Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Earlier eras were also considered ripe for renewal. In the early 1920s, musicians such as Zez Confrey had reacted to the emergence of jazz by reigniting the flame of ragtime – albeit, as the genre’s historians complained, ‘a pseudo-ragtime “novelty” mode35 designed to show off virtuoso style, at the expense of ragtime’s basic drive, form and consistency. This branch of ragtime developed into the empty pyrotechnics of the cocktail pianist, a style based on cascades of arpeggios’ (and perhaps encapsulated best by the florid playing of Liberace).

  Twenty years later, Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band were formed in San Francisco, billing themselves as a ragtime revival band, to the delight of magazines which regarded swing and the early stirrings of bebop as perversions of the true jazz spirit. (The same city would soon become the home of the folk revival, with musicians scuffling for jobs at ‘banjo bars’.) Not that Scott Joplin would have recognised their music as his own: although much of their repertoire comprised pieces with the word ‘Rag’ in their title, their sound was closer to that of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. But their much publicised antics enabled genuine ragtime pianists to record once again, although it was only with the success of Marvin Hamlisch’s movie soundtrack for The Sting that ragtime was played as its early twentieth-century composers would have wished. His performance of Joplin’s ‘The Entertainer’ ensured that a man who had died in 1917 became the composer of the best-selling US single of 1974.

  A less accurate retread of Joplin marked the commercial peak of the passion for what was called ‘Dixieland’ music, which effectively meant wrapping the most melodious elements of the New Orleans jazz scene c.1920 in cotton wool, and presenting them as a circus act. Original protagonists from that era were welcomed as conquering heroes, as long as they didn’t think about updating their style, while college audiences relished bands such as the Firehouse Five Plus Two, tooting away in their red firemen’s uniforms, and Doc Rando and His Pills, clad in white coats with stethoscopes draped around their necks. Pee Wee Hunt’s orchestra proved to be the most successful of these throwbacks, his 1948 revival of Joplin’s ‘Twelfth Street Rag’ topping the American chart.

  In Britain, this craze had started in 1943, with George Webb’s Dixielanders – playing not for laughs but in deadly earnest, as befitted men who believed that they were keeping a cultural artefact alive. ‘Their repertoire was36 the tunes of the New Orleans pioneers,’ their sometime manager Jim Godbolt recounted, ‘the style a combination of solo and collective improvisation in the fashion of their models. Quite astonishing, then, was the seeming authenticity of their music … They were utterly dedicated to absorbing the soul and essence of early jazz, notwithstanding their technical limitations. In our eager acceptance of these sturdy pioneers’ principles, we overlooked their faulty technique.’ The Dixielanders were pioneers indeed, their commitment to the past triggering the trad-jazz boom of the 1950s and 60s, in which uniforms every bit as garish as the Americans’ would flourish.

  The penchant for vintage jazz styles was matched by another revival, which provided enormous reassurance for any American with European blood. After its brief flowering in the late 1930s, it was time for the nation to take the polka to its breast. As early as June 1946, 8,000 fans filled the City Auditorium in Milwaukee for a contest to discover the country’s premier exponent of the art. The winner was Frankie Yankovic, the accordion-toting son of Slovene immigrants, who once said that ‘I like to think of myself37 as the blue-collar worker’s musician.’ For this was working man’s (and woman’s) music, entirely free of snobbery and elitism. It invited everyone to enjoy its simple pleasures, a philosophy which enabled another accordion-playing polka king, Lawrence Welk, to entertain audiences for almost sixty years with his ‘Champagne Music’, and to front a popular US TV show for twenty-seven years. Television talent show host Arthur Godfrey also cashed in: first with ‘Too Fat Polka’, a quasi-inebriated attack on an overweight woman; and then ‘Slap ’Er Down Again, Paw’, a comic defence of child-beating. Even the Andrews Sisters, who had explored every fad from boogie-woogie to the rumba over the previous decade, were inveigled into playing along, with ‘Toolie Oolie Doolie (Yodel Polka)’. Needless to say, these songs did not require a master’s degree in chromatic harmonies to understand.

  The polka craze was not strictly limited to polkas: it encompassed waltzes, ballads and even revamped hillbilly tunes – anything that would encourage a tribe of immigrant Americans to remember a Europe which in many cases they had not even seen. Not that the polka passion ended there: Yankovic enjoyed lengthy seasons in Hollywood and Las Vegas, playing to the same audiences who might also have relished more overtly American entertainers, such as Judy Garland or Bing Crosby. Ultimately, the polka was doomed as popular culture by the rapidly changing market of the 1950s: as its historian, Victor Greene, noted, ‘the American elite38 in the 1950s and 1960s regarded polka and like music as part of the mediocre, distasteful culture of beer-drinking, half-literate, white working-class clods’.

  For many sophisticates, the tastes of another frequently lampooned section of society, the rural working class, were equally appalling. As early as January 1945, the jazz magazine Metronome was promising that ‘Cowboy and hillbilly music39 are fast fading from the LA scene.’ But four years later, its rival Down Beat was forced to admit, through clenched teeth, that ‘the mountain music40 and oaters’ odes [alliteration and condescension hand in hand] are just about pushing popular tunes, jazz, swing, bebop and everything else right out of the picture’. Four years further along the range, Down Beat lowered itself to print a regular hillbilly column, ‘Sashayin’ Around’. It assumed that anyone reading it would require prose to match the music: Tennessee Ernie Ford, fans were told, loved ‘that old-fashion home cooking41 … I reckon he’s just as plain as you and me and the next-door neighbor. Bein’ a top western star doesn’t keep you from having a notion you like black-eyed peas, grits, gravy and fried catfish.’

  In the British magazine Gramophone, Oliver King concocted a line of attack that, suitably amended, would be flung by parents at teenage fans of Elvis Presley, the Beatles and their successors: ‘I often wonder how cowboys42 ridin’ the range manage to play an electric guitar. Do they have horses fitted with dynamos, or do they plug the guitar into a cactus?’ (‘What would happen if there were a power cut?’ was the sardonic response of many elders to the sight of rock groups on television.) A more effective form of satire was used by Jo Stafford – who must, secretly, have loved this music – when she adopted the widest of hillbilly twangs, and the pseudonym ‘Cinderella G. Stump’, for a rendering of ‘Tim-Tayshun’.

  Ironically, it was exactly temptation, and the other sins and snares haunting adult life, that formed the raw material of hillbilly music. Whereas the emotional range of the late 1940s pop song did not extend beyond ‘He loves me; he loves me not’, the fledgling country-music genre could handle everything from adultery to alcoholism without losing its wits (or its morals, because a hillbilly temptation always yielded retribution). This was music with consequences, not simply dreams or (in the rhythm and blues field) erotic fantasies. It lacked musical sophistication, but then so did the blues; it was frequently sung off-key (especially when Ernest Tubb, one of the stars of the honky-tonk sound, was at the microphone) or with instruments that were jarringly out of tune. Yet it was rarely banal in the sense of avoiding reality: its imagery was paper-thin, but its scenarios were as deep as life itself. As singer/guitarist Merle Travis reflected, ‘country music has been twisted43, braided and finally welded together until it’s a piece of music that’s Americana. It’s Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley and hillbilly blended together in the diamond … I believe our fans are made out of a little better timber than others. The barn stands longer.’ One of the great clichés of the country market, which held true until the 1990s, was already in evidence. Its audience was incapable of disloyalty. If an artist remained true to the music, and didn’t try to disguise his or her origins, then the fans would k
eep faith. It was a style, and an audience, that was guileless and without novelty: unassuming, solid and fiercely slow to change.

  By 1951, when Hank Williams was in his prime as a songwriter (and cunning magpie of other people’s songs), when Eddy Arnold was walking the narrow line between hillbilly and crooning, when Tennessee Ernie Ford was milking America’s mythology for all it was worth, and Ernest Tubb was still wailing just out of tune, country had become the bedrock of US popular music. Jazz was no longer providing suitable material for pop singers to steal, and much of the blues repertoire was too risqué or overtly black to be tackled by anyone who was targeting middle America. So singers such as Tony Bennett, Perry Como and Frankie Laine were turning their hand to the dependable simplicities of the country market. Rather than protesting that their work had been stolen, the original creators of such songs as ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ and ‘Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes’ considered the pop covers a compliment and a way of reaching listeners who would never have discovered the unrefined hillbilly source. Meanwhile, Patti Page’s cover of Pee Wee King’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’ became America’s best-selling record – Bing Crosby’s Christmas tunes aside – in almost twenty years.

  With ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘Cold, Cold Heart’, the newly dubbed country and western music was still selling Tin Pan Alley’s vision of American life: its success or failure dependent on the yin or yang of a romantic affair. But one country song from the early 1950s offered a more difficult choice. With ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’, Kitty Wells took a hillbilly standard, ‘The Wild Side of Life’, and reversed its scenario and its moral. In the original, a man dolefully scolded his wife for her promiscuity. In Wells’s re-reading of the text, the husband was the barfly, picking up women on a whim. ‘Too many times men think they’re still single’, she sang, nailing the double standard in a single line. There had been strong women before on record: sexual, proud, larger than life to the point of being unreal (unless you believed in the mythology of Mae West). But this was something else – a woman strong enough to speak the truth, but not sure whether she could carry its burden. None of the wholesome pop singers who sang ‘Tennessee Waltz’ went anywhere near Kitty Wells’s song. It would take the likes of Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell to make universal entertainment out of a woman’s view of marital discord.

  * * *

  fn1 It was easy to find a conflicting opinion. The dean of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York declared that dissonance in music was bound to lead to emotional problems: ‘I hesitate to think5 of what the effect of music upon the next generation will be if the present school of “hot jazz” continues to develop unabated. It should provide an increasing number of patients for [psychiatric] hospitals.’

  fn2 At nearly 30, he was perfectly poised to act as the narrator of an expectant father’s confusion. As a singer, however, he perfected the song in the 1960s, and his late 40s, on the album The Concert Sinatra.

  fn3 As Down Beat magazine noted in July 1949, ‘An important facet in the polka trend33 is that its principal support comes not from elderly people nostalgic for the old country, but from youngsters who would normally be expected to be infesting bop dens.’

  1

  2

  IT WAS LESS a goatee than a tuft, like a Hitler moustache transposed beneath Dizzy Gillespie’s bottom lip. But the beret and horn-rimmed spectacles were real enough, and together they constituted a persona which was caricatured in the papers and copied by his fans, male and female. In France, they fought over him, bop zazous and swing zazous coming to blows over a set of jazz harmonies. In America, they bought his records, especially when – in a 1945 collaboration with Charlie Parker – he could squeeze bop solos into a rhythmic novelty called ‘Salt Peanuts’ (itself based on a piano phrase Dizzy had borrowed from a Count Basie record).

  Time magazine informed adult America that bop had its own motto (‘Be hip, be sharp3, be bop!’) and language, in which the people who wanted to turn jazz back into Dixieland were ‘moldy figs’. It also provided a definition: ‘hot jazz overheated4, with overdone lyrics full of bawdiness, references to narcotics and doubletalk’. They were actually referring to the jive-filled R&B records of Slim Gaillard, but the link was sufficient for a Los Angeles radio station to ban bop because it incited juvenile delinquency.

  Within nine months of throwing out their ‘Salt Peanuts’, Gillespie and Parker had drifted apart. Dizzy appeared in a low-budget performance movie, Jivin’ in Bebop, and then set out with a big band. Charlie Parker, who had declared that bop wasn’t a descendant of jazz but an entirely new species, criticised Gillespie’s conservatism: ‘A big band slows anybody5 down because you don’t get a chance to play enough. Diz has an awful lot of ideas when he wants to, but if he stays with the big band he’ll forget everything he ever played. He isn’t repeating notes yet, but he is repeating patterns.’ Gillespie replied: ‘Bop is part of jazz6, and jazz music is to dance to. The trouble with bop as it is played today is that people can’t dance to it.’

  Consciously or otherwise, Gillespie was in the throes of a musical discovery that would alter the course of American popular music; but it wasn’t bop. It was his intention, he said, to combine bop not only with Broadway standards, but also with the rhythms of Cuba, ‘which will make it truly7 a music of the Americas’. Whereas the harmonies of bop passed pop by (until they were incorporated, suitably refined, into the jazz-tinged movie and TV soundtracks of the 1950s, the first of which was Alex North’s score for A Streetcar Named Desire), Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban jazz concoction would help to smooth the path for that Caribbean island to claim a disproportionate influence over the American mainstream. During 1947, Dizzy slipped the Cuban percussionist and composer Chano Pozo into his big band. At a Carnegie Hall show in September, and two fertile recording sessions around Christmas, the two men concocted a heavily percussive blend of their native styles. On the two-part piece ‘Cubana Be; Cubana Bop’, Chano’s chattering congas and eerie chanting gradually seized control of the music, like a riposte to the frequent American invasions of his homeland. The pinnacle of their collaboration was ‘Manteca’, a 1948 jukebox favourite anticipating the Latin groove of the early 1970s funk scene, with hand-drum breakdowns ripe for hip-hop sampling. But then Chano Pozo was dead: he had beaten up his dope dealer for selling him substandard marijuana, and the man returned two days later with a pistol to hunt him down. Regardless, Cuban percussion remained in the jazz armoury, and from there it slipped into everything from rock to easy listening in the years ahead.

  In time, other Cuban echoes would also be heard across America. In the singing of the island’s 1930s icons, Miguelito Valdés and Arsenio Rodríguez, it is possible to hear the sultriness of Billy Eckstine or the Elvis Presley of the early 1960s. For America, ‘Latin’ equalled ‘romance’; just as Britain found its symbol of love in Paris (and France invoked the names of cities in Italy, Portugal and Spain to achieve the same effect). But Cuba also offered a more physical presence in its hypnotic rhythms, which would leave their mark everywhere from mid-1950s mambo novelties to the syncopated basslines of James Brown’s band a decade later. The Cuban band led by Tito Puente in the late 1940s were heavy on timbales and vibes, with rhythms that would recur throughout the early work of Stephen Stills, and the most popular Latin-rock band, Santana.

  In 1951, Gabriel García Márquez, yet to conceive the fictional art of magical realism, was a journalist in Colombia, looking out across the Caribbean towards Cuba. It was from that vantage point that he passed judgement on a Cuban style which had recently swept on to American dance floors, by shedding the bop elements of Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban experiment and focusing entirely on the groove. ‘Possibly the mambo is an outrage8’, Márquez wrote. ‘But everybody who sacrifices five cents in the jukebox is, in fact, sufficiently outraged to hope it says something to him that resembles what he wants. And possibly also, the mambo is a danceable outrage … America is shouting itself hoarse with health
y admiration, while maestro Pérez Prado mixes slices of trumpets, chopped-up saxophones, drum salsa [sauce] and pieces of well-seasoned piano.’

  The man born Dámaso Pérez Prado (his stage name was actually his surname) not only popularised the mambo in America and beyond: he taught the fundamental lesson of Cuban music, which was that the body had to be moved in a different way to anything seen in English-speaking nations before. ‘It frightens inhibited people9,’ Perez Prado said, ‘but whips up the blood of those who really love life.’ With the mambo, everything was centred on the hips, which didn’t thrust like a piledriver, as a novice lover might, but undulated, slid, swayed, circled like someone for whom sex and sensuality were the same thing, tantalising and arousing with their passionate rhythm. Admittedly, the mambo couldn’t always evoke those feelings when it was borrowed by the likes of Rosemary Clooney (‘Mambo Italiano’) and Perry Como (‘Papa Loves Mambo’). Pérez Prado’s greatest American success came when he cooled his mambo into something resembling a cha-cha-cha for ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’, in which only an occasional groan – as if a boxer had been punched in the solar plexus – retained any physicality. The hook for that record was the humorous slurring of his lead trumpet, a pale facsimile of the massed horns of his earlier hits, such as ‘Mambo No. 5’ and ‘Que Rico el Mambo’.

  Although he came from Spain rather than Cuba, Xavier Cugat – last sighted in this narrative in 1935, submitting Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ to the rumba rhythm – proved to be the island’s most enduringly popular representative in the United States. It is perhaps fitting that his biggest US hit was entitled, misleadingly, ‘Brazil’, bringing a little indeterminate south-of-the-border exoticism to the wartime landscape of 1943.