The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  Post-war jazz relied for its forward-moving momentum on being daringly free with the regular, four-beats-in-a-bar pulse. Instead of emphasising the strong beats as the foot-tappingly predictable swing had done, bebop deliberately resisted, suspending the rigid reiteration of the regular pulse. Take as an example Cab Calloway’s 1934 swing classic ‘Jitter Bug’ – the hit, incidentally, that caused the meaning of the expression jitterbug to change from someone suffering from alcohol-induced shakes to someone who dances to swing. Its steady, reliable beat acts as an anchor to the syncopated vocal line, while the rhythm guitar, bass and drums act as a unit to keep the clockwork of the pulse ticking along. Any stretches to the expected fall of the beat (that is, syncopation) are clearly audible against the main beat. In contrast, the steady 1-2-3-4 beat is virtually inaudible in the 1945 radio broadcast recording of ‘Air Mail Special’ by bebop pioneers Billy Eckstine and his Orchestra, giving way instead to syncopated, off-beat, high-speed brass phrases. Previously non-emphasised divisions of the pulse are now the principal motors of the rhythmic drive, with drummer Art Blakey playing furiously with ride cymbals and the kick-drum to serve up snapped, unpredictable accents in seemingly – though never actually – random beats. The overall effect sounds as if the drummer, formerly the guardian of the steady pulse, has been asked to improvise a solo from the first beat of the piece.

  In the late 1940s, Billy Eckstine’s big band boasted among its ranks some of the rising stars of the bebop era: Blakey, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and Fats Navarro. But while they were impressing each other on the road with their tightrope-without-a-safety-net virtuosity, there was another, quite opposite impulse emerging. It was a musical impulse that relied slavishly on hypnotic repetition and had an unbending loyalty to four steady beats, and it took the world by storm.

  Although it grew out of swing and the pioneering electric guitar figures of Charlie Christian, early rock and roll announced its intention to go light on improvisation and heavy on rhythm guitar. Whereas bebop took from Christian’s playing style the inspiration of his free-flowing solos, rock and roll took the sound of his accompanying – ‘rhythm’ – guitar grooves. If he had been a piano player instead of a guitarist, one might say bebop grew from the solos of his right hand while rock and roll grew from the accompaniment of his left. From the outset, of course, the functions of bebop and rock and roll were different and distinct, as were their respective audiences: jazz was for cool dudes to listen to, and rock and roll was for teenagers to dance and date to. And teenagers suddenly existed, apparently, after 1950.

  Indeed, the affluence of post-war America – and eventually Europe – saw a generation of carefree teenagers with pocket money to spend, and they wanted to spend it on rock and roll. Transistor radios and Dansette record players opened a bustling new market for record companies and they began producing music specifically aimed at teenagers. Increasingly it became the case that albums were for adults and hit-parade singles were for the youth. The song generally identified as the first rock and roll record is ‘Rocket 88’, composed by Ike Turner’s saxophonist Jackie Brenston and released in April 1951. (The song, which extols the virtues of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible as a metaphor for sexual prowess, was in fact based pretty unapologetically on two earlier tracks: ‘Rocket 88 Boogie’ (1949) by boogie pianist Pete Johnson, and ‘Cadillac Boogie’ (1947) by Jimmy Liggins.)

  But before the new genre could become a universally addictive sensation it needed to undergo some fine-tuning, particularly in its choice of instruments. The major feature shared by rock and roll’s prototypes is the swinging triplet of the piano. But this instrument’s dominating role in churning out the oscillating left-hand chords or defining the ‘walking’ bass line in boogie-piano style – a more frantic contemporary of ragtime popular in the 1930s and ’40s – was gradually taken over by the guitar on chords, with a double-bass (later bass guitar) dealing with the ‘walking’. In addition the (at first unintentional) distortions of the electric guitar were later added deliberately, the sound blurring and fuzzing, and generally becoming ‘dirtier’ as its volume was cranked up in the amplifier.

  All that was now needed to turn this cocktail into a mass youth movement with electric guitar at its throbbing centre was for some white guys to repackage this black music for an even wider audience. We have already witnessed black music being ‘bleached’ for greater commercial appeal a number of times, often to the dismay of its original performers. (The extent to which this had been true of jazz and swing led Art Blakey, who frequently hired white musicians, to observe somewhat resentfully that ‘The black musician… his thing is to swing. Well, the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is at the end of a rope. Swinging is our field and we should stay in it.’5) But there was no stopping the inexorable takeover of rock and roll by big-name white musicians, and there were plenty of candidates willing to become the heart-throbs of a generation.

  First in line was a man who looks to us like an insurance salesman at his daughter’s wedding karaoke, but who was to the upstanding middle class of the early 1950s the very incarnation of a rock and roll Satan: Bill Haley. He too jumped on the ‘Rocket 88’ bandwagon with a cover of the song, also in 1951. He and his Comets went on to have a series of enormous chart hits, including ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ in 1954 – originally composed, incidentally, by African-American Jesse Stone and previously recorded by African-American Big Joe Turner – and Max C. Freedman’s ‘Rock around the clock’ in 1955, but they were eclipsed soon enough by the much more charismatic Elvis Presley.

  The phenomenon of Elvis – good-looking, mildly rebellious, an expressive and versatile voice, a distinctive dancer, as good on film as on record, well promoted by a cunning team of managers and writers – is one that record executives have tried to emulate time and again over the course of the pop age. But Elvis did not bring just charisma and energy to the music scene; he also introduced two musical elements to the black Rhythm and Blues mix that was standard currency among American musicians of the early 1950s: the simplicity and liveliness of country music, known at the time as hillbilly or rockabilly, and the soul-searching yearning of gospel. This last ingredient, implausibly combined with uninhibited sexuality, was what gave his vocal renditions such quivering power, even when the subject matter was physical, rather than spiritual, love.

  Unlike the giants of the 1960s, though – Bob Dylan and The Beatles for starters – Elvis did not carve out his larger-than-life identity through material he had actually composed himself, and by the time of his later Las Vegas residencies he was essentially a variety turn, reminding his inevitably older, richer audiences of their carefree youth. Dylan, on the other hand, though not gifted with Elvis’s tremulous voice or elastic thighs, wrote the kind of lyrics that might change a whole society’s way of seeing itself. Notwithstanding their chart success, his acute observations on modern society – ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, ‘The times they are a-changing’, ‘Only a pawn in their game’ and ‘The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll’ – have rarely been matched in any field. That America’s conscience, in the period of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, was pricked not by classical composers but rather by this awkward Jewish maverick with his guitar and harmonica – nothing more complicated than a folk singer, essentially – shows the extent to which musical tastes had changed by the 1960s. The signs had been there since the rise of radios and records in the 1920s and ’30s, but now it was an inescapable reality: pop, be it folk, Blues, rock or gospel-based, was the music of the twentieth century.

  The explosion in popular songwriting in the second half of the twentieth century is a joyous thing. But the sheer volume of songs being composed, albums being recorded and careers being launched at the dawn of the pop age should not blind us to the fact that, in purely musical terms, the vast majority of melodies, harmonies and rhythms were both relatively limited and relatively static in comparison to either jazz or classical music of the nineteenth and twentie
th centuries. In a hundred years from now, with the dispassionate benefit of hindsight, it will be possible to describe large swathes of the pop, rock and soul repertoire as variants on the basic Blues template, with a straight four-in-a-bar drumbeat, a diet of between three and twelve chords, and a smallish smorgasbord of instruments to choose from: guitar, bass, keyboard, drums.

  This is not to say that the ingenuity and character given to these meagre resources over the past few decades has not been staggering, nor that the journey from (apparently) innocent teen fun in the late 1950s to the sophistication and diversity of the modern pop industry is not remarkable in itself. But pop has certainly remained true to a number of tried and tested templates since its early days; one might even say the ground rules for the way commercial pop would work were laid down from the very beginning. Talent contests and megalomaniac record producers have always paired ingénue wannabes with experienced songwriters, for instance, cashing in quickly on success before the public’s appetite for novelty fades. Rags-to-riches ascents are inevitably followed by equally rapid riches-to-rags descents, while established set-ups such as the high-school girl group – early pioneers were The Marvelettes, The Ronettes and The Shirelles in the early 1960s – are still very much with us today.

  But against this tradition of pop history repeating itself, certain artists have stood out for their engagement in a deeper exploration of the popular song form – even finding success with these unconventional endeavours in an industry increasingly motivated by money. As had been the case in earlier centuries – with classical composers such as Bach, Handel, Mozart and Mahler – the pop era composers who made the most profound impact over time were those able to synthesise and absorb the many styles and influences around them, wrapping them up in something of their own. Stevie Wonder, surely one of the greatest of all twentieth-century musicians in any field, was one such gatherer of styles. The fusion of influences that characterised his music proved both irresistible and irreversible: we can hear his masterly hand behind almost all modern black music, even if his deeply felt spirituality has largely been stripped out along the way. In his landmark albums of the 1970s, Wonder combined the prevailing Blues and gospel-influenced pop he had grown up singing in his childhood Motown days (such as ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours’ and ‘For Once in My Life’) with the exhilarating dance rhythms and sultry jazz chords of central and southern America, which he had discovered as a young adult. The most influential of these exotic beats came from the dynamic rhythmic hub of Cuba.

  The distinctive Cuban dimension in Latin American music that so inspired Stevie Wonder and others had only really escaped from its island home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Around the time that ragtime and the Blues were giving way to jazz in mainland America, a form of music called son was becoming popular in Cuba. Son was a hybrid African-European song type that could be danced to, and it comprised three main rhythmic layers: a bass line that determined the (mostly) minor-key chord sequences of ‘primary colour’ chords I, IV and V, and which moved at a slightly slower pace; an eight-beat repeated syncopated pattern that worked as an embellishment against a simple reiterated ‘clave’ (both a term for a repeating pattern and the percussion instrument that might play it); and a piano or guitar figure, also shaped into eight-beat patterns, which glued together the bass and percussion components. From son an abundant range of dance and song types blossomed: danzón, rumba, guaguanco, yambu, bossa nova, mambo, chachacha, conga, and eventually salsa. These forms came to have enormous influence on twentieth-century music, first in the Americas and then in time around the world, through popular music of countless genres. But what was it about the three-layered Cuban son rhythm pattern that was so seductive?

  For one thing, Cuban folk songs fused a European-style chordal guitar accompaniment with an African approach to rhythm, whereby patterns would be layered one on top of another – rather like the polyrhythm we encountered in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In a sense, layered rhythm patterns were a percussive version of harmony: each player’s individual pattern fitted to the ones already up and running until there might be four, five or six different repeating rhythmic phrases operating at the same time. To African drums, the Cubans gradually added an array of percussion instruments that were native to the region, such as the claves and the maracas. (The urge to complicate a rhythmic pattern was so great in Cubans, in fact, that Havana dock workers were famous for making up highly sophisticated percussion improvisations from the packing cases and trunks they had stacked all around them, each docker adding his own variation to the whole. These impromptu packing-case sessions were still being performed in the 1960s.)

  Secondly, there was a particular type of syncopation that originated in son that proved irresistible to late-twentieth-century ears. This syncopation is now so common in all popular music that it has quite forgotten its Cuban roots. It is a kind of mirror image of swing, and although it hasn’t got a name one might call it ‘lurch’. We have already heard swing performers of the jazz scene holding back the melody a little to give it a degree of elasticity against the main beat, a syncopation brought about by delaying the expected fall of the pulse. In Cuban son, however, the melody is elastic in the other direction: it anticipates the main beat. Nowadays, this kind of ‘pushed’ melody – where the melodic line nudges ahead of the beat – has become so commonplace that singing without it would sound odd, stiff and stilted; it is virtually unheard-of in the classical world but I doubt there is a single pop song since the Second World War that does not make use of it. In Beyoncé’s ‘If I Were a Boy’ (2008), for example, the anticipation can be heard as she arrives (too early) on the word ‘boy’ – the main underlying beat she technically should arrive on follows shortly afterwards. Likewise, Adele’s 2008 cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’ ends each line of the first verse on two anticipated beats: ‘blowing in your face… on your case… warm embrace’.

  In Cuban son it is not just the melody, whether played on a trumpet or sung, that pushes ahead, but also the bass line. Indeed, the fact that the bass jumps ahead of the beat is what gives son such a powerful dance feel: it almost pushes your feet to move. The definitive introduction to this style is the work of the prolific composer and bandleader Ignacio Piñeiro, who made a number of son recordings with his Sexteto – later Septeto – Nacional between 1927 and 1935. One of them, ‘Échale Salsita’ (1930), even gave birth to the term, and later genre, salsa. Easily the most famous son, ‘Guajira Guantanamera’, attributed to Joseíto Fernández, is practically the national song of Cuba (as well as the tune of choice for a variety of football chants around the world). In this classic, as well as in the other early sons, the gently strumming guitars play the regular, pacesetting beats, and the voice and bass then nudge ahead of every ‘downbeat’ – that is, the strong first beat of any group or bar. Meanwhile the percussion instruments layer on another set of patterns, African style.

  There was a seductive sway to this type of syncopation that complemented the sexy, body-to-body, hip-orientated nature of Cuban dance; being ‘forward’ fits neatly with both the physical and musical nature of Cuban rhythm. Nothing could be further from the non-contact European court dances with which the colonial sugar-cane and coffee-plantation owners had wiled away their evenings before Cuban independence. But the interesting thing about this irresistible new form of syncopation is that the early Cuban prototypes that started spreading across the Americas in the 1930s and ’40s did not ride roughshod over the pulling, delaying swing of jazz; rather the two styles merged and combined, offering a whole new palette of musical possibility.

  Nobody mined the ambiguities available in these seemingly contradictory syncopations with more dazzling panache than Stevie Wonder, combining – often within the same song – the relaxed Latin feel of them with the steady, pressing groove of urban black soul music; a prime example is the infectiously jerky ‘Don’t you worry ’bout a thing’. But while Wonder was a pioneer of twentieth-ce
ntury musical fusion – from jazz chords (‘You are the sunshine of my life’, ‘Isn’t she lovely?’), Latin rhythms (‘Ngicuela – Es Una Historia – I am Singing’), classical pastiche (‘Pastime paradise’, ‘Village ghetto land’), swing-era pastiche (‘Sir Duke’), gospel anthems (‘Heaven help us all’, ‘Love’s in need of love today’) and Motown grooves (‘Superstition’, ‘Higher Ground’) – even he, inspired as he was by the sacred music of his childhood, never thought to incorporate a German Lutheran hymn tune that had been harmonised by Bach into a pop song. This was the idea of one of his most brilliant contemporaries, Paul Simon, with his knowingly entitled 1973 hit ‘American Tune’.

  Simon’s choice of hymn was in fact rather apt. The origin of the hymn, ‘Ich will hier bei dir stehen’ (I will stand by you), generally known in English as ‘O Sacred Head Sore Wounded’, is medieval, but its tune started life as a secular love song from around 1600 called ‘Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret’, which loosely translates as ‘All shook up’. We saw in an earlier chapter that Martin Luther’s enthusiasm for congregational singing prompted the early Lutheran Church to borrow favourite tunes, often popular folk songs, and give them holy words, so in a sense Paul Simon’s expropriation of the tune was simply returning it to its populist, unholy roots.