

  C –The Popular Waltz Song (on a thousand and one subjects)

  D –The Coon Song (Rough, Comic, Refined, Love or Serenade, etc.)

  E –The March Song (Patriotic, War, Girl, Character, etc.)

  F –The Comic Song (Topical, Character, Dialect, etc.)

  G –The Production Song (for Interpolation in big Musical Productions, entailing the use of a Chorus of Men, or Girls, or both, and certain novel action, costume, or business)

  H –The Popular Love Ballad

  J –High Class Ballads

  K –Sacred Songs

  Harris’s delineation of the market took no account of a seismic shift in public taste which had occurred between the writing of ‘After the Ball’ and the publication of his primer. It would pass into history as the moment when America created its first authentic genre of popular music, and sent it out to conquer the world. This was now, although Harris preferred not to see it, the era of ragtime.

  * * *

  fn1 The melody of one of these 1903 recordings, ‘Poor Mourner’, reappeared sixty years later in Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Free’, a striking example of the folk process in action.

  fn2 For British readers of a certain age, the ‘chairman’ will inevitably bring to mind Leonard Sachs, the host of BBC television’s The Good Old Days, which helped to solidify the enduring image of the classic London music hall. The show ran for thirty years, from 1953 to 1983, but as early as 1939, before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, Sachs was introducing a regular programme of old-time music hall at the Player’s Theatre in London.

  fn3 Harris may not have known that the first Book of Common Prayer, issued by the Church of England in 1549, laid down a very similar edict: ‘for every syllable a note, so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly’.

  1, 2

  AS AN UNSCIENTIFIC survey suggests, the word ‘ragtime’ tends to conjure up one of two pieces: ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, Irving Berlin’s hit song of 1911; and Scott Joplin’s piano instrumental, ‘The Entertainer’, written in 1902, and chosen as the main theme of The Sting (1973). Of these, the first epitomises the ragtime era, but has little of ragtime about it; the second is genuine ragtime, but not what the citizens of the early twentieth century imagined when they heard the word. Ragtime was an elusive concept, even during its prime. It was also the first genre of popular music to become a pejorative word – a warning of immorality or indecency at large.

  Ragtime was both a narrowly prescriptive style of instrumental composition, written for the piano but popularised by the banjo or the brass band; and shorthand for a confluence of influences and impulses which amounted to nothing short of a revolution in American music. To most ears, it appeared shockingly new. It reeked of youthful exuberance, rather than Victorian sobriety; it came unashamedly from the African-American population, even though most of those who exploited ragtime were white (and many of the richest from Eu
ropean immigrant families); and, most startling of all, it was built around a rhythmic device known as syncopation, which recurred throughout the next century of black music and entered the pop mainstream around the world.

  Syncopation is not intrinsically black, or American, or indeed popular: examples occur in the music of Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Handel. It describes any rhythm which throws the accent on to the unexpected, which delays the beat, or suspends it, or falls between it. At its most basic, it transfers a 4/4 rhythm from the on-beat (one-two-three-four) to the off-beat (one-two-three-four). Simpler still, syncopation is what makes music swing. It became so natural a part of our lives over the twentieth century, transported from ragtime to jazz to R&B to soul to rock to hip hop and beyond, that only its absence was shocking.

  The last champions of unsyncopated popular music were the Victorian ballad singers who survived into the Edwardian era and even beyond the Great War. They sang as soloists, or (if male) in quartets. They were men such as Harry McDonough, a stalwart of the Edison Male Quartet, the Haydn Quartet, the Lyric Quartet, and many more. His operatic training dampened any faint urge he may have felt to swing, or even sway; he specialised in duets with women that were utterly lacking in sensuality; and as late as 1916, when journalists were beginning to suggest that ragtime was being supplanted by jazz, he could still deliver an Irving Berlin tune like ‘The Girl on the Magazine’ with a stiffness that stifled any erotic intent. Likewise, there was no rhythmic twist in the work of Joe Belmont, the whistler known as ‘The Human Bird’; in Henry Burr, arguably North America’s most popular balladeer before Bing Crosby; or, heaven forbid, in the voluminous catalogue of the Athlone baritone John McCormack, trained operatically in Italy, a prominent balladeer in America from 1910, and still on hand to lend a steadying voice to Allied morale in the Second World War.

  They were the old guard, whose rigid adherence to their station would hold little attraction for the new century. Their audience – like that of the phonograph, ownership of which connoted at least a degree of wealth – was adult, although their music could be enjoyed by the entire family. They never set out to divide that audience, to stake an identity by appealing to an elite; their goal was universal entertainment. What marked out their music was ethnicity: they carried the heritage of Europe in their bones. The participants in the ragtime era, whether they realised it or not (and often they cared not to), performed in a style that was easier, more relaxed. They swaggered rather than marched – and their music bore the irrepressible hallmarks of its origins in black America.

  In the ragtime era, several forms of entertainment, pointed and benign, collided; one might even say they were coupled, for much of the panic aroused by the spirit of ragtime was its threat of sexuality and racial transgression, a culturally lethal marriage at the dawn of the twentieth century. Some sense of the tangled racial history of nineteenth-century American society is suggested by the minstrel tradition, which both celebrated African-American culture and simultaneously mocked it in the crudest imaginable way. From minstrels, black and white, came one of the formulae listed by Charles K. Harris: the ‘coon song’. Combine the coon song with the syncopation of instrumental ‘rags’, and you have the ragtime song: the first generation of American pop, and (in both cultural and musical terms) the recognisable ancestor of the tradition running from Al Jolson to Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley – each a champion, in his way, of black American music; each accused of stealing it from its originators.

  The nineteenth-century minstrel borrowed the African-American tradition of the singing, comic, cavorting stage performer, who might exaggerate his supposed racial characteristics to please his white ‘superiors’, and turned it into – well, what exactly? Cultural derision, certainly; entertainment, without doubt; affectionate tribute, on occasion. The minstrel show was an event so ambiguous that it required black men to caricature their own culture and accentuate the colour of their skin by adopting ‘blackface’. This ensured they would not startle audiences acclimatised to white performers who had adopted the burnt-cork make-up, exaggeratedly painted mouths and curly black wigs which transformed them, to their satisfaction, into authentic ‘nigger minstrels’.

  The most famous of the white man’s minstrel characters was ‘Jim Crow’, created by Thomas Dartmouth Rice around 1830, and brought to London six years later. But the impulse for white men to paint themselves black can be traced back to the early seventeenth century, when Ben Jonson wrote a masque which would enable England’s queen, Anne of Denmark, to don the face paint; while Shakespeare’s Othello effectively required its leading man to follow suit. In the 1840s, the Virginia Minstrels quartet – white men, on fiddle, banjo, tambourine and ‘bones’ – set the shape for the white minstrel show, ‘with a fast-moving program3 of songs, jokes, dances and instrumental specialties’. After the American Civil War of the 1860s, this theatrical genre expanded to encompass African-American performers. Racism was so intrinsic to the society from which the so-called ‘nigger minstrels’ (black or white) came that it was scarcely noticed by those who perpetrated it; and regarded as inevitable by those who endured it.

  Among the contortions, moral and physical, required of black performers was a high-stepping dance that became known as the ‘cakewalk’. It took its title from the tradition – roots unknown – whereby white spectators would offer the prize of a cake for the most dramatic and energetic display of black dancing. By 1877, this idea was sufficiently entrenched for it to form the basis of a minstrel routine, ‘Walking for Dat Cake’. Fifteen years later, the New York Times reported on a contest with the ‘suspicion that the intention4 was not to hold out the cake walkers as models for the reverent imitation of the spectators, but to expose them to the derision of an unsympathetic concourse of whites. This is all very wrong.’ But the cakewalk did offer some pioneering black performers a vehicle with which to command white attention. The music that accompanied it introduced the art of syncopation to an audience for whom this irregular sense of rhythm was both exotic and strangely compulsive.

  The future music of this country5 must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States … They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose.

  Antonín Dvořák, 1893

  What with ‘coon songs6’, banjo picking and ‘cake walks’, the white people are picking up what the better class of colored people are trying to get away from. Are the white people degenerating in these tastes?

  Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, 1898

  Beyond the minstrel shows of the late nineteenth century, African-Americans performed spirituals (the primary cause of Dvořák’s admiration), traditional melodies, popular songs, comic monologues; and, on banjo or perhaps piano, syncopated dance tunes which came to be known as ‘rags’. When first documented, a ‘rag’ was often a gathering (usually unruly) rather than a piece of music: a Kansas newspaper in 1891 complained that the weekly ‘rags’ in a town hall ‘are a nuisance and should be abated7’. There was an immediate association between ‘rags’, violence and drunkenness. The Leavenworth Herald remarked in 1894 that ‘Kansas City girls8 can’t play anything on pianos except “rags”, and the worst kind of “rags” at that.’ (A dictionary from 1902 defined a ‘rag-time girl’ as ‘a sweetheart or harlot’.) But the same newspaper also referred kindly to ‘a country “rag” dance9’, with its callers, routines and rhythmic clapping of hands, as if it were no more threatening than a quadrille in the days of Jane Austen. The black pianist Blind Boone, renowned as one of the fathers of ragtime, performed piano recitals (occasionally accompanied by a vocalist) through the early 1890s in the politest of society, with a repertoire ranging from light classics (Strauss and Liszt) to improvised ‘rags’ around tunes which were either traditional or else penned in a comparable style, such as Stephe
n Foster’s ‘Old Folks at Home’. (One excited journalist of 1893 described Boone’s playing as having been ‘clear out of sight10’.)

  In the hands of Tin Pan Alley, these rags became a commercial property, marketed as an invitation to perform the cakewalk – hence the title of an 1892 instrumental for banjo and piano, ‘Kullud Koons’ Kake Walk’. It was an era when, as ragtime historians have noted, ‘the popular music market11 was bombarded by a succession of Ethiopian oddities, darky songs, coon songs and plantation songs’, and when a professional songwriter, such as the effortlessly adaptable Kerry Mills, could make a lucrative career out of such novelty tunes as ‘Rastus on Parade’ and ‘At a Georgia Camp Meeting’. A former slave, George Washington Johnson, billed himself as ‘The original whistling coon and laughing darkey’, inaugurating a long tradition of ‘laughing’ records with his 1891 recording of ‘The Laughing Song’. (Charles Penrose’s ‘The Laughing Policeman’ is probably the most enduring of these novelties.) His performance – which he is believed to have repeated some 40,000 times, so that a fresh cylinder could be made from each rendition – was viciously self-mocking, with its casual references to a ‘huckleberry nig’ and a ‘big baboon’.

  In the sorry history of racial indignity in popular music, few songs have matched the notoriety of an 1895 composition by Ernest Hogan – a pseudonym hiding the identity of the black entertainer Reuben Crowders. He picked up a chorus from a Chicago saloon, entitled ‘All Pimps Look Alike to Me’, fleshed it out, and rendered it suitable for decent company as ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’. Soon, as the historian David Suisman noted, ‘Whites taunted blacks12 by whistling the first few notes of the chorus, turning the sounds themselves into a weapon of racial intimidation.’ Reuben Crowders was said to have been tormented by his role in the affair, though that did not prevent him from penning an equally cartoonish portrait of his race, ‘My Coal Black Lady’, the following year. Such songs were purveyed to the masses via music sheets which bore grotesque caricatures of African-Americans, their features apelike, their expressions untameable.