by Ben Yagoda
The country music industry, aided if not actually created by BMI, had by this time established in Nashville a center of songwriting, publishing, and recording. Tennessee’s Democratic senator Albert Gore (father of the future vice president) read into the record a telegram from Governor Frank Clement stating that Packard’s testimony was “a gratuitous insult to thousands of our fellow Tennesseans both in and out of the field of country music.” Gore, an amateur country fiddler, added his own opinion that country music expressed the “hopes and aspirations” of the people of his state. “I would not like to see all country music branded intellectually cheap.” This was more than Arthur Schwartz could take. “If you attack country music you attack southern womanhood, I see,” he remarked to no one in particular.
Possibly the most effective witnesses were a series of country-and-western songwriters and performers, who, with thoughtfulness, dignity, and humor, described how ASCAP for years had presented them with a closed door, while BMI publishers had allowed their songs to be widely heard for the first time.
Gene Autry: “Well, I tried to get into ASCAP as far back as 1930, and could not get an audience, or could not even get in.”
Pee Wee King: “I started writing my own material and collaborating with other writers in the 1930s. I, frankly, never even bothered to apply for an ASCAP membership. I did talk about the possibility to some ASCAP writers I know, such as Bobby Gregory and Bob Lamm, a young man on the record ‘Near You.’ They were so discouraging about the possibility of my getting into ASCAP that I never pursued it further.”
The Honorable Jimmie Davis, former governor of Louisiana and the author of “You Are My Sunshine” and other songs: “I . . . found that the welcome mat at the ASCAP door had a way of disappearing for writers engaged in the country and western, folk music, and gospel music field.” Davis finally got into ASCAP as a “nonparticipating” member, meaning that he received no payments from the society. “I never succeeded in collecting a single penny from ASCAP for the performance of my music even though it was being extensively played all over the country,” he said. “ASCAP was interested in a limited group of writers and a limited kind of music.”
The Smathers bill didn’t get out of committee.
In December 1959, more than six years after Schwartz v. Broadcast Music, Inc. was filed, Federal District Judge Edward Weinfeld ruled in response to the defendants’ motion for summary dismissal. He noted the 20,000 pages of testimony that had accumulated thus far, the 11,000 exhibits filling 55,000 pages, and observed, with palpable annoyance, that “the extensive, if not prolific, affidavits and briefs submitted in support of, and in opposition to, the motion, have strayed in a number of instances far and wide from the basic question.” Nevertheless, he could cut through the haze enough to make some judgments. The law held that, in order to collect damages, a plaintiff must be directly injured. And, with respect to public performance rights—over the airwaves and in live performance—he found that the party directly hurt by any conspiracy would not be any individual songwriter but the organization that licensed a songwriter’s works. “No matter how phrased,” Weinfeld wrote of the suit, “it cannot obscure the fact that ASCAP, and not the individual composers, is the direct target of the alleged conspiracy. Any other conclusion flies in the face of reality.” And therefore, “with respect to the nondramatic public performance rights, the plaintiffs are without standing to sue.” So any losses related to radio airplay—the focus of the vast majority of testimony in the courts and congressional hearings—were suddenly off the table.
Weinfeld allowed the suit to proceed with respect to publishing and recording rights. However, the following March, Sylvester J. Ryan, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of New York, issued a ruling that was about as devastating to Schwartz and his colleagues as a ruling could be, short of dismissal. He limited the damages sought by the thirty-three plaintiffs to the financial losses they could prove they actually suffered as a result of the so-called conspiracy. In other words, in order to win the case, Ira Gershswin would have to prove that he could have earned more from recordings of, say, “I’ve Got a Crush on You” if the alleged conspiracy hadn’t been in place—and show exactly how much more money he would have made! That would seem to be an impossible proposition. But the plaintiffs who were still alive persisted, and the suit dragged on.
In 1959, Nat King Cole was quoted in Variety as saying, “We’ve entered the era of the complete takeover and the payola . . . I know some of these disk jockeys and you can’t tell me they like this stuff they’re plugging.” “Payola,” sometimes preceded by the word “the” and sometimes called “payolas,” had been recognized as a fact of Tin Pan Alley life basically since forever, though admittedly it had picked up with the postwar rise of the disk jockey and had become an accepted part of the way the legion of independent labels did business. Billboard noted in 1952, “The very general method of promoting r.&b. disks is by means of the deejay, and the payola has become standard operating procedure with a number of indies who regard this payment as advertising.”
Now, with the Schwartz suit going nowhere and nothing happening in Congress, alleged payola to disk jockeys replaced BMI favoritism as the most popular scapegoat for the perceived decline of popular music. There was no question that some bribery existed in the industry, but it took place on all levels. The transparency of focusing on payments to deejays by small labels didn’t escape Jack Gould of The New York Times, no rock-and-roll apologist. Gould wrote that the jocks were “relatively small fry when it comes to payoffs” and remarked that the allegations originated “with many of the country’s foremost composers—the writers of Broadway and Hollywood hit tunes—who have been dismayed to witness the dominance of rock ’n’ roll on the nation’s airwaves.” To prove that even intense exposure to a bad record couldn’t force the public to buy it, four deejays in Norfolk, Virginia, played a song called “Pahalacaka” 320 times in one day and marched outside the station carrying a placard that read, “We want payola too.” They made their point, but they were suspended, leaving the station with no one to man the turntables.
Little mentioned was the fact that no federal law existed against commercial bribery of the sort that payola represented. Some states had such statutes, but they had been prosecuted rarely, if at all. Nevertheless, the scandal, such as it was, struck a chord with the public and took on a life of its own. Several deejays in major cities resigned or were fired over payola, most notably Alan Freed, at the time the host of a rock-and-roll program on a New York television station. He was quoted as saying, “What they call payola in the disk-jockey business, they call lobbying in Washington.” Dick Clark, whose American Bandstand ABC TV show was broadcast over the country from a studio in Philadelphia, agreed to divest himself of all publishing and recording interests and was allowed to stay on the air.
By the end of 1959, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, New York City district attorney Frank Hogan, and the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight—which had recently concluded its widely publicized investigation of fixed television quiz shows—had all begun separate payola probes. The House subcommittee began hearings in February and heard from a parade of disk jockeys, most acknowledging some level of payola, rarely amounting to more than a few thousand dollars a year. The jocks frequently added that the payments did not influence their decisions on what records to play. Stan Richards, formerly with Boston’s WILD, compared the money he got to “going to school and giving the teacher a better gift than the fellow at the next desk. It seems to be the American way of life.” However, Norm Prescott, of WBZ in Boston, was asked by Representative John Bennett if he thought the “junk music, rock and roll stuff” would be played without payola. Prescott replied, “Never get on the air.” The final witness was Dick Clark, who, despite evidence that American Bandstand consistently favored records in which Clark himself had an interest, consistently deni
ed any ill intent, emerged without a scratch, and continued his fabulously successful career.
The bill Congress ultimately passed did not outlaw payola. Rather, it mandated that if deejays accepted any promotional “consideration,” they had to inform the station owner or manager, and it had to be announced on the air.
• • •
Reading the testimony at the various congressional hearings, you would get the impression that no music other than rock-and-roll junk was being recorded or made. While it’s true that the Big Beat had come to dominate the singles market and as a result the radio, a whole other area of popular music had been claimed by grown-ups.
Television became a significant force in music and much else in 1952, when more liberal FCC policies led to a tripling of the number of stations. Subsequently, every popular singer was a regular “guest” on variety programs, and many—Perry Como, Nat King Cole, and so on—became the “hosts” of their own shows. The TV musical repertoire was a mix of inoffensive current hits, tried-and-true standards, and forgettable special material. “Spectaculars,” such as the NBC productions Carolyn Leigh worked on for Max Liebman, initially promised to be a market for high-quality original popular songs, but faded away after a few years of prominence in the middle of the decade. Only a handful of scores produced lasting songs. One was Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s for an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in which Frank Sinatra, as the Stage Manager, sang “Love and Marriage,” a singsongy piece of conventional wisdom that wasn’t up to the best of the writers’ work but was a hit for Sinatra and Dinah Shore, as well as the template for the long-running Campbell’s advertising campaign “Soup and Sandwich.” Two years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein ventured into television with a score for Cinderella that included the soon-to-become standards “In My Own Little Corner” and “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?”
Development in recording technology had a more significant impact than television. In 1948, two new formats were introduced that had records spin at, respectively, 331/3 and 45 revolutions per minute. Each had a corporate sponsor (CBS and Columbia Records for the 331/3, NBC and RCA Victor for the 45), and for a while the two battled it out, but before long they amicably divided up the sonic territory and in so doing put the traditional 78 out of business, except for some children’s records and other specialized uses. The 45 took the singles market, and 331/3 became the format for long-playing records, or LPs. By 1955, seven years after they were introduced, long-playing albums accounted for half of all record revenues.
The dual formats deepened the gap between the kids’ stuff on singles (rock and roll, novelty numbers, romantic fluff) and the more grown-up fare on LPs. And what constituted grown-up fare in the mid-to-late 1950s? From the beginning, there was a strong bond between this format and the Broadway stage. The South Pacific cast album was the best-selling LP of 1949, 1950, and 1951, and it was followed by records from other musicals, the most successful over the decade being My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music.
LPs also proved a perfect format for multiple variations on what had traditionally been dubbed “light music,” a kind of blend between the sweet big bands and classical symphonies. A pioneer of the genre was a Russian émigré named Andre Kostelanetz, who, with his sixty-five-piece orchestra, had presided over popular radio programs since the 1930s, and who started putting out records for Columbia in 1941. Also popular were onetime piano prodigy Morton Gould and the Canadian conductor Percy Faith, who had a radio show called The Carnation Contented Hour and became a trusted member of Mitch Miller’s musical staff at Columbia in the fifties.
The stage was set for the arrival of the LP, which had not only a (self-described) long playing time but also the capacity for stereophonic sound and otherwise distinctly higher fidelity than the 78. That is, it allowed you to put on a record, go about your business (whatever your business was), and have appropriate music in the background for a half hour or so—and even longer than that after the invention of the record changer, which allowed the listener to program a stack of disks for a whole evening’s entertainment. Paul Weston, the music director at Capitol Records (and former Tommy Dorsey arranger), was an influential figure in this narrative even before the invention of the LP. After the war, he told author Joseph Lanza, “the tunes got slower and slower. Jitterbugging went out, and my albums stepped into the gap.” The first such album was 1945’s Music for Dreaming, followed by Music for Memories, Music for Romancing, Music for the Fireside, and Music for Reflection. In 1950, Coronet magazine, coining a phrase, dubbed him “the Master of Mood Music.” Weston, with his strong jazz credentials, was ambivalent about the designation. He commented that a “reliance on strings without the jazz feel I brought even to my ballads was the reason the term ‘elevator music’ came to symbolize most of the later mood music attempts.”
Lanza is the foremost chronicler and appreciator of this multifaceted genre, and in his book on it—unapologetically titled Elevator Music—he provides a useful catalog of its common properties: “Slower, more hypnotic time signatures; massed strings treated with echo-reverberation; background vocals that sounded more angelic (or, in some cases, demonic) than human; and often well-conceived theories about music’s utilitarian function.”
An impressive assortment of practitioners followed Weston. One of the most successful was the television comedian Jackie Gleason, who in 1952 attached his name to a Capitol album called Music for Lovers Only, featuring dozens of strings and a single trumpet, played by the former Glenn Miller sideman Bobby Hackett. It is unclear how much Gleason contributed to the arrangements or the recording sessions. According to his biographer William A. Henry III, his musical directions were along the lines of saying he wanted something “like the sound of pissing off a high bridge into a teacup.” Gleason probably had more of a hand in the steamy cover art of the album (which would become as much of a hallmark of this genre as of mass-market paperbacks) and the general hubba-hubba air of the enterprise. “It’s five a.m.,” he reflected, “and you see her body outlined through her dress by the streetlight, and you get that ‘Mmmmmm, I want to come’ feeling.”
Whoever was responsible in what measure, the formula worked. Music for Lovers Only sold 500,000 copies and kicked off a series of more than forty Gleason LPs through the decade, cumulatively selling more than 120 million copies. His best year was 1954, when he was responsible for four of the ten top-selling LPs.
Gould, Faith, Kostelanetz, and Mantovani (a native of Italy who at a young age dropped his first name, Annunzio, and whose Decca LPs showed a deep belief in the seemingly magical power of a great many strings) all had classical credentials. In contrast, the Massachusettsan Ray Conniff was a big-band trombonist before and after World War II. Once the big-band era ended, he found himself working for $30 a week as a pick-and-shovel laborer. He decided to conduct a study of exactly what made a hit record. He later recalled: “There was always a pattern in the background. You could call it a ghost tune behind the apparent one. And there was another pattern, a pattern of tempo. All I can see is that it’s a sort of pulsing. The average person likes to hear a pulsation, not obvious, but reassuringly there in the background.” Conniff took this discovery to Mitch Miller, who took him on as an engineer and arranger. For Don Cherry’s 1955 song “Band of Gold,” he hired background singers for the date and—crucially—had them sing nonsense syllables, not words. “Band of Gold” went to number five on the charts. The next year, Columbia signed Conniff to create his first LP, ’S Wonderful, which he recorded with eighteen musicians and eight wordless singers. It was in the Cashbox top album chart for thirty-eight weeks. Through 1965, Conniff had twenty-eight more albums on the charts.
Virtuoso keyboard playing constituted a whole separate mood-music category, as seen in the triumphs of the semi-classical Liberace, the team of Ferrante and Teicher, and Roger Williams, who in 1955 released “Autumn Leaves,” the only instrumental to reach num
ber one on the Billboard charts. (“Autumn Leaves” was a French song to which Johnny Mercer had given English lyrics in 1947.) Pianists with serious jazz credentials, including George Shearing, Erroll Garner, Dick Hyman, and Peter Nero, made frequent and successful sorties into the mood-music world.
In 1947, an arranger and orchestra leader named Les Baxter released a 78-rpm album called Music out of the Moon, and thus inaugurated a subgenre that simulated the sounds of tropical jungles and distant planets. Baxter’s most successful disciples were Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny, a California pianist who in the mid-fifties incorporated birdcalls and Latin rhythms to the music his combo played during their continuing gig at a Hawaii bar. In 1957, Denny put out an album called Exotica, which finally gave this genre its name. It reached the top of the Billboard charts in 1959 and stayed there for five weeks.
Clearly, mood music was multifaceted. Possibly the only two traits its various manifestations shared were a sense that it could be played in the background and an indifference to the value of songs.
• • •
As the 1950s drew to a close, most of the former big-band singers who had broken through as solo artists a decade before were having a tough time of it. Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett made out the best, but other middle-aged male singers had little luck, especially on the singles charts. The cohort consisted of Bennett and Sinatra’s Italian paesani Perry Como, Vic Damone, Julius La Rosa, Frankie Laine, Jerry Vale, Al Martino, and Dean Martin, as well as the variously ethnic Andy Williams (Norwegian), the young Jack Jones (the WASP son of the movie star Allan Jones), Steve Lawrence and Eddie Fisher (Jewish), and Sammy Davis Jr. (Jewish and black). These crooners’ success came mainly via polished middle-of-the-road LPs composed of show tunes, movie themes, and the occasional rock-and-roll hit whose rough edges could be smoothed away.