Hail Hail Rock and Roll

By the 1950’s, American Music had been on a fascinating journey.  Rolling out of the Appalachian Mountains and into southern cities; drifting out of the cotton plantations of the south, winding its way up from New Orleans, along the Mississippi Delta, carried along many musical creeks, tributaries, and rivers, rolling its way along mysterious trails past the crossroads, and chugging its way across railroad lines.   American Music had evolved, and grown, and changed, just like the culture that produced it.  We’ve seen the rise of jazz in its different forms, and heard the echoes of slavery in the blues – as it evolved from the country blues of Robert Johnson and Huddie Ledbedder to the electric blues of Muddy Waters and BB King – and the evolution of Country music as it grew out of English, Scottish, and Welsh ballads into the slick, urbanized sound of Nashville or the honky tonks and juke joints - the urban sounds of Hank Williams.  

In the few decades that led up to the mid-1950’s,  there were just a few more cobblestones that needed to be laid into the roadbed that ended with the birth of rock music.  Among these were Western Swing and Rockabilly.  

The rock and roll attitude – rebellion, sexuality, and freedom – is a rockabilly hand-me-down sweatshirt from rock’s big brother.  However, the true rockers that came later were true, dyed in the wool non-conformists and rebels.  There’s a world of difference between someone like, say, Jim Morrison, and Kung-Fu Elvis.  Morrison’s disgust for authority was the real thing.  Elvis, on the other hand, had his picture taken at the White House next to Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon.   Compare that to many, very public apologies that aging rockabilly artists made later for their antics in younger years.  

Good Golly, Miss Molly…. Welcome to the latest edition of American Song; episode 13.  Hail Hail Rock and Roll!


IN THIS EPISODE
Tex Williams
Moon Mullican
Arthur Smith's Hot Quintet
Tennessee Ernie Ford
The Maddox Bros. and Rose
Elvis Presley
Jerry Lee Lewis
Buddy Holly
John Lennon
Paul McCartney
Ringo Starr
Jackie Brentson
Roy Brown
Big Mama Thornton
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Chuck Berry
Fat's Domino
Little Richard
Eddie Cochran
the Teen Queens
Bobby Freeman
Wanda Jackson
Pat Boone
Allen Freed
The Platters
The Dominoes
Thomas Hardin/ Moondog
The Who

Transcript

By the 1950’s, American Music had been on a fascinating journey.  Rolling out of the Appalachian Mountains and into southern cities; drifting out of the cotton plantations of the south, winding its way up from New Orleans, along the Mississippi Delta, carried along many musical creeks, tributaries, and rivers, rolling its way along mysterious trails past the crossroads, and chugging its way across railroad lines -  American Music had evolved, and grown, and changed, just like the culture that produced it.  We’ve seen the rise of jazz in its different forms, and heard the echoes of slavery in the blues – as it evolved from the country blues of Robert Johnson and Huddie Ledbedder to the electric blues of Muddy Waters and BB King – and the evolution of Country music as it grew out of English, Scottish, and Welsh ballads into the slick, urbanized sound of Nashville or the honky tonks, urban sounds of Hank Williams.  

In the few decades that led up to the mid-1950’s,  there were just a few more cobblestones that needed to be laid into the roadbed that ended with the birth of rock music.  Among these were Western Swing and Rockabilly.  We’ll begin our story here.

Western swing is ballroom dance music with a Western twist.  Substitute the big brass and woodwind sound from East Coast swing, and you’ve got the Western sound.  Mainly, it was played by musicians that hailed from Texas and Oklahoma.  Benny Goodman’s and Glenn Miller’s counter-parts in Western Swing were guys like Bob Wills, Johnnie Lee Wills, and Leon McAuliffe.  It really became important in the Tulsa area of Oklahoma.  As a style, you can hear American Songbook styled pop, the blues, traditional jazz, Dixieland, traditional folk and fiddle, ragtime, and there’s even a few songs that have hints of classical music poking out around the edges.  

The most popular Western Swing band got their start in 1929 and ultimately were Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.  These guys had a long, fifty year stretch into the 1970’s, but got their start as a trio called the Willis Fiddle Band, playing gigs in Fort Worth, at a place called the Crystal Springs Dance Pavillion.   By 1933, Bob had moved his band out to Waco where he perfected their sound - a blend of country, jazz and big band with prominent fiddle playing tossed in for ultimate coolness.  Their biggest hit dates all the way back to 1938, and was called “New San Antonio Rose”.  Wills once even said, "Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928!”  Other big songs from them were Maiden's Prayer and Faded Love.  Like everything else else we’d seen, radio made the audience.  Bob broadcasted his hugely popular dance music across the Southwest,  using the powerful signal from Tulsa's powerful 50,000 watt KVOO radio station to do it!

Besides Bob Wills, other successful Western Swing groups included Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies, Spade Cooley and His Orchestra and Hank Thompson And His Brazos Valley Boys.

Hillbilly Boogie is another immediate ancestor in rock’s family tree.  A group of country musicians, like Moon Mullican, the Delmore Brothers, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Speedy West, and Jimmy Bryant, all played something called “hillbilly boogie” –x think of it like country with a boogie slap-bass bottom and hillbilly vocals on top.  Like Western Swing, hillbilly boogie dates back to the early 1930’s.  The first major hit of its’ kind was a tune called “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith’s Hot Quintet.  Although a first cousin to country music, rockabilly was distinctive in several ways.  The song structures were simpler.  They had simpler chord progressions, lyrics, and arrangements.  The beat was faster, and the rhythm was much more dominant.  Singers had a rougher edge and their performances were a lot more flamboyant.   In 1950, Tennessee Ernie Ford had a number one hit called “Shotgun Boogie” more paving stones on the trail toward the rise of rock and roll.  

 Of all the musical prophets predicting the arrival of rock and roll, you might think of Rockabilly as rock’s John the Baptist, preparing a way in the desert for the coming of the Teenage Messiah.

Chevy Ad 1950’s

Let’s drop into the late 1940’s and check out a band called The Maddox Brothers and Rose, from the Sand Mountain region of Alabama.  They’re the first group we can easily recognize as rockabilly artists.  Listen to their song, (Pay Me) Alimony, from 1950.  On this track, they show their country / proto-punk side and we’re now within spitting distance of rock and roll.  Their music had a killer honky-tonk feel, with a heavy, manic bottom end and they like it loud!  Rockabilly is  a blend of bluegrass, with the glimmer and glint of early rock seeping through its pores.  Even the name suggests it; hillbilly (which was the early name for country music if you remember back to a really early episode in this podcast about the rise of country music) and rock (from rock and roll).  Barbara Pittman, an early rockabilly singer, spoke at Paul Allen’s  MOPOC; the Museum of Pop Culture and talked about how a lot of the early rockabilly players felt about that term ‘rockabilly’.   She said, "Rockabilly was actually an insult to the southern rockers at that time. It was their way of calling us 'hillbillies.”  

Rockabilly added strong, loud rhythms, southern twang, and plenty of tape echo to the vibe that blended western swing and guitar boogie had already started.  By and by, guys like Carl Perkins, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis added to the sound by adding more instruments and adding harmonies behind the lead vocals.  Other early rockers, like Howlin' Wolf, Junior Parker, and Arthur Crudup, all left their mark on rockabilly.  Let’s not leave out Little Junior's Blue Flames who also shaped the sound of rockabilly – especially on songs like Mystery Train.

The rockabilly train was ch-ch-chugging along at high speed by 1956, when – unbelievably, on a single weekend in January Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues, Carl Perkins, Blue Suede Shoes and Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel were all released.  Incredible if you think about the lasting impression these three songs have left over the last sixty-five years.  Television, technology that was rapidly expanding into homes all over America in these years, had a lot to do with that.  Elvis first performed Heartbreak Hotel on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show in February and Perkins played debuted Blue Suede shoes performance on Ozark Jubilee, an ABC show that ran from 1955 to 1960.  By the end of 1956, and – goodness gracious, Jerry Lee Lewis had broken through, and in 1957, with two major hits; released two major hits Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakiin’ Goin’ On.   Here comes ‘ol Jerry Lee now, time travelling from the 1950’s and the Dewey Phillipps show to talk to us now.  Jerry Lee Lewis interview

So, Rockabilly was king of the hill for the years 1957 to 1960, pretty much ruling radio on the pop stations.  In 1958, Eddie Cochran had a major rockabilly hit with his song, Summertime Blues.  He followed it up with two more hits in 1958 and 1959. Ironically, in 1960, he scored another hit with  “Three Steps to Heaven”.   He’drecently turned 21, and was touring in the UK, when the taxi he was riding in crashed into a light post, killing him instantly.  

That’ll Be the Day

Unique in so many ways, and a music career that lasted for for what seems like merely an instant, Buddy Holly left a deep, lasting imprint on American Music.  Tall and thin, with a ‘revenge of the nerds’ look about him, and a recording career that lasted only 18 months, Buddy achieved more in his 22 years than many do in much longer life times.  In just a year and a half, he recorded 50 songs – most of them his own.  His first composition was Peggy Sue; not a bad place to start!  Though his life was short, Holly’ shadow was very long – he’s influenced rock musicians in every decade since his own time, including the Beatles, the Stones, Elton John, Marshall Crenshaw, Bob Dylan, Don McLean, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt, Cliff Richard, and clear down to more recent artists like Wheezer, whose first hit was called “Just Like Buddy Holly”.  Besides writing perfectly beautiful two-minute diamonds, it was also Buddy Holly that invented the basic rock band format we’ve known all these years now – you know the one, two guitars, bass and drums….  He was also the first artist to use tape echo and to double-track his voice.  

True Love Ways

Being a Texan, Buddy was not used to the cutting winter cold that he encountered while on tour in February,  1959.  He was doing the Winter Dance Party Tour – arranged by a totally incompetent promoter who probably couldn’t route himself out of bed in the morning, in a bus with no heating, in the days before the interstate highways existed. It was so cold that people on the bus kept getting sick.  One of the drummers actually got frost bitten feet!   Along for the tour from hell were a number of early rockers, including the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.  Back and forth re-tracing the same territories in a nor rhyme nor reason circuit – one night there was a show in Minnesota, the next night in Iowa, the third show back in Minnesota – and so forth.  absolutely no heed to making it easier on the musicians, and temperatures down past freezing.  

So, the bus travel had taken its toll and Holly decided to charter a flight for the next leg.  He didn’t know that the pilot had very few air miles in experience.   So, looking for a break from it, Holly decided to charter a flight after a show  in Des Moines, Iowa.  He’d invited Valens and  the Big Bopper to come along on the flight to Moorhead, Minnesota which left the same night, after a show in Des Moines, Iowa.  It started snowing as they all made their way to the airport and the weather got worse from there.  With limited visibility, the young 21-year old pilot got lost in the clouds and the plane crashed, killing everyone aboard.  This was the day Don McLean sang about … ‘the day the music died’ in his song American Pie.  After that, radio gradually quit playing rockabilly.  It also didn’t the scene too much when parents learned that Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin.  But that’s not to say that rockabilly’s impact stopped being felt.  Like a huge stone thrown into a pond, it’s ripples seemed to spread out and out a long, long way.  

In England, rockabilly styles were adopted by a group of teenagers called Teddy Boys  and adopted a quasi-uniform, including Edwardian-style frock coats, tight black drainpipe trousers and soft-soled suede shoes (they called them brothel creepers).  Later, in the ‘60s, Teddy Boys were re-named as rockers; if you’re familiar with either the Who’s album, Quadropheia, or the movie that came later, you’re familiar with the Mods and the Rockers.  

But probably the most profound impact left over from the Rockabilly years was the one it had on four lads from Liverpool, England, who called themselves the Beatles.  We’ll talk more about them later; but, long after they broke up, each of ‘the boys’ continued to pay tribute to the music that had started it all for them.  John (Be Bop a Lula) recorded an album of rockabilly songs in 1975 called Rock and Roll, chock full of all his favorite boyhood songs.  In the 1980’s, Paul recorded a song, on his Tug of War album, with his idol, Carl Perkins and in 1999 released an album like John’s called Run Devil Run (Yakety Yak).  Ringo’s ‘You’re Sixteen’ from 1971 was a rockabilly cover, and George teamed up with Roy Orbison in the supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys.  

The rock and roll attitude – rebellion, sexuality, and freedom – is a rockabilly hand-me-down sweatshirt from rock’s big brother.  However, the true rockers that came later were true, dyed in the wool non-conformists and rebels.  There’s a world of difference between someone like, say, Jim Morrison, and Kung-Fu Elvis.  Morrison’s disgust for authority was the real thing.  Elvis, on the other hand, had his picture taken at the White House next to Richard Nixon.   Compare that to many, very public apologies that aging rockabilly artists made later for their antics in younger years.  

Good ‘n Plenty jingle

In a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Jerry Lee told this story:

“I said, ‘Elvis, I’m going to ask you one thing before we part company here. If you die, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?’ And he got real red in the face, and then he got real white in the face, and he said, ‘Jerry Lee, don’t you ever say that to me agin.’ 

Lewis continued, saying “I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell,” he concedes. “I still am. I worry about it before I go to bed; it’s a very serious situation. I mean you worry, when you breathe your last breath, where are you going to go?”

Good Golly, Miss Molly…. Welcome to the latest edition of American Song; episode 13.  All Hail Rock and Roll!

Having talked about rock’s family tree, we really probably ought to start figuring out when rock actually did finally show up – what was the first rock song?  I’ve already eliminated a number of guesses you might have made.  It wasn’t Elvis.  It wasn’t Jerry Lee Lewis.  Hell, it wasn’t even Bill Haley and his Comets, but keep thinking along those lines – especially around the word ‘comet’.  You’ll see the connection pretty soon now.  

There are a few contenders competing for the distinction of first-ever rock and roll song.   We talked about Ike and Tina Turner in our last episode, and how they were among the early luminaries in R&B.  Ike had already been around a long time by the time he teamed up with Tina.  If you could time-trip back to 1951, you’d most likely find Ike Turner writing music and playing with a number of musicians, among them, a sax player named Jackie Brenston, from Turner’s band, The Kings of Rhythm.  Ike wrote a song called Rocket 88 that Brenston sang lead on.  

The guitarist on Rocket 88 was a guy named Willie Kizart.  Wait til you hear this story about great things from humble beginnings….  It seems that while driving to the recording session, Kizart had a flat, and while digging through his trunk for the spare, accidentally dropped the amp.  He broke the cone.  Being a make-it-happen kind of guy, and to keep the amp in one piece long enough for the gig, he stuffed newspaper inside the amp.  It held together, but now it also had a raspy, distorted edge.    And that’s the story of the first rock recording with distortion, and 

lyrics that used an Oldsmobile 88 to represent male sexuality …. Rock’s infatuation with cars was already well along by the time the Beach Boys wrote Little Deuce Coup, not to mention Janice Joplin’s prayer for a Mercedes Benz, or the Boss and his trip down Thunder Road.  The track was recorded at Sun Records, in 1951, and produced by Sam Phillips – two years before a young Elvis Presley sauntered into his studio to record a gift for his mother – a song named “My Happiness”.

Another Southern boy, Roy Brown from New Orleans, recorded Good Rocking Tonight in 1947 and then followed it up with Rocking at Midnight in 1948.   Part of the problem with trying to definitively pinpoint the time and place that rock and roll came kicking and screaming out of its mother’s womb is that all the people who may have been involved – as artist, producer, or recording engineer have long been laid to rest…. With the exception of one Joe Bihari, former vice-chairman for Modern records, the label that gave BB King his first recording contract.  Bihari says that it had to have been one of the black artists he was working with back in those distant and half-forgotten times.  The unfortunate reason we recognize names like Bill Haley, and Elvis is because they’re white. Before 1955, pretty much anything created by Blacks was simply dismissed by the white audience.  Despite the moderate success that black R&B was finding, and the few brave radio stations out there who started to program those ‘race records’ into the playlists that built an R&B audience faster than most thought possible, getting ‘race records’ played in many markets was tough-tough-tough.   Bihari says, “There was very little airplay for R&B records, because there were very few black DJs, and very few black stations that played black music. Also, it wasn't easy, particularly in the south, for white kids to bring home black music in the 1940s. Their parents frowned on it."  As a result, many of the early black rockers died unrecognized and forgotten.  Even Ike’s bandsman, Jackie Brentston.  After Rocket 88,  in 1951, his life pretty much fell apart in an alcoholic daze.  Jackie had a preference for drinking that really bad shit - stuff you probably wouldn't allow in your house, not even to wash the floor.  Eventually, he gave up music, got himself a class-A license, and died forgotten in 1979.  Roy Brown also quit music and became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in the pre-internet days and died in 1983.

For his own part, Ike probably deserves a bigger footprint in rock’s history.  Public distaste for, among other things, his temper and his misogyny (he beat the hell out of Tina Turner during most of their marriage), has tarnished public opinion and cost him a more revered spot in rock history.

There were still other artists who compete for the distinction of first rock record.  Big Mama Thornton recorded a very primal, from the gut version of Hound Dog that makes Elvis’ version sound like Pat Boone singing Metallica several years before Elvis recorded his.  We heard it in the R&B episode last month.  Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day” from 1944.  

Finally, things started changing for black rock musicians in 1955.  Chuck Berry released his first single, Maybelline.    Fats Domino’s song Ain’t That a Shameand Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti all came out the same year.  All three of these guys had been on the same journey, from blues and R&B to this new thing called rock and roll.  

So, now that we really don’t have any more clarity around who wrote, produced, or recorded the first rock song than we did earlier, let’s see if we can at least define what rock and roll is! 

It’s always been about the feel of the music; rebellious, adventurous, aggressive, steeped in the blues, country and as we saw in a previous episode, rhythm and blues.  As simple as it is, in the 65 years since it’s arrival, it has never stopped evolving to reflect the spirit of the times.  For this episode, I’m exploring only the first five years.  Let’s first take a look at something really basic - the chord structures.  In the earliest years of rock and roll, there were just two basic chord patterns.  

Long Tall Sally

Joe Burns is a professor at Southeastern University, Louisiana and he did a really interesting study of 100 rock and roll songs that were written and released during our 1955 through 1959 period.  Out of those 100 songs, Joe counted 145 different chord progressions that were used, meaning most songs had just one simple progression.  Most of the songs were written in 4/4 time.  That means there were just four beats per bar, counted out like one-two-three-four.  As the 1950’s progressed, more songs were written that had more than a single chord progression.  Most songs used a 1=>4=>5 progression.  If you’re playing in the key of C for instance – no sharps, no flats – the ‘one’ chord is C-major.  In a 1=>4=>5 progression, the ‘four’ chord would be F major; that’s three more notes up the C major scale – C – D – E- F – and then the third chord in the progression is G-major – that’s four notes up the scale from C ; C-D-E-F-G.

Winston Cigarette Ad 50’s

You’ll hear that 1=>4=>5 progression in songs like Rock Around The Clock" (Bill Haley and the Comets), "Long Tall Sally" (Little Richard), "Suzy Q" (written by Dale Hawkins, but best known as a cover by Creedence Clearwater Revival), and "Summertime Blues" (Eddie Cochran).   

Eddie My Love

When songs deviated away from the 1=>4=>5, it was mainly toward the 1=>6=>4=>5 progression where the 6 chord is a minor chord (flat the third note in the familiar tonic, 3rd, 5th chord structure).  It seems like a lot of doo-wop songs used 1=>6=>4=>5, such “Eddie My Love" (written by Maxwell Davis and Aaron Collins, Jr., and recorded by a doo-wop group called the Teen Queens), "Lollipop" (written by Beverly Ross and Julius Dixon and recorded by the Chordettes), and "I Wonder Why” (written by Melvin Anderson and Ricardo Weeks and first recorded by Dion and the Belmonts).  

Do You Want to Dance

A few songs also used a 1=>2=>4=>5 variation of this progression, for instance Book of Love (by the Monotones), Do You Want to Dance? (written by Bobby Freeman, who was 17 at the time), and Oh Carol (by Neil Sedaka).

Let’s thing about another aspect of the music.  Way beyond the simple construction or rock music, rock is the 20th century version of a tribal rite.  It’s a music that brings people together to celebrate or to vent their frustrations, or to do both at the same time!  In the fifties, things were, in lots of ways, much simpler.  Mostly, the topics we hear about in rock’s early period is what a bummer it is to have a part-time summer job, when you should be free to hang out with the guys and watch the girls in their itsy-bitsy-teeny-weenie polka-dot bikinis.  Or what a drag it is to have to clean your room and watch out for your kid sister.  However, the baby-boomers were about to hit their teen years and maybe it was the increasing hormones that made all this seem so damn serious to them.  If so, it was a global phenomenon.  In our last episode, we heard Ahmet Ertegun say that rock music is the only artform that has ‘traveled’ around the globe, like nothing before it had – it’s meaning was universal.  

Chuck Berry Roll Over Beethoven

Full of teen angst, rock and roll was music to rebel by.  In a prior episode, we saw how jazz, the music of the first rock generation’s parents, had taken a hard left turn toward intellectualism – a move that was about making a statement about black humanity.  But rock brought music back to the masses.  It made NO demands of its audience, except to give in to its infectious rhythm.  As new songs and new artists arrived on the scene, they reinforced what had come before, even as the best of them slowly pushed the boundaries.  Rock’s audience settled into a comfortable canon of work.  

Wanda Jackson; Let’s Have a Party

Just like any tribal rite, there needs to be a shaman, a priest, a guru to lead the celebration – and these people have to be ‘authentic’.  You can’t fake that, and if you try, you’ll be found out, quickly.  It’s all in the performance, and in the way the shaman walks the walk.  There’s a reason why Little Richard is memorialized today, while Pat Boone is remembered as the skinny little geek, white shoes and all, that he was.  Pat Boone Aint That a Shame

The Australian journalist, Nick Bhasin wrote that “if you want to demonize a white rock star, you should probably start with Pat Boone, whose covers of songs like Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” are musical hate crimes….And his versions of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally” are even more abominable.”

When I was a kid, they used to sell these long sticks of, sweet, sticky pink bubble gum that were wrapped like cigars.  No matter how hard they tried to make those things look dangerous and cool, they were no substitute for the real thing; and if you thought you were going to hang out with your big brother and his tough pack of friends, with one of those stupid things in your mouth, you were only kidding yourself.  Pat Boone – and the rest of his ilk – were the pink bubble gum cigar-frauds of rock and roll.  Eventually, if you were really into the scene, you figured it out and you never looked back again.  That story has been told many times over the decades.  I mean, if you can remember, try comparing the Bay City Rollers with Led Zeppelin, for instance.  Recently, I imagine it’s what happened to One Direction fans; some of them finally moved on and discovered the Black Keys, or the Foo Fighters, or whatever.  

Not  Fade Away

In our last episode, we heard Ruth Brown say that when the white kids started dancing to it, they called it rock and roll.  Well, no one got the kids dancing more than Elvis Aaron Presley.  It was Elvis, more than any other artist of his time, that smashed down the walls that separated white kids from black kids in the very heavily segregated South.  Elvis was the Marco Polo of his day.  Just like Polo brought Chinese culture into an unexpecting Europe, blowing its mind wide open about what lay beyond its pearly-white borders, Elvis carried the ‘forbidden’ black music into white homes where the music was, on account of Elvis’ whiteness, suddenly acceptable.  And the world was never the same again.  We also wouldn’t be eating spaghetti and meat balls if it weren’t for Marco Polo bring Chinese noodles into Italy!  

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

In the same way that Elvis made people re-think music, his performance and identity made them rethink their social and moral values, too.  Elvis, the Pelvis, maybe most especially the pelvis, was a threat to middle class white society values, erected and defended since the end of the Civil War.  He ushered in youth culture, which was going to grow, mature and burst into full flower at Yasgur’s farm fifteen years down the line.  With it, came the breakdown of sexual inhibition – which had been in the air since way before the Civil War – and the end of segregation.  Little Richard once said “Elvis was an integrator. He was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through the back door, so he opened the front one.”  

Growing up poor, and in total obscurity, making money driving trucks, one day in the summer of ’53, he walked into a little recording studio called Sun Records, in Memphis.  Suddenly, fully bloomed and completely from out of nowhere, Elvis sprang into America’s consciousness – like a UFO.  Not long after that birthday gift for his mamma at Sun, Elvis scored a contract with RCA records and his first national hits were That’s All Right Mama and Heartbreak Hotel.  If you’re one of the very few on this planet that have never heard an Elvis song (um, do you actually live on the same planet as the rest of us?), you’ve missed out on one of the truly original, great voices of the last hundred years.  A white man that sounds like a black man – that’s how people described him at the time.  It was his sound, and the way he danced in total abandon – hips thrusting to the beat, and driving the girls into a frenzy that far exceeded what the girls had once done for the young, skinny crooner, Frank Sinatra, and wouldn’t be topped again until the Beatles arrived nine years later – and finally his incredibly good looks that hurled him to the top of the American music industry just about overnight.  Suddenly, Elvis was everywhere; the radio, the movies, television, concert halls.  Elvis was like a splitting wedge – a sharp edged, heavy metal wedge used to split logs.  His music, his looks, his attitude, what he represented – this was the wedge that lots of parents had worried might be coming around the corner to drive a cultural split through the middle of their families.  Parents were really threatened by Elvis, and one parent took it so seriously that he sent a letter directly to  J.Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I.  The letter said that Elvis was a “definite danger to the security of the United States.”

The thing was, once those logs began to split, there wasn’t any going back, although lots of people tried, even as recently as the Trump administration… you’ll remember, Let’s Make America a Racial Nightmare Again…..

Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock

Anyway, as the American novelist from Kentucky put it, 

“People didn’t know what Elvis’ music was. They didn’t know if it was rhythm

and blues, country, or what but whatever it was, listeners clamored for it. In an era

when daytime radio was dominated by tepid crooning, quirky novelty, and chirpy

innocence, here was a record- by a white boy- that had a "flavor of juke-joint music.

It had the thumping abandon, the driving energy, of the life force itself- a thrusting

and writhing and wallowing celebration.  It was exactly what a country full of teenagers had been waiting for.  Elvis, himself, put it this way: “People were looking for something di#erent and I came along just in time. I was lucky.”

Within a year of his first appearance on television, Elvis had become the top selling performer of all time.  His television appearances only plunged that log splitter deeper into America’s fiber; TV show hosts, like Milton Berle, and Steve Allen did all they could to present an antiseptic, ready for the whole family version of Elvis, sans gyrating hips.  The first appearance on Milton Berle generated a mail-room full of angry parent letters.  Steve Allen had Elvis perform in a tux and top hat while he sang Hound Dog to a basset hound.  Of course, the following day, the teens were upset because ‘that wasn’t the real Elvis’.  Finally, Ed Sullivan had his camera men shoot Elvis from the waist up – only.   Even with that, a critic at the time published that “Elvis appearance on Ed Sullivan ripped the 1950’s in half and American would never be the same.” The rock n’ roll era had officially begun.  From my perch, here in 2021, and aware of everything that followed Elvis, I can’t help but think of what Al Jolson said in 1927, and what Bachman Turner Overdrive sang in the 1970’s – “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.  Shock rock was just a bad thought in the latenight dreams of many parents at that point.  I wonder what those 1950’s parents would have thought of Slip Knot or Marilyn Manson?

Sam the Space Monkey

Elvis Presley, Wear My Ring Around Your Neck

The young men in America saw their girlfriends falling for Elvis.  As one young girl at the time put it, “He’s just one big hunk of forbidden fruit!”   The guys were not about to lose their local standing with the apples of their desire either, like the title to this song “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” would imply - so they began adopting Elvis’s style, growing their hair longer - into ducktail haircuts, with sideburns down their cheeks – and wearing black slacks and open necked shirts. But just as much as the teens flocked to him, the older generations did everything they could to shut him down for good.  Maybe old blue eyes was simply feeling jealous that he could no longer get the ‘bobby socksers’ to swoon for him like they had in the 1940’s, but Sinatra did pick up a pen to write the following about Elvis.  He said, “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.”  Everywhere he toured, the adults did their best to block Elvis’ performances.  In Jacksonville, Florida, the local juvenile delinquency judge threatened to arrest him if Elvis danced on stage.  Presley did everything he could to abide by the rules that were throw up in his path, but he did say, “Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.”  Even local church leaders entered the controversy, calling rock and roll, “Devil’s Music’. Reverend Carl Elgena was the pastor of a church in Iowa and he told his congregation that “the belief of unholy pleasure has sent the morals of

our nation down to rock bottom and the crowning addition to this day’s corruption is Elvis Presleyism.”  In his own mind, Elvis was not rebelling against God.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  Throughout his life, Elvis remained a strong Christian, and reverently added gospel songs to his repertoire and his live shows through to the very end of his career.

Elvis Presley – My Baby Left Me (Arthur Crudup cover)

Ultimately though, Elvis’ impact on America had a profoundly positive impact, especially because of the way he brought black culture into the mainstream, such as this song by the black bluesman, Arthur Crudup “My Baby Left Me”.  By doing this, he was chipping away at the walls of segregation that did ultimately fall by the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Although in recent episodes we’ve talked about some of the important white, Southern DJs that were beginning to play R&B records, for the most part, white DJs would not play black artists; it was a socially prohibited form of music in those days.  It took a lot of courage for Elvis to do what he was doing.  Southern segregationists were actively trying to squash his career, on the belief that racial mixing would lead to the total destruction of white society and that white kids who were exposed to black culture would inevitably fall into juvenile delinquency and sexual immorality.   I suppose that foolish, ignorant white man, hiding under pointy pillow cases and wearing white kimonos while burning crosses on their neighbors lawns was somehow moral thought?

In the face of this, Elvis quite openly showed and talked about his respect for African

American performers and their music.  He totally dismissed the social norms of his day when it came to racial prejudice.  He was the leading end of a long trail of white rock musicians who openly paid tribute to blues and R&B – guys like Eric Clapton, John Mayhall, the Beatles, and many others.   

To the people who would accuse Elvis of cultural appropriation, I just say listen to what Elvis said in a 1957  interview with Jet Magazine.  He said, “A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along.   Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid.”

Elvis Presley:  If I Can Dream: Black & White

In a June, 1956 interview with the Charlotte Observer, 

Elvis talked about the heritage of his music like this: “The colored folks been singing it and

playing it just like I’m don’ now for more years than I know. They played it like that

in the shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ‘til I goose it up.

I got it from them, down in Tupelo, Mississippi I used to hear old Arthur Crudup

band his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old

Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

Color, to Elvis, didn’t exist.  Being poor, he’d been raised in a down-trodden neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi with black neighbors everywhere.  His family lived the same kind of life as any poor black family, and that’s how it was for many poor white southerners.  Once you reached a certain level, the rest of white society stamped certain people as ‘outsiders’.  So, the Presleys shared the same living conditions, the same stunting effects of poverty, the same lack of respect, and the same search for a way out.  As the rock and roll photo archivist, Michael Oaks has said, “Elvis Presley had a black soul with a white face…”

Many of the artists I’ve been talking about in this episode – Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard and so on – were able to climb as high as they did in their careers because of what Elvis did. And the opportunities were not just available in music; as society gradually became more accepting, jobs of all types opened up for African Americans.

Greil Marcus, a music critic who, probably more than anyone else, has chronicled the long career of America’s poet Nobel Laureate and prolific song writer Bob Dylan, once wrote this about Elvis: “Because of Elvis’ arrival, because of who he was and what he became, because of his event and what we made of it, the American past, from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, looks different than it would have looked without him. Because of that event, the future has possibilities that would have been otherwise foreclosed. Presley’s impact on American culture went far beyond what heever imagined.”

In 1958, the King of Rock and Roll became Sargeant Presley when he joined the army. While stationed in Germany, he drove a truck for an officer named Captain Russell.  Being in the service for a two-year period, Elvis was out of the music industry for a two year period in which the music was changing a lot.  Also, while in the service, one of his buddies got him hooked on amphetimines – the beginning of Elvis’ long downward slide that came to a pretty sad end when he died at home, morbidly obese, and drug-addled, sitting on the toilet.

Alongside Elvis, Chuck Berry is remembered as the seminal founder of rock and roll.  Some call him the Father of Rock and Roll.  Elvis had opened white people’s minds to listen to black music with less prejudice – I wish I could say without prejudice (period) – Berry was able to build an audience with white kids.  He came out of a middleclass background, and this also gave him natural empathy with white suburban teens.  Like the Beatles after him, and were heavily influenced by him, Chuck Berry once said his success was grounded in being able to say things in his music the same way the kids thought about things.  He broke through the color barrier – something Elvis never had to do.  Being from St. Louis, instead of the South, also made it easier for him to write songs that mirrored teenage experiences.

His parents lived in heavily segregated North St. Louis where Chuck was born in 1926.  He was three years old before he saw his first white person - a firefighter battling a fire.  His father had to explain that, no, he wasn’t white because he was scared of the fire, white people look like that all the time.  At age six, he began singing in his church choir, but he didn’t actually start playing guitar until high school!  Chuck was also a bit of a rebel.  By seventeen, he was sentenced to ten years in jail when he and a couple friends found a pistol in a parking lot, and used it to hold up a few small businesses.  Let out after three years for good behavior, his music career began when a friend asked him to join his band.  

Joe McCarthy Censure

Pepsodent Radio Ad

Chuck took a fateful trip to Chicago in 1955, where he met blues-legend Muddy Waters; Berry had just written Maybelline.  Waters advised Chuck to go meet the people at Chess Records and when Berry played the song for them, they put him on a contract immediately.  The song went to No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the pop charts.  First time at bat, and Chuck hits a home run!

Radio stations around St. Louis were divided on race lines; the white stations played country music for white audiences.  The black stations played R&B for black audiences.  Chuck was a fan of both kinds of music.  As a musican, he found early on that he could expand his audience by playing to both sides.  He created a sound that took the best from country and R&B and it made Chuck and his band a very in-demand outfit.  His early gigs were local dances at a club called the Cosmo, and the band just got better with time.  That was the point when white audiences started showing up to his gigs.  These were also the years where Chuck perfected his famous ‘duck-walk’, hillbilly stomp and chicken peck moves.  

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Brown Eyed Handsome Man

Just like he was blending black and white music, Berry pushed hard for de-segregation.  He turned his fan club headquarters into a small club where white and black kids could dance together. It was the only bi-racial business,  not just in St. Louis, but actually in the entire state of Missouri.  Of course, the police didn’t like that real well – Chuck used to tell a story about a mixed couple who, driving home from his club one night got pulled over and dragged down to the station for a mandatory venereal disease shot.  With the amount of push-back he was getting everywhere in the South, Berry headed for a tour of New England where his optimism about the future of the country was re-ignited.  Up there, black and white kids mixed, danced and had fun together.  It happened at all his shows.  He went back to St. Louis determined to make it happen there too.  To give mixed concerts and dances a place to thrive, Chuck opened a place called Berry Park; a bi-racial country club complete with a lodge for overnight guests and a guitar-shaped swimming pool!  

Originally coming from an R&B background, his songs and lyrics about fast cars, dances, and above all rock and roll won him a large teenage following.  Songs like Roll Over Beethoven, and Rock and Roll Music hit the right chord with the first true teenage generation loving the just-born rebel music that was fast becoming the sound track to their unique lives.  More than anything, it was Berry’s rhythms that the kids loved so much.  His songs had an  infectious energy that gave permission to the behaviors and feelings that most of repressive 1950’s America said was strictly taboo.  

Nadine

In 1960, Chuck was pulled over while giving two white girls a ride on their journey to the next state over.  For this, he did three years in federal prison for violating the Mann Act; an anti-prostitution law that said you could not carry a minor across a state line for the purpose of having sex.  Ever the optimist, Berry put the time to really good use.  He wrote a couple of his classic songs, “Nadine” and “You Never Can Tell”,  got his high school diploma, and learned accounting so he could manage his own money in the future.

Rock and Roll Music

Chuck Berry defined rock and roll.  His songs ran a yellow highlighter over the cultural dividing line that now separated the generations.  You could see the gap most clearly in  the audience’s love for rock music, and the new freer racial attitudes they wore on their sleeves.  As much as Berry defined the music, the fans also defined him.   But it wasn’t just on the teens where Chuck Berry made his indelible mark.  You can also include the legions of rockers that followed him, including Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones, George Harrison and the Beatles; Bruce Springsteen; Pete Townshend, AC/DC, Emmy Lou Harris, The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Lenny Kravitz, Questlove, The Roots, The Grateful Dead, Motorhead and Bob Seger. 

Also among these was also one John Winston Lennon.  From 1972, here’s John on the Mike Douglas show, introducing his childhood hero and jamming with him!

John Lennon/ Chuck Berry

NASA even got into the act; when Voyager I was launched in ’77, Johnny B. Goode was the only rock and roll song included in earth’s message in a bottle sent out to the universe.

Like all the other genres we’ve talked about so far on this podcast, radio was instrumental in the rise of rock and roll.  Allen Freed was rock’s first and maybe greatest promoter, cheer leader and most sincere fan.  He left his imprint on every aspect of the rock scene in his day; first he won over Cleveland with his show on WJW.  Later, he moved his show to New York City at WINS.  Along the way, he wrote songs that appeared on the four albums he made, promoted the music bringing countless performers to a national audience, and had important roles in early rock movies like Don't Knock The Rock,  Rock Around The Clock, and  Rock, Rock, Rock, where he played himself.  Allen Freed introduces the Platters in Rock Around the Clock Each of these films cost a couple hundred bucks to produce, but made millions!  Unfortunately, the Payola scandal also made Freed one of rocks first scapegoats due to.  Considering that plenty of other famous names in rock have also been scapegoats – like John Lennon, the Beatles as a group, Eminem and others, Freed’s in good company.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1922, and mostly raised in Ohio, Freed started off as a musician with a band called The Sultans of Swing (a few bars of Dire Straits here). He went to Ohio State but the war interrupted things, and he was eventually discharged due to an ear infection.  Once out, he studied broadcasting in night school while working a government job day gig where he inspected military plants.  His first DJ job was at WKST, in New Castle, PA and then WAKR.  In these pre-rock days, he played hot jaz and pop songs.  Allen Freed on WJW His real shot came in 1950 when he was invited to substitute at WJW – a classical music station.  Instead of following format, he played R&B songs all night.  He was fired the next day, but the public response had been amazing – the station was flooded with requests for the songs Freed had been playing and they rehired him.

Marilyn Monroe in Korea

Sixty Minute Man

By 1951, Freed had the #1 show in Cleveland under the name Moondog’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.  Freed was calling himself Moondog.  Now, there’s two possible sources of where the name Moondog might have come from.  Option A:  There was a song by the Dominoes called Sixty Minute Man – here’s a verse: 

Sixty-minute man, sixty-minute man

Look a here girls I'm telling you now

They call me "Lovin' Dan"

I rock 'em, roll 'em all night long

I'm a sixty-minute man

If you don't believe I'm all that I say

Come up and take my hand

When I let you go you'll cry "Oh yes"

"He's a sixty-minute man".

There'll be 15 minutes of kissing

Then you'll holler "Please don't stop" (Don't stop !)

There'll be 15 minutes of teasing

And 15 minutes of squeezing

And 15 minutes of blowing my top........

The second option is more interesting.  

Moondog Monologue into Up Broadway

Since the 1940’s there’d been a blind, homeless guy named Thomas Hardin, but using the name Moondog, was living at the corner of West 54th Street and Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan.  With a long, flowing beard, and dressed in Viking garb, he wrote poems, and played home-made percussion instruments for anyone who’d throw him a quarter.  Everybody thought he was nuts; few people knew we a highly respected American composer, recording for several record labels, highly praised by Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington, and sometimes making children’s records with a Julie Andrews before she’d made it big.  As Moondog’s Dance Party got to be a bigger thing, Thomas Hardin decided he’d cash in, got himself a lawyer, and Freed ended up having to drop the name, and change his show to Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll Party!

Anyway, It was Alan Freed that hung the name “Rock and Roll” on the new music. 

He did it to move past the racial slurs whites had for the music – what’s funny about that is Rock and Roll is what the blacks called sex at the time.  

Alan Freed Rock ‘n Roll Dance Party Live

Freed used his prominence, position and connections to become the first rock and roll concert promoter.  Between 1955 and 1959, use produced no less than 19 rock concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount theater that featured the biggest stars of the time.  Over those short five years, his shows promoted the Moonglows, the Penguins, Tony Bennett, Chuck Berry, the Platters, the Flamingos, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, the Diamonds, Buddy Holly and the Cricketts, King Curtis, the Del Vikings, the Chantels, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, Frankie Avalon, Jackie Wilson, Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, Bo Diddley, Dion and the Belmonts, and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks (this band was a forerunner to Bob Dylan’s electric backing band, the Hawks, and later the Band). 

Around the same time, this obscure little band called the Quarrymen changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs – a brief detour on the way to becoming a band called the Beatles.

By now, Freed’s place in the world had really changed!  By 1959, he could look back just five years and see how his income had gone from $15,000 a year to $750,000 a year; in today’s terms, that would be over $7 million a year.  What happened next was a surprise to everyone.  The House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, chaired by Arkansas Democrat Oren Harris had been snooping around – in a very McCarthyism kind of way – and Freed’s number came up.  It turned out that he’d been accepting money from the record labels to play some of the music on his show.  From a legal perspective, the government controls the airwaves, and radio was supposed to be impartial to what was played.  Payola meant that radio stations weren’t acting objectively, and supposedly this was hurting some recording artists.  By this time, Freed was on contract with ABC, and they fired him because he wouldn’t sign a contract that denied he’d every accepted any ‘pay for play’.  Next stop was a court hearing where he refused to testify and a month later the NYPD arrested him on charges of  having accepted a total of $30,000 from six labels in return for radio plugs.  Although it had a the look and smell of government properness about it, this was really Freed’s refusal to back down from his all-out loyalty and support of rock music.  The old guard in the recording industry had taken an offense, and Freed took the fall for a practice that was basically standard practice all over the music industry.  From a legal perspective, the most he finally faced was a suspended sentence of six month in jail, and a $300 fine.  But the old guard had gotten what they were after.  They’d 

destroyed his career and his life.  

Freed left New York, had a short-stint as an LA DJ, and then took another in Miami but nothing stuck.  The worse things got, the more he drank.  In Miami, he only lasted two months on the job.  He moved to Palm Springs and spent his last days along, calling old friends in the music industry to beg for rent and grocery money.  In 1965, he went into the hospital with a case of blood poisoning and died there.  The man who’d put rock and roll on the map, had died alone and penniless at the relatively young age of 43.  The final insult though came way after his death. 

Alan was posthumously honored with a place in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and an urn, with Freed’s ashes, were there from then until 2014.  Alan’s son,  Lance, described it as an ‘eviction’.

The 1950’s have traditionally been seen with nostalgic reverence, from behind rose-colored lenses that color the world in the sticky sweetness of childhood, puberty, and high school crushes. Rock and roll had its birth and childhood in this half-remembered, half-fantasized world.  But by 1959, some of the greatest acts in rock’s early history had died, the man who put the music on the map had been silenced, the reigning king of rock had joined the army and would never be the same again.  The future certainly looked uncertain.  In future episodes, we’ll see rock grow up and take on more of the social, cultural, political and economic profile of a full fledged adult in an increasingly complex world.  See you next time on American Song!