MUS 132 Lesson 3
Electric Sound Production
A note on the instruments themselves: electric guitars had been available since the 1930s, and electric bass guitars since the 1940s, and electric guitar had been adopted particularly in jazz, blues, and r&b fairly widely by the end of the 1940s. The primary reason for their use in these genres was for the higher volume made possible by amplification. An acoustic guitar was impossible to hear when playing with a group including horns and drums, and electric amplification made it possible to hear. However, the implications for sound manipulation that resulted from electrification were not of much interest to artists working in these styles. Rock and roll musicians, by contrast, tended to look at the electric guitar in a more sonically flexible way, altering its sound as a basic feature of musical interest in sound recordings. Electric bass quickly became the primary bass instrument in rock and roll, though largely for logistical reasons (it is easier to transport and easier to play than acoustic bass, and it is a much less expensive instrument to buy). It was only in the mid-1960s that electric bass sound began to be manipulated along the lines that electric guitar sound was in the 1950s. The most immediately recognizable form of manipulation that electric sound production facilitated was distortion. Distortion is essentially a fuzzy tone that initially came from the breakdown of an amplifier. A quick side trip down physics alley: Waveforms When an electric guitar sends a signal to an amp, it is in the form of a sine wave (the top wave in the image). As that wave approaches the maximum capacity the amplifier can handle, the wave begins to be "clipped"—essentially, the peaks and troughs of the wave start to get flattened out (the second wave in the image is a sine wave just hitting the limit of the amp). This flattening creates a fuzz and the more extreme the flattening is, the more fuzz you'll hear and the less pure tone (the third image is a flattened wave that has considerably exceeded the limit of the amp). Distortion was relatively mild in early rock and roll, and originally happened when the vacuum tubes in amplifiers started to break, which would produce a warm fuzz. This is what you hear in "Rocket 88" Pretty quickly musicians discovered how appealing this sound could be, and how much it distinguished their music from what older audiences were listening to, and started to produce it on purpose. Over time more and more extreme levels of distortion have been common.
Instrumentation
All the genres of American popular music shared a general approach to instrumentation at mid-century: instruments were divided into "rhythm section" and "lead" roles, and there was a preference for a core grouping of guitar, bass, and drums. The rhythm section of a group played accompaniment figures that would usually be very similar from one song to another and that would change very little within a song, except perhaps to mark the difference between A sections and Bridge or between Verse and Chorus. Blues was distinguished by commonly including two guitars (one playing rhythm parts and one playing lead parts) and the addition of harmonica and sometimes piano; r&b was distinguished by the common use of piano in the rhythm section and inclusion of horn sections to play lead parts; country's subgenres each had distinguishing features as well—honkytonk usually added fiddle and/or pedal steel guitar, bluegrass added mandolin, banjo, and fiddle, Texas swing used fiddle and pedal steel, but also often featured clarinets and saxophones borrowed from jazz. Rock and roll tended toward an economy of means, and it was by no means uncommon for groups to be trios including only guitar, bass, and drums, or trio plus lead guitar. In a trio the lone guitar had to cover rhythm and lead parts, and as a result lead parts are often to be brief and only played at structurally significant moments (the beginning, during a solo break, at the end). Some singers and groups retained the larger r&b instrumentation (Little Richard, for instance, played piano and had large horn sections, as did Chubby Checker somewhat later). Still, the trio or trio plus lead guitar became the most sonically recognizable format for rock and roll and the rough, sparse sound it promoted became a marker of the emerging genre.
Two Exemplary Songs
Chuck Berry's "Maybellene," recorded in 1955 is often pointed to as one of the first true rockand roll songs and as a primary example of the music's distinctive approach to the fusion of country and r&b in songwriting. Berry's first single, "Maybellene" was recorded at Chessrecords in Chicago, a label strongly associated with blues and r&b. The song is, indeed, an innovative blend of bits and pieces, in its approach to lyrics and form. You may find analyses of "Maybellene" online that describe it as a verse-chorus form, but that is a weak interpretation. Indeed, it has a section that repeats lyrics and a section that does not, but it makes more sense to hear it as a hybridization of blues with ballad form. In three stanzas Berry tells a chase story that takes place between the eponymous character, Maybellene, driving a Cadillac coupe de ville, and the first person protagonist ("I") driving a V8 Ford. The narrative sections all take place over an extended section without harmonic movement (musicians call this a one-chord vamp. Vamp means a section that repeats over and over, and in this case it only as a single chord.) This leads to the section that uses the repeating lyrics, "Maybellene, why can't you be true?/Oh, Maybellene, why can't you be true? / You done started doing the things you used to do," which uses a complete 12-bar blues form. Musically it makes sense to hear this whole thing as BOTH an extension of blues form—that is, a blues form with an extended opening vamp—AND a ballad form in which the refrain is three lines long. (Incidentally, Chuck Berry derived the drum part and the rhythm of his performance of the lyrics in the narrative section from a ballad-form song by Texas swing musician, Bob Wills, called "Ida Red.")The particular poetics of "Maybellene" are new, and somewhat distinctive. They center around the protagonist's emotional investment in his car. This connects the song indelibly with thegrowing postwar teen culture. Adults may have been more likely to actually have cars, but young people increasingly had access to cars, and moreover cars were coming to symbolize freedom, independence, and status for teens. Elvis Presley's "Blue Moon of Kentucky," recorded in 1954, is another good example of thecreative fusion of elements from r&b with elements from country in early rock and roll. The song was Elvis's second recording at Sun Records, the B-side on his first single (the A side was "That's Alright") and was a cover of a country song recorded by bluegrass pioneer, Bill Monroe. The song is an AABA form (the A sections begin with the lyrics "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and the B section begins with "It was on one moonlight night") fairly generic lyrics about love and loss. The combination of country and r&b or blues here comes in the performance of a song that was originally country in a style that is heavily influenced by blues. There are lots of differences between Elvis's recording and the original, but two seem particularly important. The first is rhythmic. If you listen to the Bill Monroe version, you can hear that it is a waltz, meaning that it has beats grouped in threes; the Elvis version, by contrast, is in a rock and roll shuffle groove, with beats grouped in fours and a backbeat, a rhythmic style derived from r&b. The other big difference is the vocal style. Bill Monroe sings in a higher key, with a distinctly twangy, nasal-timbred voice, a sound intimately connected with bluegrass (often called the "high lonesome" sound). Elvis lowers the key of the song so that he can sing in a lower, less-twangy style that sounds more bluesy than country. There is another big difference, which has to do with instrumentation and use of recording effects, but we will save that for the next lecture on the sound of rock and roll.
Musical Forms
Early rock and roll tended, for the most part, to use the common forms from the previous decade and more of popular music: blues forms (especially 12-bar blues); AABA pop song forms; and somewhat less commonly, verse-chorus forms. It is tempting to think of blues forms as something coming into rock and roll from r&b, and verse-chorus forms coming from country; but the reality is more complicated. In fact, r&b had used AABA pop forms at least as much as it had used blues forms, and it had used verse-chorus forms as well; likewise, country artists, since at least the 1930s "blues yodel" recordings by Jimmie Rodgers, had recorded their own blues forms. The differences between these traditions had not been as much in the area of form as they had been in the area of performance style, sound, and lyrics. In fact, this seems to have been something rock and roll artists were aware of, and used as a way of making the new style: namely, that it was possible to take songs from country or from r&b and re-make them each as rock and roll, partly because the musical forms were more or less interchangeable. Good examples of these three forms in the new rock and roll style include: Blues: "Long, Tall Sally," by Little Richard, recorded in 1956 Little Richard uses a standard 12-bar blues musical form, in a distinctive way here. The first four bars are in what musicians call "stop time." The music stops most of its sound, only playing on the first beat of each measure while the singer delivers the vocal line. In measures five through twelve, the band plays a standard rhythmic accompanimental line behind the vocals. Little Richard uses each of the stop time sections to sing new lyrics, and measures five through twelve to sing a lyrical refrain, the same words each time: "Oh, baby, / Yes, baby, / Ooh, baby, / Having me some fun tonight." AABA Form: "Great Balls of Fire," by Jerry Lee Lewis, recorded in 1957 This is the classic approach to a 32-bar AABA form in rock and roll: you hear one whole performance of the form (the first A starts at the beginning, the second A starts with the lyrics "I learned to love all of Hollywood money," the B section starts with "You kissed me, baby, woo," and the final A section starts with "I chew my nails and I twiddle my thumbs"); after that there is a half-chorus instrumental solo (the piano plays the lead for two A sections), and vocals return for the second half of the form. Lewis uses lyrics to create a refrain of a sort, ending each A section with the line "Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!" Verse-Chorus form: "That'll Be the Day," by Buddy Holly, recorded in 1958 True verse-chorus forms are relatively uncommon in early rock and roll, though various hybrid forms that use variations of blues or AABA to create a sense of refrain are more common (indeed, both of the songs above do this). On the other hand, there are some examples of verse-chorus forms. "That'll Be the Day" is one. The song begins with the chorus (which is a bit unusual), and alternates between chorus and verse. After the second chorus there is an instrumental solo, which uses the chord progression of the chorus. The difference between the two sections is not huge—their melodies are similar, and they both have a very limited harmonic framework. Nonetheless, there is one major difference, which is that the chorus ends on the tonic chord of the key (an A major chord), and the verse ends on the chord based on the fifth note of the key (an E major chord); as a result, the end of the verse sounds incomplete and pushes forward to the chorus (Buddy Holly uses this musical feature to create momentum, singing a drawn out "well" to transition from the verse back to the chorus.
Rock and Roll Films
If rock and roll on television mostly appeared (at least in the mid-1950s) on family programs, film offered a medium that marketed more directly and specifically to teens as such. It's nosurprise: while television in the home was mostly watched under the eye of parents, films gave teens an unsupervised space in the movie theater. DJ and producer, Alan Freed, among others, took full advantage of this phenomenon, creating the genre of rock and roll films. These films tended to have at best thin, contrived plots, and wooden acting, but they existed principally to showcase performers. Ultimately film turned out to be a better medium for the emerging genre than television. Television was filmed live and required musicians to focus on singing and playing at the same time as they focused on crafting a look and feel; by contrast, it was commonplace in musical film to record sound separately from video. This allowed performers far more range for truly over-the-top performativity. Another element of these films that speaks to their niche teenage market has to do with the racial makeup of the performers. During the 1950s (and, frankly in the 1960s and beyond as well) American television was a racially conservative space, which tended to maintain segregation and give the most (and the best) opportunities to white performers. If everything you knew about rock and roll came from television, in the 1950s you might well have thought it was an all-white affair. Freed's films, on the other hand, presented a considerably different picture. Freed had started as an R&B DJ in Cleveland, and had promoted interracial concerts in connection with his work as a DJ. He continued to show rock and roll as an interracial phenomenon in his films, highlighting performances by black and white artists. The implication was that for teens who were interested in this music, race was secondary to musical connoisseurship, as the Starr and Waterman reading argues. This is a particularly optimistic view of rock and roll; it may be accurate, but from the perspective of black artists who had been struggling to make a living in the decade before playing rhythm and blues it may have seemed more complicated. The rest of the lectures in this module will consider the question further. A fine example of rock and roll film performance can be seen in Chuck Berry's appearance in Freed's last film, Mr. Rock and Roll, from 1957. The clip you see here includes a short introduction and Chuck Berry lip-synching to the song "Oh Baby Doll." Later lectures in the module will discuss musical sound and lyrics, but here I would like you to focus on watching Berry as a performer. His dancing is not entirely unlike Elvis's, but more involved (this video particularly showcases side-to-side leg slides, such as at 1:19, but also his signature "duck walk," for instance around 1:29, and some highly suggestive use of the guitar as a symbolic phallus, such as at 2:29 or so). It's worth also thinking about howhe plays to the camera in a somewhat unusual way. While most musical performances at the time (and later as well) were generally filmed so that audiences would be able to watch without looking directly in the performers eyes, Berry stares—HARD—directly into the camera for nearly the entire two-and-a-half minutes. The effect is intense.
Some Songs That Don't Really Fit the Mold
Not all rock and roll songs share this "combination of r&b with country" format nearly as well asthese two. Far more rock and roll songs are more or less straight-forwardly r&b songs with no real country elements whatsoever. Most of Chuck Berry's songs fit this description, as do virtually all of Little Richard's, and any number of their contemporaries. In fact, considerable difficulty exists in determining the "beginning" of rock and roll precisely because of this. The song "Rocket '88," recorded by Ike Turner's Rhythm Kings in 1951 (using the name Jackie Brenson and His Delta Cats), a blues form tune about a car, is sometimes considered the first rock and roll recording and at other times considered an r&b recording that influenced the beginnings of rock and roll. Other rock and roll songs are pretty closely connected to country without any obviously bluesy or r&b elements. Much of what the Everly Brothers recorded in the 1950s fits this description, as does a considerable portion of Buddy Holly's recorded work. Beyond this, a lot of rock and roll was more intimately connected to mainstream pop from the late-1940s and early-1950s than the country-plus-r&b narrative or the idea of rock and roll as teen rebellion would suggest. Elvis was famous for recording pop ballads in a crooner voice as soon as he was able (listen to "I Forgot to Remember to Forget You" from 1955, or "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" from 1956 for examples); and the prominence of so-called "novelty" songs on the pop charts created room for Latin rhythms in rock and roll and even for Latin songs such as the Mexican song "La Bamba" to become hits (originally a song from the state of Veracruz in the Son Jarocho style, Richie Valens recorded it as a rock and roll song in 1958). The next lecture will pick up the sound of rock and roll, making the argument that what ties these songs all together, more than form or lyrics, is an approach to musical sound.
Variety Entertainment on Television
One of the most important venues for creating a look and feel for rock and roll was already in place before the music's emergence: the variety show. These shows, which were hosted by a popular entertainment celebrity, featured a series of acts including comedy sketches, animal and circus acts, and music. Sometimes hosts were performers themselves (such as Perry Como, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, or Bob Hope) but many were only known as presenters. The most famous variety show in the 1950s was hosted by Ed Sullivan, a presenter who was not known as a performer. The format helped shape audience expectations for rock and roll by showing the performers on stage. Television audiences not only heard the music, they saw the performers' fashion, hair styles, and movement, and because these were live shows, they saw how the audience in the studio looked and acted. An appearance on the Milton Berle Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, or one of Sid Caesar's shows had the capacity to move an artist from a small-time, aspiring musician to a full-fledged star. That said, variety shows also stoked the controversy around rock and roll and its individual performers. Because they predated the emergence of teen culture and because they were broad-spectrum popular, family entertainment presenters, variety shows brought rock and roll to a wide and diverse audience. The strongest critiques of Elvis came in direct response to his appearance on the Milton Berle show, for instance, not to the performances he had been giving on tour all across the American South in the two years leading up to it. (Ironically, of course, adults' moral outrage at performances by Elvis or Little Richard and the like probably worked more to build their popularity with teen audiences than anything else) It's worth looking at a few performances from variety television in the period to get a sense of how musicians who were being marketed as rock and roll projected the sense of wild performance and youthfulness for which the genre was coming to be known. Elvis Presley's appearance on the Milton Berle Show in 1956 is a prime example. Berle introduced the act with a brief comedy sketch that plays on the so-called "mania" of hisfans—notably represented as screaming, sexually aggressive girls. The comedy revolves around mistaken identity (in their madness the fangirls tear off the wrong man's clothes). Berle's punch line, "Gimme the good old Rudy Vallee days," Elvis in the lineage of pop crooners but also marks his difference from the ones who came before him; by extension it creates both a comparison and contrast between the new rock and roll and the pop styles (especially big band swing) that came before it. The scene then shifts to the stage, where Elvis appears with his backing trio (Scotty Moore, guitar; Bill Black, bass; and D. J. Fontana, drums. Elvis had appeared on Berle's show a few months earlier with less intense reaction, and the implication is that the difference was the visibility of his body. On the first performance he played guitar, which obscured much of his torso and limited his mobility; on the second, which you see here, he did not play guitar, instead dancing and using the mic stand as a prop. There is no question that the performance here has sexual overtones—the hip thrusts at about 1:16 are particularly suggestive—but two other elements were probably equally important. First, the music: Elvis's slowing down from full to half speed for the second and third verses of "Hound Dog" was a trick from burlesque entertainment, widely associated with sexualized exotic dance performance (Elvis may have actually picked up this version of "Hound Dog" from a Las Vegas group that had ties to burlesque). Elvis's hip thrusts accentuate the gesture. Second, the audience: Much of theconcern expressed by commentators after the performance revolved around the fear of rampant teen (female) sexuality. Elvis was accused of stoking fans lewd desires, and fans were accused of wanton abandon. All of this was modeled for fans (specifically girls) watching at home. The effectiveness of this medium to build national stardom for a performer was clear. In 1944 and 45 Elvis was a successful performer with a regional audience. He had recorded in Memphis, at Sun Studios, and toured extensively but exclusively in the South (At first in a small region roughly between Memphis, TN and Shreveport, LA; later in a wider area between Texas and Florida, and as far north as southern Missouri). Shortly after the Berle appearance, his bookings stretch from California to Pennsylvania and from Arizona to Nebraska; by early 1957 he was playing Toronto, Ottawa, and Honolulu. For comparison, it's worth looking at a performance of "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins on Perry Como's show, also in 1956. Perkins was a rockabilly musician, also recording at Sun Studios, and also popular throughout the South. This performance is not so different in musical terms from Elvis's at the time, but its look and feel are utterly different. Perkins is subdued and low-key. There are no screaming fans. Like country singers before him, he mostly stands in place and sings. His brief attempts to shake a leg (literally...) along with the lyrics "uh uh honey, lay off of them shoes" only dramatize how distant he was from Elvis and other rock and roll acts emerging at the time.
Selling Records
Radio continued to be central to the marketing of music as it transitioned from live performance to recorded broadcast. Where once it had been important for artists to land weekly shows, now it was imperative for a record company to place their singles on radio, preferably nationally-syndicated shows. The most important figure in this process for rock and roll in the 1950s was Alan Freed. Initially a DJ in Cleveland, and then in New York, Freed was one of the first and most ardent promoters of rock and roll (he is often credited with coining the genre name, though whether he coined it or just popularized it is in question). Freed was also the central figure in the most dramatic scandal in the 1950s recording industry, the so-called "payola scandal." The payola scandal is interesting not only because of its salaciousness, but because of what it tells us about the increasing centrality of records to the industry and to the livelihoods of musicians. In brief, Freed was accused of accepting bribes from record company agents in exchange for playing their records on his radio show. The practice of paying to have records played (or to get bands to play a song in their live broadcasts) almost certainly predated rock and roll, but it became a scandal in the late-1950s precisely because of the success rock and roll was having in displacing mainstream pop from radio airwaves. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Billboard charts, which ranked the popularity of songs (and still do so today) moved at the time from counting song selections on juke boxes, sheet music sales, and on-air performances, to primarily counting on-air broadcast of recordings. The changes in the industry structure discussed above were central to the scandal: the major labels, which represented significant corporate interests, were responsible for mainstream pop, and they saw the small, independent-label rock and roll as a threat to their business model. They pushed the U.S. Congress to initiate an investigation because payola—paying for radio airtime without disclosing it as sponsored programming—is a violation of federal law regulating telecommunications. Freed became the focus and primary victim of the congressional hearings not only because he had been an important recipient of payola, but also because he was uncooperative and unrepentant. Dick Clark (who would go on to host the television show American Bandstand for decades) was also brought in to the hearings, but was cooperative and divested himself of holdings in a company that had violated payola laws, and thus escaped any retribution.
Recording Effects
Recording changed dramatically at the same time as rock and roll was emerging, and a number of effects that weren't really possible in live performance (and which hadn't been possible in recordings up to that time) became standard in rock. Each of them were techniques that had been used in mainstream pop as well, but they were always special novelties in pop. Rock and roll musicians and audiences were "recording native," so to speak, and made these techniques part of the norm in their music. The first of these effects was echo (also called delay). Echo is a process where a single sound source is recorded twice, with a time delay between the two recordings. Initially this was accomplished by setting up one microphone in front of, for instance, a singer's mouth, to capture his or her voice as he or she sang. That signal would be recorded, but would also be sent through a speaker located in another room (often an echo-y room, like the bathroom down the hall from the main studio room in Sun Records in Memphis, where Elvis recorded his earliest work). That room would also have a microphone set up, which would pick up the sound as it played through the speaker in the other room. That signal would also be recorded onto the same track. Because of the slight delay involved in the signals passing through an amplifier, speaker, and back to the recording device, the sound from the second mic would appear to be an echo behind the singer's main voice. It could also be recorded at a somewhat lower volume to extend the effect. In time tape recorders were created that could simulate this effect much more handily, by recording on two different spots on a tape as it moved. By varying the distance on the tape between the two recordings it was possible to create lots of different echo/delay effects. This is easy to hear in Elvis's vocal track on "Blue Moon of Kentucky," particularly on, for example, the words "shining bright" at 0:06-0:07 or "I said blue moon..." at 0:16-0:18. But it was commonplace and can be heard on guitar lines, drums, and bass as well as voice in lots of recordings from the period, if you listen for it. (this is something that is much easier tohear on higher quality playback equipment. If you're using your computer to listen, you may ormay not hear it, but if you use headphones you will find it easier.) This effect is related to (but not the same as) reverb, which creates a sense of space for a recording. Essentially, the more reverb a recording uses, the larger the space it appears to have been performed in. Amps of the time (and many amps, still) simulated this by passing the tone through a set of springs that could be made more or less flexible. The more the springs vibrated, the more reverberant the final sound would be, and thus, the larger the room it appeared to come from. This could be used just to give a recording a sense of warmth and presence—like you the listener are really in the room with the artists—but increasingly it could be applied differently to different instruments and voices to create recorded artifacts that do not correlate with real experiences (how often do you hear a performance where the vocalist is in a different space than the guitarist?). The other main recording effect that became commonplace in rock and roll was multi-tracking and overdubbing. Here the idea was that it became possible to record the parts of a performance separately and combine them after the fact. An excellent example of this is Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." The song, which tells the story of the rise to fame of a young guitar player named Johnny B. Goode, is marked by particularly prominent lead guitar lines (the lead begins the song, and comes in as a series of solos at a number of points as the song progresses). There is also a rhythm guitar, but it is recorded much more softly and with a darker timbre so that the lead stands out even more. However, Chuck Berry is the only guitarist on the recording. On the first take he recorded the introductory lead and then played the rhythm part along with piano, bass, and drums and his vocals. He then recorded the rest of the lead parts separately, and the engineer at Chess records in New York mixed them together. Berry was a particularly technologically inclined musician, having experimented with overdubbing using a home tape deck before he was recorded in the studio, so it makes sense that he would have been a particularly prominent early user of this technique. As a result of all this recordings came to represent performances that never happened, and over time they became conceptually distanced from performances as such. Eventually, in fact, rather than recordings trying to sound like performances, performances were crafted to sound like recordings—but that's a story for a different lecture.
Lyrics
The lyrics of popular music have been so significant, influential, and ubiquitous in the culture of the later twentieth century and twenty-first century, it can be hard to imagine a world before them. From Little Richard's evocative nonsense syllables—"Wop bop a loo mop, a lop bop bop"—to Pete Townshend's iconic assertion of hostility toward old age—"I hope I die before I get old"—rock songwriters have produced words that encapsulate the ethos of their times as much or more than any other art. Rock and roll as it emerged in the 1950s certainly drew on older traditions of songwriting, but it also initiated some new wrinkles on older trends. Blues had developed, most significantly, the tradition of highly personal lyrics, written in the first person ("I woke up this morning...," "I've got to keep moving, I've got to keep moving / Blues falling down like hail," "I'm a man..."). Pop music scholars tend to differentiate between three subjects when talking about the music: characters (which are fictional subjects who appear in songs) personas (which are the public images of performers) and people (which are the performers private selves). Many traditions, of course, have songs in the first person, but the blues specialized in an approach that blurred the distinction between characters, personas, and people. In many cases listeners can imagine that the "I" in a blues song song is actually the singer. Blues songs may be narrative, telling a story (in which case listeners are encouraged to imagine that the events depicted actually happened to the singer) or lyrical, reflecting on an emotion or state of mind (in which case listeners are encouraged to imagine that the singer actually feels what the song depicts). Country included a wide variety of approaches to songwriting, but drew more heavily than did blues on the tradition of Anglo-American narrative song from the nineteenth century and before called Ballads. These songs had narrative verses each of which ended with a refrain (usually two lines long) that commented on the moral of the story (my favorite is the song "Frankie and Johnny," which tells the story of Johnny's mistreatment of Frankie, and his eventual revenge murder at her hands. The refrain goes "He was her man / but he was doing her wrong.") As a result, country songs were more commonly in the third person than were blues or r&b songs, and more commonly told stories with narrative arcs (beginning, middle, end). Pop songs were often about more broad, generic aspects of life—especially about love. They tended to reflect on the nature of love, more often than they told stories about it or provided highly individual, idiosyncratic examples of it. In addition, they often used larger vocabularies, more complex poetic structures, and allusions to high art—in this regard, the songwriter Cole Porter, whose songs still get recorded by jazz singers to this day, is particularly exemplary. Rock and roll used all three of these approaches, drawing variously on one or another model more or less equally.
Teen Culture
The pop music industry in America distinguished itself over the years by its ability to make the most of every available media to get its product (recordings, in the 1950s, and sheet music before that) into the hands of audiences. Long before MTV made music videos a commonplace, popular music promoters were using photography, film, and television as well as radio (naturally) to create an image for songs and performers, giving them a "look" and more broadly speaking a "feel" for listeners. For rock and roll the look and feel contributed significantly to the development of the notion that this was "teenager" music. The notion of youth culture was not new, by any means (jazz had been youth culture in the period between WWI and WWII, for instance) but the more specific distinction, focusing on teens as both a marketing category and cultural group more broadly speaking was new. Youth up till then had been focused as much on young adults—people in their late-teens and early-twenties—as on high school-aged people. As the Starr and Waterman reading makes clear, the emergence of the teenager in the 1950s was no coincidence, but rather a direct result of the confluence of the baby boomer generation entering their teen years and America going through a period of considerable economic growth. Rock and roll was not the only venue for the creation of teen culture, to be sure. Throughout the decade there were films for teens—High School Confidential, for instance—literature for teens, and by the end of the 1950s there were television shows specifically marketed to teens. Still, by far the most important genre in defining the new teen identity was rock and roll. Many teen films were organized around rock and roll, teen television was largely connected to rock and roll, and even teen literature made reference to rock and roll. Teens played rock and roll, to some extent, but the most important element of creating teen culture around the music was the emergence of the teen consumer of popular music.
Selling Stars
Ultimately, one of the main stories of 1950s rock and roll was the incorporation into the star system of popular music. All of the changes that this unit has discussed were important, and significant, and they served to set rock and roll apart from other kinds of popular music, both before and contemporaneously; but on another level, the emergence of this new music was only a change to some degree. The industry at large adapted, offering contracts to the biggest stars (Elvis would leave Sun records for RCA Victor by 1956, for instance, and Columbia would sign Sun's two other most successful artists, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, a few years later), and incorporating rock and roll into the sound of mainstream pop. This led to some embarrassing, and unappealing covers, such as Pat Boone's version of "Tutti Frutti." (This version is from a live performance of the song on Canadian TV in 1957) It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rock and roll artists, such as Elvis, who were most able to be sold as pop stars—young, photogenic, and yes, white—were those who prospered most from the music as the 1950s turned over into the 1960s. The next module will pick up this thread, looking at the creation of "manias" for artists as rock and roll became rock.
Making Records
Up to the beginning of WWII, in the late-1930s, the recording industry in America was relatively small and dominated by a few large labels. The precise group of major labels shifted over time, but RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca (operating under various names controlled the vast majority of the market between them for decades. However, it wasn't a very big market—sheet music was still a major part of the pop music industry, live performance was still the biggest part of most musicians' income, and nearly all radio music was played live over the air. By the middle of the 1940s this was changing dramatically. Records were increasingly important as a segment of the industry and as income-generators for artists. What happened? First, the war led, among other things, to an increase in records being broadcast over the radio. Musicians were enlisted in the war effort, and broadcasters found it was more cost effective to broadcast recordings. (This wasn't the only reason. Some presenters also liked the idea of pre-recorded music because it was more predictable.) Second, the American Federation of Musicians (the musicians' union) boycotted recording as away to protest the loss of wages when radio played recordings instead of hiring live musicians. The boycott was effective, and had two outcomes. It established the policy of royalty payments for the broadcast of recordings and it broke the market dominance of the major labels. With recordings a newly-profitable sector of the industry (because they now carried royalty payments for broadcast rather than just single-sale payments) and with the majors struggling in the wake of the AFM boycott, hundreds of small record labels sprang up in cities and towns across America. These labels had a clear line on popular taste in the areas where they were, and could afford to record with local markets in mind. They recorded jazz, blues, country, r&b, and so forth—basically everything except classical music and mainstream pop. Rock and roll musicians were the beneficiaries of this system, and many actively took advantage of it. Chuck Berry's relationship with Chess records in Chicago is a case in point. Berry, who had grown up in a middle-class neighborhood in St. Louis, and become interested with music and music technology, actively sought out Chess, approaching them not with live performance, but rather with a demo tape that he had made in his home. This is, of course, the normal procedure now, but in the 1950s it was relatively unusual.