Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Just My Soul Responding

University of California Press

Chapter One

"I hear you knocking ...":
from r&b to rock and roll

I heard Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers. The Charioteers, Red Foley, Hank Williams, Glenn Miller, Tex Beneke ... I heard Sonny Til and the Orioles ... But then on Sunday I heard Wings Over Jordan and the Southernaires, and the Golden Gate Quartet ... A lot of different influences. (Ruth Brown)

"Sh-boom"

When the Chords' "Sh-boom" crossed over from the Rhythm and Blues charts intothe predominantly white pop charts in July 1954, it was not the first r&brecord to leap that racial and commercial divide. "Gee" by the Crows -- thelatest in a flock of "bird" vocal groups descended from the Ravens andOrioles -- had pecked at the lower reaches of the pop chart earlier thatyear. The Dominoes' "Sixty-minute man", Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy",and Faye Adams' "Shake a hand" were among the other r&b records which hadappeared on that chart earlier still. Nevertheless, LeRoi Jones (Imamu AmiriBaraka) was essentially right to claim that r&b in the early 1950s "was stillan exclusive music". It was "performed almost exclusively for, and had tosatisfy, a negro audience". In 1950, for example, only three of the recordswhich made the national Rhythm and Blues charts also crossed over into thepop field: and all three -- saxophonist Lynn Hope's "Tenderly", Nat KingCole's "Mona Lisa", and Billy Eckstine's "Sitting by the window" -- weremarkedly from the slicker end of the broad r&b spectrum.

    Before "Sh-boom", r&b forays into the pop record charts were relativelyisolated phenomena: musical mavericks which implied no major realignment ofwhite consumer preferences. Accordingly, they elicited little response fromthe major record companies which were primarily geared to serving the tastesof the mainstream market as they perceived and helped to define it. Capitol,Columbia, Decca, MGM, RCA and the newcomer Mercury showed little interest inleaping onto bandwagons not of their own making, especially ones theybelieved were of doubtful moral roadworthiness and limited commercialmileage.

    After "Sh-boom", however, there was a sustained surge of r&b into the popcharts, with more than twice as many records crossing over in 1954 as in theprevious year. In the months that followed "Sh-boom", Joe Turner's "Shake,rattle and roll", LaVern Baker's "Tweedlee dee", the Charms' "Hearts ofstone", Five Keys' "Ling ting tong", and Spaniels' "Goodnite sweetheartgoodnite" all appeared on the pop record sales lists. By the end of 1954,income from r&b records and tours constituted a $25 million branch of theindustry. A growing, if still relatively small, contingent of young whitefans had combined with the black audience to double the market share claimedby r&b from 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the total industry gross.

    And this was just the beginning. By the end of 1955, rock and roll, asperformed and consumed by both blacks and whites, had emerged as a distinctmusical style, rather than simply a euphemism for the black r&b which spawnedit and with which it continued to overlap. In late 1956, Billboardreported that 25 of 125 pop chart entries during the first 50 weeks of theyear had been black r&b/rock and roll records. Many others were either whitecover versions of black songs or by white artists performing in stylesobviously derived from black music. In 1957, the independent record companiesresponsible for recording much of this material accounted for an astonishing76 per cent of the year's hit singles. In 1958 more than 90 per cent of the155 records appearing on the national Rhythm and Blues charts during the yearalso appeared on the pop charts.

    Taken together, the rise of these Independents and the unprecedentedpopularity of black and black-derived styles with young white audiencesthreatened the traditional distribution of power and influence within themusic industry. According to Charles Hamm, "At no other point in thetwo-hundred year history of popular song in America had there been such adrastic and dramatic change in such a brief period of time". The powerfulalliance of Tin Pan Alley music publishing houses, professional songwriters,network radio stations and major recording labels, which had long dominatedthe popular music business, was challenged and for a while bested by a newbreed of song publishers, black-oriented radio stations, distributors, andrecord labels.

    The reactions of the recording and broadcasting industries to the initialbreakthrough of r&b and the hostile responses of sections of adult whiteAmerica to that phenomenon were closely linked. Together, these reactionsreflected the dominant racial assumptions and beliefs of the mid-to-late1950s, just as they were coming under pressure from the same political,economic, demographic and cultural forces which shaped the modern civilrights movement. Coupled with important developments taking place within theblack community, these interlocking commercial and public reactions helped toaccount for many of the key musical and lyrical changes in r&b as sustainedsuccess in the mainstream became a realistic possibility for some of itsblack practitioners.

Majors and Independents

In The sound of the city, Charlie Gillett explained the breakthroughof r&b primarily in terms of a consumer revolution on the part of an increasinglyaffluent white teen audience and a successful, guerilla-type action waged bysmall, often under-financed, but endlessly resourceful independent recordlabels against the major recording companies and established song publishingfirms. In most subsequent accounts, Independents have also appeared as theheroes of the piece: feisty outsiders who challenged vested interests withinthe industry, nobly championed the neglected music of black America, andfinally made it available to the mainstream market. For many commentators,this amounted to nothing less than a spirited assault on the hegemony of themiddle-class white values enshrined in the popular music of Perry Como andJune Valli. This conventional wisdom requires finessing, however, both inorder to appreciate important differences among the Independents, and tocontextualize them within -- albeit often at the margins of -- the Americanentertainment industry, where they were caught in much the same web of socialexpectations, racial assumptions and commercial aspirations as the Majors.

    Most of the Independents involved in the production of r&b had emerged inthe mid 1940s, after the Majors, responding to the enforced economies of theDepression and then war, had curtailed minority ranges like black music andconcentrated on the more lucrative mass market for white popular music. Afterthe Second World War, however, a disparate group of entrepreneurs moved intothe market niches created by these cutbacks, encouraged by the fact that thecost of entry into the business of record production remained relatively low.A thousand dollars was enough to hire a studio (typically at $50 an hour),book musicians, pay American Federation of Musicians (AFM) dues, have amaster tape prepared, and press 500 singles at 11 cents a shot.

    Although...