by Ben Yagoda
“All I can think of is the day I’ll be free to sit down and write some good old-fashioned score-free songs,” she went on. “Never thought I’d think this way, but I do. Only scores that can tempt me otherwise are those in shows headed for Broadway.”
But there were no Broadway offers on the horizon, and she wasn’t too pleased with the prospect of doing high-quality work in the pop music field. It just didn’t seem to sell, and that fact was reflected in the melodies that came across her desk. “Every composer I’ve met recently seems obsessed with the idea that (pardon the expression) crap is commercial,” she complained toward the end of 1954. “All of their output sounds like every other song I’ve ever heard. I’d give my left eye for eight bars of original music.”
Things looked even bleaker the next year, when a song called “Rock Around the Clock,” recorded by Bill Haley and His Comets and prominently featured in the film Blackboard Jungle, shot to number one on the Hit Parade, considerably surpassing “Sh-Boom” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (Haley’s previous hit). A woman from Columbia, Mississippi, named Elma Duncan had written to Leigh asking for advice about becoming a songwriter. The lengthy reply began by noting Duncan’s grammatical lapses:
You may very well object, on the grounds that many songs which become popular today are full of grammatical mistakes; but I can only answer that the songs which have lasted and will last as “standards” through the years are not songs of the type written by a few lucky semi-illiterates. This last by no means is an allusion to you. I refer to “rock’n roll” and “freak” songs, from the pens of people hoping to make an easy dollar. The records show that these people make that easy dollar once, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, no more than once.
Leigh still had faith in popular song, though she realized it wasn’t an easy road. She told Duncan:
If you have a legitimate talent, have studied and read a great deal and are willing to go on studying and reading for the rest of your life, are financially able to support yourself for at least three to five years, and can in general, cheerfully be able to give up family life, vacations, pride, money—in short, your whole life—why then pack and take the first plane to New York. But be prepared to find that all these conditions fulfilled do not necessarily mean success for you. There is an intangible: luck. Without it all you do is to no avail. I have had overwhelmingly large quantities of that intangible. I cannot guarantee you will, but I wish it to you with all my heart.
VII
The Big Beat
1951–1968
Things were pretty sleepy on the Americana music scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Popular radio was sort of at a standstill and filled with empty pleasantries.
• Bob Dylan
Once upon a time a song had melody and rhyme,
And lovely ballads fused to fill the air.
The songs were sweet and lyrical,
And sang about the miracle
Of love in bloom and love beyond despair.
But gone are the June songs,
The how-high-the-moon songs.
And baritones that used to sing romantic airs
Are singing songs more frantic than romantic.
One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, rock.
You gotta sing rock or you go into hock.
Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, roll.
Throw away your senses and your self-control.
But brother I’ve got news,
Mr. Cole won’t rock and roll!
• “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock and Roll,” by Joe Sherman and Noel Sherman
Beyond, or beneath, the mush at the top of the charts, changes were brewing in the early fifties. Hillbilly music had already made its mark, but vigorous and distinctive new honky-tonk voices like Hank Williams, Floyd Tillman, and Lefty Frizzell were emerging. So were all sorts of propulsive “rhythm and blues” sounds (the term was popularized in the late forties when Jerry Wexler, then an editor at Billboard, adopted it in place of the traditional “race music”) by performers as varied as Louis Jordan, Ike Turner, B.B. King, Charles Brown, Hank Ballard, Muddy Waters, Ruth Brown, the Ravens, the Orioles, the Drifters, and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, who hit big in 1953 with “Hound Dog,” written by two twenty-year-old Jewish kids from Los Angeles, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. All those artists recorded on the hundreds of independent labels that sprang up in the forties and early fifties (with the exception of Jordan, at Decca) and went out over the radio in the country’s largest cities. At first, their tracks were mainly played on stations catering to African-Americans, who had taken part in a massive northern urban migration in the years before, during, and after the war. Then hip white deejays picked them up, and their “teenage” listeners, who represented a demographic group of dramatically increasing significance, responded with enthusiasm.* They loved to listen to this music in their cars, on the jukeboxes at their hangouts, or, in due time, on a recent innovation, a portable device called the transistor radio. A lot of the new music had decidedly mixed parentage, a sense picked up on by a 1953 Billboard headline: POP—C.&W.—R.&B.: DEMARCATION LINES ARE GROWING HAZY.
The jock leading the way was Cleveland’s Alan Freed, who started his wildly popular Moondog Show in 1951 and began promoting touring R&B shows a year later. Rhythm and blues record sales reached an all-time high of $15 million in 1953. In April 1954, Billboard announced, TEEN-AGERS DEMAND MUSIC WITH A BEAT, SPUR RHYTHM-BLUES, and noted, “The teen-age tide has swept down the old barriers which kept this music restricted to a segment of the population.”
The magazine expanded on the subject in a long article that summer:
The rhythm and blues market, formerly restricted wholly to a Negro audience, has repeated the move in the pop field, as did country and western music several years ago. About that time, almost any good c.&w. tune was jumped upon by big label pop a.&r. men. . . . Not only have record stores started selling r.&b. where none was sold before, but juke box operators are reporting requests for r.&b. tunes from pop locations which previously detested the low-down, noisy but exciting numbers. . . . One juke box operator who does terrific business selling used juke box records to neighborhood kids claims the first items they ask for are numbers by such artists as Muddy Waters, Willie Mabon and Ruth Brown.
The following year Billboard was starting to recognize that “the r.&b. invasion is only part of a larger pattern,” one that had brought with it “pain, turmoil and soul-searching. . . . This pattern spells out what has been coming into focus for some years, to wit: The Brill Building, headquarters of the Broadway based publisher, is no longer a tight little isle, and Tin Pan Alley must integrate itself with a larger musical scene if it is to continue its traditional function of song purveyor to the nation.”
When that article appeared, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was nearing the end of its twenty-four weeks on the charts. The following year, 1956, saw the irrefutable arrival of rock and roll in the form of Elvis Presley and his four number-one releases, led by “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog.”
At first, to the extent they paid any attention to it at all, the elders of Tin Pan Alley dismissed rock—sometimes termed “the Big Beat”—not only as a fad but as a fad that was already fading. As early as March 1955, Variety reported that, based on a poll of teenagers, “the popularity of the rock ’n’ roll beat in the New York area is slipping.” In the fall of 1956, even as Elvis was dominating the charts, ASCAP president Paul Cunningham said, “From this point on, we can expect a revival of good music in the style of the Gershwins, the Kerns and the Rombergs.” Clearly, denial was one tack to take. Another was condescension. In a 1956 interview in Down Beat, songwriter Johnny Green (“I Cover the Waterfront,” “Body and Soul”) compared rock and roll to tarragon: a spice that was useful once in a while, but which no one would want as a steady diet. The next year the venerable bandleader P
aul Whiteman said that even though it had only about “two words to a lyric,” rock was all right “in a pretty simple way.” By the end of 1957, rock and roll accounted for forty of the sixty top records, led by Elvis’s “All Shook Up,” which sold 2.4 million copies. As Billboard had to acknowledge in a headline, DEMISE OF R&R JUST SO MUCH WISHFUL THINKING.
The commentary grew more hostile and defensive. Bandleader Bob Crosby told Music Journal, “The so-called ‘tunes’ are monotonous, with a similarity that is often ridiculous.” Meredith Willson, composer of The Music Man, stepped up the attack: “The people of this country do not have any conception of the evil being done by rock ’n’ roll; it is a plague as far reaching as any plague we have ever had. . . . My complaint is that it just isn’t music. It’s utter garbage and it should not be confused in any way with anything related to music or verse.” (One wonders about Willson’s reaction, a half-dozen years hence, to the royalty checks he received from the Beatles’ rendition of his song “Till There Was You” on their album Meet the Beatles.) Frank Sinatra, over whom girls had swooned just a dozen years before, was quoted as saying: “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics, and . . . it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
In response to Elvis—and other overtly sexual performers, like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent—the attack expanded from rock and roll’s (poor) quality to the affront it represented to public safety, moral standards, and common decency. As deejay-sponsored record hops and live performances of rock and roll grew more common, they were accompanied by the occasional fistfight or act of vandalism, shocking both municipal elders and the industry establishment. After a handful of such incidents in 1956, Variety editorialized that rock’s “Svengali grip on the teenagers has produced a staggering wave of juvenile violence and mayhem.” According to an editorial in Music Journal, juvenile delinquents were “definitely influenced in their lawlessness by this throwback to jungle rhythms. Either it actually stirs them to orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves), or they use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions . . . and an incitement to juvenile delinquency.”
There was a racial component to all of this, as there is to most important cultural things that happen in America. As Billboard had observed, young white people were listening to and buying music made by black people, and when their elders started to pay attention to this music, they couldn’t help noticing that some of it was off-color. The suggestiveness in “Sixty Minute Man,” “Work with Me, Annie,” and its follow-up, “Annie Had a Baby,” wasn’t so different from Lorenz Hart’s “Horizontally speaking, he’s at his very best” (from “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) or Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” but then again, in some ways it was very different indeed. In December 1954, the Music Publishers’ Protective Association passed a resolution condemning “dirty” songs “as showing bad taste and a disregard for recognized moral standards and conventions.” Early in 1955, Variety ran a three-part series on “leer-ics.” Radio stations around the country dutifully responded. In Houston, the Juvenile Delinquency and Crime Commission created a “Wash-Out-the-Air” subcommittee, which produced a list of twenty-six records they deemed “suggestive, obscene, and characterized by lewd intentions.” All the songs were licensed by BMI, all the records were on independent labels, and almost all were by blacks, including Ray Charles (“I Got a Woman”), Clyde McPhatter (“Whatcha Gonna Do Now?”), and Roy Brown (“Good Rockin’ Tonight”). All the radio stations in Houston dropped the songs.
The major record companies had a subtler but ultimately more effective way of co-opting the new music. In 1954, an African-American vocal group called the Chords released “Sh-Boom,” a record that resembled what the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers had been doing for a decade or more, with a prominently peppy beat and a moderately honking saxophone solo in the middle. Shortly after it began to climb the pop charts, Mercury released an almost completely identical version of the song, by a Canadian group called the Crew-Cuts; as their name implied, they were white. There was nothing illegal about the practice: under the Copyright Act or 1909 only the text of a song was protected, not the arrangement or interpretation. (Writers of the original songs did get royalties on the cover versions, depending on their publishing contracts.) The Chords’ “Sh-Boom” peaked at number five on the charts in 1954; the Crew-Cuts’ version was number one for nine weeks in a row. The same thing happened the following year when Georgia Gibbs reproduced LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” almost note for note. In the years ahead, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and other black artists repeatedly had their songs—often in cleaned-up versions—appropriated by white singers, most notoriously Pat Boone, who released pale versions of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti.”
The arrival of rock and roll coincided with and was connected to some profound long-term changes in popular music, including a new primacy of record labels over publishers and performers over writers, and a centrifugal decentralization of the industry, away from New York. But the music itself wasn’t monolithic, and the dominance that rock (broadly defined) would eventually have over pop wasn’t anything close to immediate. The same kinds of songs that had done so well in the early fifties—sentimental, soothing, homespun, novel, or possessing some combination of those qualities—continued to be written, recorded, and purchased.
In 1956, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, now writing movie theme songs almost exclusively, provided a lilting lullaby called “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” for Alfred Hitchcock’s remake of his 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. Doris Day sang it at a crucial plot point in the film. According to the website devoted to the work and legacy of Ray Evans, she initially refused to make a record of “Que Sera” “because she thought it was a children’s song. But this was the important song in the picture, so Paramount insisted that she record it. Paul Weston, who was present at the recording session, said that she knocked it off in one take and said, ‘That’s the last time you’ll ever hear that song.’” Day’s record ended up being on the charts for twenty-seven weeks, reaching as high as number two. And “Que Sera” won Livingston and Evans their third (and final) Best Original Song Oscar.*
The veteran songwriter Harry Ruby (“Three Little Words,” “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”), who, at seventy-one, was three years older than Irving Berlin, wrote a letter to Jay and Ray:
Last Saturday when I heard “THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE” on the Hit Parade—and another little ditty, entitled: “WHATEVER WILL BE, WILL BE,” I wanted to shout. When such songs can be on top, it proves that, as I have always said, the public does not get mad when someone writes a real song—the kind of song that’s here to-day and will be here tomorrow. Which reminds me that I have not heard “CEMENT MIXER” lately.
As for the others songs on the same Hit Parade “HOUND DOG,” “DON’T BE CRUEL,” etc., if you fellers wrote those too, what I said in paragraph one still goes.
Livingston and Evans had an even bigger success the next year with an even simpler and more sentimental tune: “Tammy,” from the film Tammy and the Bachelor. The record by the movie’s star, Debbie Reynolds, was number one for six straight weeks, and the song was nominated for an Academy Award, losing to Van Heusen and Cahn’s “All the Way.” “Tammy” was recorded over the next decade by dozens of singers and orchestras, collectively selling more than 18 million records.
When Reynolds’s record was rising high, the boys were interviewed by the Los Angeles Mirror-News for an article called “Rock ’n’ Roll Termed Gyp.” In the course of the short piece, they covered nearly all the standard reactions against the new music. Jay was quoted as saying: “The kids are being short-changed, cheated out of a part of culture.
They won’t have anything to be nostalgic about. How are they going to be able to look into each other’s eyes and sigh, ‘They’re playing our tune,’ when the radio’s blaring ‘Raunchy’?”
Ray chimed in: “And 10 years from now, who’s going to remember a 1958 top hit—‘Short Shorts’?”
Jay: “Professional writers can’t and won’t write rock and roll, so it’s being done by the amateurs. In rock and roll, it’s the noise on the record that counts, not the music. . . . Formerly, many would go from an interest in pop tunes to an interest in classical music. But where do you go from rock and roll?”*
The same week, Billboard extensively quoted one of Jay and Ray’s colleagues, Pat Ballard, a fifty-eight-year-old songwriter who had had a couple of hits in 1954 with “Mister Sandman” and “(Oh Baby Mine) I Get So Lonely.” Ballard issued what the magazine described as “a call to veteran songwriters with prebop hits behind them to write for today’s market or retire gracefully.”
“It’s worldwide, so it’s our duty to produce something to entertain,” said the cleffer/publisher/producer. “The Juilliard boys destroyed the dance beat with their over-arrangements, so kids naturally have taken to rock ’n’ roll, they’re starved for a beat. . . . Isn’t it ridiculous to call yourself a songwriter if you haven’t written anything since 1940? To write what communicates to the youngsters of the world is a privilege, not a bore. Let’s get off our fat royalties and work at our profession.”