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Pop History

A History of Modern Pop Music.

by Roger Smyth.

Part One of a Four Part Series.

Late in 1954, Bill Haley and the Comets cut a record called "Rock Around the Clock" which had been a rhythm V blues hit for Ivory Joe Hunter the year before So modern pop music arrived.

The abolition of slavery in 1865 was by no means a signal for a burst of prosperity for the American negro. On the contrary, his position economically and socially was just as bad, and, in some cases, worse. Negroes were forced to scrape a living (much as before) by hard physical labour that there evolved a musical form known as the work-song. Derived mainly from African chants, work songs were functional in that they not only helped ease the strain of work, but also provided an outlet for creativity and self expression. Basically a work-song consisted of an improvised verse, sung by a leader and a refrain chanted by his workmates to produce a complex interweaving of rhythms, with the stress coinciding with the striking of a hammer or whatever. The deprivation of the negro and his consequent lack of former training meant that work songs were almost entirely improvised and spontaneous, relying solely on the inherent rhythmic sense of the participants.

Initially, work songs were purely an expression of the act of working, scarcely touching on the emotional side of life. Gradually, however, negro music began to encroach upon other areas of life. For instance chain gangs, would pass "coded" messages using work songs as a medium. Somewhere along the line, the English ballad and the latin-inspired music of the creoles from Cuba and the West Indies both lent their influence, and the emphasis of negro music shifted from the sole act of working to the whole backdrop of living. The blues was born.

The blues reflected the negro life with all its joylessness and misery. Not that the blues was vindictive - far from it, rather it depicted loneliness, jealosy, fear and especially love and lust. Everything in fact but joy or happiness.

Much of the spontaneity of the work song had disappeared in this evolution. The blues had an extremely rigid structure and form — twelve bars in common time, and the verse consisting of three lines, the second of which is a repeat of the first, with the third line rhyming or near enough. The repeated first line derived in all probability from the use of songs to convey messages, just as fighter pilots will open a communication with something like "Red header to Squadron, Red header to Squadron," so did the negroes draw the attention of the listener with the first line, give him time to let it register with the second and deliver the actual message with the third. Further, this format allowed for improvisation within the rigid structure by allowing the singer time to compose the crucial third line. Improvisation was also ensured by the negroes poverty, in that musicians could rarely get hold of adequate instruments.

Then the blues moved north, from the lazy banks of the Mississippi, the blues followed the path of early New Orleans jazz to Chicago. And blues men followed their music in an effort to cater for an ever-increasing negro population come to that city for work. But unlike jazz, the blues became firmly entrenched in the squalid ghetto of the south side of Chicago.

Of course a musical form could not emerge unchanged from so radical a displacement. Whereas blues was originally mild and gentle and sad (and hence evocative of its environment) Chicago Blues was all noise, electrified guitars, wailing saxophones and sweaty harp-blowers. A new generation of players appeared in Chicago, — Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Elmore James. Everyone still played twelv-bars, but the mood was different, violent. Elmore James strikes me as being the best of the earlier crop of Chicago blues men; he played a slick guitar that would explode down the scale at the end of each line, and just as it began to peter out, the voice would come in again, harsh and malicious.

During the optimistic post-war period, a touch of hedonism was added to this mixture and a new rhythm evolved, faster, simpler and more fierce. And even noisier. Rhythm and Blues. A line of four beats, belted out by the singer and then echoed by the band.

All a little banal perhaps but very powerful and raw. Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker were top, but everyone was in on the act — even Howling Wolf — and Muddy Waters' bassman Willie Dixon, emerged as a prolific writer of R'n'B

And then there was Boogi-Woogie, a totally different R'n'B style perfected by John Lee Hooker whose Boogi Chillun sold more than a million copies around 1951. Boogie is a piano or guitar style that is even harder to pin down in words. Suffice it to say that it is faster than conventional R'n'B and good rocking music. Originally the boogie had consisted of piano versions of twelve-bar blues in which the left hand played a walking bass while the right-hand explored variations of twelve-bar chords to produce music rich in cross-rhythms. It had reached a peak in the 1920's but by the time it reached John Lee Hooker in the late forties and early fifties, it had been rather freely adapted; the cross-rhythms were preserved but the twelve-bars are somewhat obscure.

At any rate, R'n'B echoed through the streets of Chicago A whole new negro identity had formed, a new mood was creeping in and Bo Diddley was a hero. There were even special R'n'B sales charts. The music drew heavily from the blues tradition, but mournfulness slowly dissipated; songs like Big Boss Man (Dixon & Smith) depicted the new but still harsh life of the negro, but bitterness was creeping in. Love (or rather lust) was still the most frequent subject for songs but any suggestion of discretion was done away with;

You can lake me baby, put me in your big brass bed
You can take me baby, put me in your big brass bed
Eagle Rock me, baby, till my face turns cherryred.

This example of Mississippi Blues, is blatant enough but compared to titles like Baby let me Bang Your Box, its just kids stuff.

However the existence of R'n'B charts produced some changes in the music. Much of the original R'n'B was watered down, its lyrics toned down and its fierceness removed. Wyonie "Mr Blues" Harris, Louis Jordon. Fats Domino and Lloyd Price emerged as leaders of this new tradition, and they sold millions of records. Bo Diddley may still have been in some sort of control but the weaker idiom was gaining. Fats strikes me as being the best of this new generation. If nothing else, his music has lasted. He was short, squat and fat, had his first hit with Fat Man (1948) and had clocked up twenty-two million sellers by the time he was through. All the songs sounded much the same. Fats played piano and sang, while behind him were assembled banks of brass. They are easy gentle pieces, perhaps a little reminiscent of the saving era. The vocals are lazy and carefree, but beneath is a solid rhythm. It's all a colossal piece of understatement.

Of the rest, Lloyd Price is the only one who is still remembered but this is probably due to the fact that he eventually made it with a white audience in 1958. (remember Personality-certainly not R'n'B but a hit nonetheless) and because he wrote the immortal Lawdy Miss Clawdy As music however this type of R'n'B just couldn't compare with Bo Diddley and others, but it was only in this form that black music could be peddled to white audiences. (None of these people ever had a hit in the lucrative white market even though they frequently sold upwards of a million copies of a record. In America it is possible to sell large numbers of records and not even get a toe into the National charts.)

In 1951, Alan Freed drew white audiences to a series off R'n'B concerts (watery variety) and coined the name "rock 'n roll" to eliminate the racial overtones of "rhythm and blues." These concerts were an immediate! success and no wonder. There was no teenage music for; white American kids. Everyone listened to the same old stuff ballads by Pat Boone, Dorothy Collins et al. All sentimental mawkishness. I mean, they couldn't even sing and their songs were drippy instant hits pushed by Tinpan-Alley, middle-aged men peddling middle-aged music to teenagers who were trying to enjoy the fruits of a never-before known prosperity. Johnny Ray had prepared white audiences for the type of stage-exhibitionism that is part and parcel of R'n'B and by 1953, the conditions for a pop-explosion were already ripenings Trouble was that there were no suitable performers and no suitable music. No worry—Bill Haley was on the way.

Bill Haley had a typical fairytale showbiz-type success story. He showed an inclination towards music at an early age and built his own guitar out of cardboard when he was maybe nine years old. His father was impressed and bought the young Bill a real one. He formed a group when he was thirteen and even scraped a few bookings. At fifteen he left home to earn a living out of his music land began the long struggle for recognition. Of course Haley had no really distinctive talent and so was forced to spend six years working for a Radio Station in Chester, leading a country and western band known as Bill Haley's Saddle men in his sparetime. They played undistinguished country 'n' western whats more. But in 1951 they dropped c'n'w for commercial R'n'B, changed their name to the Comets and designed a wild stage act. They even managed a recording contract and had some minor hits—Rock the Joint and Crazy Man Crazy. In 1954 he had a big success with Shake Rattle and Roll and then he cut Rock Around the Clock which stayed in the charts a whole year and made number one world-wide. Rock 'n' Roll, Bill Haley style, betrayed its country and Western origins in the arrangements. Bill Haley sings in his rather flat voice and the sax replies, then the comets join in for the chorus-chant. And the inevitable lead-guitar break. Bill Haley's guitar style is a mixture of orthodox country and Hawaian and the effect is bad, really bad, much copied of course, but bad all the same. Still for all his faults, I like Bill Haley. He has come into much critisism of late because his voice is deadpan (so is Jim Morrison's), and because he sounds old and tired.

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Of course much of this was Haley's own fault. When Rock V Roll was king but Haley had been deposed, he cut an album of his own and everyone's greatest rockers, on which he does preety pathetic cover-versions of such songs as Blue Suede Shoes. But Haley was good in his own (admittedly limited) range. He wrote many of his own songs (Live it Up. Crazy Man Crazy, Rockin Chair on the Moon and others) and these strike me as being the best. Throughout them all runs the powerful rhythm he borrowed from the negro R'n'B players. His music appeals to me as being very striking, danceable and definately charming in an ancient sort of way. It has a character all of its own, and is nothing if not distinctive.

Of course Bill Haley couldn't fail, true, he was getting old and dull and square, stupid-looking in a charming way. But the conditions were there. He was outlandish enough in his stage act but Johnny Ray had prepared the way with his sobbing. Haley went just far enough beyond that. Haley himself didn't do much except grin, but the comets performed all sorts of acrobatics.—climbing over the bass, the sax-man bending over backwards till he nearly touched the ground, - all sorts of clowning routines that might appear corny today but was really something in 1954. The thing that really made Haley was the press. Rock Around The Clock wasn't an especially good song - it had been an R'n'B hit for Ivory Joe Hunter the year before and had made no impression on white audiences. But Bill Haley's weaker version crept into the charts and was hailed by critics everywhere as anti-music, licentious and sinful. So teenagers bought it. After all, they had had nothing of their own ever, they weren't event taken into account as a group distinct from younger children and had no identity. More post-war prosperity had ensured them of a ready supply of money and of spare time. But they had nothing much to buy and so they were bored, and it was to this audience that Haley played. The adverse criticism of him, and the reactions of the older generation literally ensured him of a place in hearts of teenagers.

The main role that Haley performed in the evolution of pop was that he provided a bridge between the mushy ballads that preceded him and the fierce rock 'n' Roll that was to follow. He was sufficiently way-out to provide a distinct identity for teenagers and to arouse the contempt of their parents, and thus to establish a definite rock 'n' roll audience. He was not outrageous enough to alienate his audience or to repel them. It was a bitterly cruel role for Haley. He was projected overnight from a somewhat mediocre country and western singer to the rock hero number one a true messiah. This success produced a flood of rock 'n' roll and against all this new competition Haley just didn't have the talent to sustain his success. Successors went so far beyond him in ways to outrage that Haley, too old and not good enough to adopt, simply stopped having hits, and was dumped wholesale by his fans. His change from mediocrity to messiah to obscurity took just two years, but in that first hit he had established pop music as a mass appeal phenomena.

To be Continued