Just My Soul Responding

Rhythm And Blues, Black Consciousness And Race Relations

Brian Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135370039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Brian Ward is Lecturer in American History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne .; This book is intended for american studies, American history postwar social and cultural history, political history, Black history, Race and Ethnic studies and Cultural studies together with the general trade music.

PART ONE

Deliver me from the days of old

CHAPTER ONE

“I hear you knocking…”: from r&b to rock and roll

I heard Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers. The Charioteers, Red Foley, Hank Williams, Glenn Miller, Tex Beneke… I heard Sonny Til and the Orioles… But then on Sunday I heard Wings Over Jordan and the Southernaires, and the Golden Gate Quartet… A lot of different influences. (Ruth Brown)¹

“Sh-boom”

When the Chords’ “Sh-boom” crossed over from the Rhythm and Blues charts into the predominantly white pop charts in July 1954, it was not the first r&b record to leap that racial and commercial divide. “Gee” by the Crows—the latest in a flock of “bird” vocal groups descended from the Ravens and Orioles—had pecked at the lower reaches of the pop chart earlier that year. The Dominoes’ “Sixty-minute man”, Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, and Faye Adams’ “Shake a hand” were among the other r&b records which had appeared on that chart earlier still. Nevertheless, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) was essentially right to claim that r&b in the early 1950s “was still an exclusive music”. It was “performed almost exclusively for, and had to satisfy, a negro audience”. In 1950, for example, only three of the records which made the national Rhythm and Blues charts also crossed over into the pop field: and all three—saxophonist Lynn Hope’s “Tenderly”, Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa”, and Billy Eckstine’s “Sitting by the window”—were markedly from the slicker end of the broad r&b spectrum.²

Before “Sh-boom”, r&b forays into the pop record charts were relatively isolated phenomena: musical mavericks which implied no major realignment of white consumer preferences. Accordingly, they elicited little response from the major record companies which were primarily geared to serving the tastes of the mainstream market as they perceived and helped to define it. Capitol, Columbia, Decca, MGM, RCA and the newcomer Mercury showed little interest in leaping onto bandwagons not of their own making, especially ones they believed were of doubtful moral roadworthiness and limited commercial mileage.

After “Sh-boom”, however, there was a sustained surge of r&b into the pop charts, with more than twice as many records crossing over in 1954 as in the previous year. In the months that followed “Sh-boom”, Joe Turner’s “Shake, rattle and roll”, LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee dee”, the Charms’ “Hearts of stone”, Five Keys’ “Ling ting tong”, and Spaniels’ “Goodnite sweetheart goodnite” all appeared on the pop record sales lists. By the end of 1954, income from r&b records and tours constituted a $25 million branch of the industry. A growing, if still relatively small, contingent of young white fans had combined with the black audience to double the market share claimed by r&b from 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the total industry gross.³

And this was just the beginning. By the end of 1955, rock and roll, as performed and consumed by both blacks and whites, had emerged as a distinct musical style, rather than simply a euphemism for the black r&b which spawned it and with which it continued to overlap. In late 1956, Billboard reported that 25 of 125 pop chart entries during the first 50 weeks of the year had been black r&b/rock and roll records. Many others were either white cover versions of black songs or by white artists performing in styles obviously derived from black music. In 1957, the independent record companies responsible for recording much of this material accounted for an astonishing 76 per cent of the year’s hit singles. In 1958 more than 90 per cent of the 155 records appearing on the national Rhythm and Blues charts during the year also appeared on the pop charts.⁴

Taken together, the rise of these Independents and the unprecedented popularity of black and black-derived styles with young white audiences threatened the traditional distribution of power and influence within the music industry. According to Charles Hamm, “At no other point in the two-hundred year history of popular song in America had there been such a drastic and dramatic change in such a brief period of time”. The powerful alliance of Tin Pan Alley music publishing houses, professional songwriters, network radio stations and major recording labels, which had long dominated the popular music business, was challenged and for a while bested by a new breed of song publishers, black-oriented radio stations, distributors, and record labels.⁵

The reactions of the recording and broadcasting industries to the initial breakthrough of r&b and the hostile responses of sections of adult white America to that phenomenon were closely linked. Together, these reactions reflected the dominant racial assumptions and beliefs of the mid-to-late 1950s, just as they were coming under pressure from the same political, economic, demographic and cultural forces which shaped the modern civil rights movement. Coupled with important developments taking place within the black community, these interlocking commercial and public reactions helped to account for many of the key musical and lyrical changes in r&b as sustained success in the mainstream became a realistic possibility for some of its black practitioners.

Majors and Independents

In The sound of the city, Charlie Gillett explained the breakthrough of r&b primarily in terms of a consumer revolution on the part of an increasingly affluent white teen audience and a successful, guerilla-type action waged by small, often under-financed, but endlessly resourceful independent record labels against the major recording companies and established song publishing firms. In most subsequent accounts, Independents have also appeared as the heroes of the piece: feisty outsiders who challenged vested interests within the industry, nobly championed the neglected music of black America, and finally made it available to the mainstream market. For many commentators, this amounted to nothing less than a spirited assault on the hegemony of the middle-class white values enshrined in the popular music of Perry Como and June Valli. This conventional wisdom requires finessing, however, both in order to appreciate important differences among the Independents, and to contextualize them within—albeit often at the margins of—the American entertainment industry, where they were caught in much the same web of social expectations, racial assumptions and commercial aspirations as the Majors.⁶

Most of the Independents involved in the production of r&b had emerged in the mid 1940s, after the Majors, responding to the enforced economies of the Depression and then war, had curtailed minority ranges like black music and concentrated on the more lucrative mass market for white popular music. After the Second World War, however, a disparate group of entrepreneurs moved into the market niches created by these cutbacks, encouraged by the fact that the cost of entry into the business of record production remained relatively low. A thousand dollars was enough to hire a studio (typically at $50 an hour), book musicians, pay American Federation of Musicians (AFM) dues, have a master tape prepared, and press 500 singles at 11 cents a shot.⁷

Although routinely depicted as outsiders, at the heart of the new Independents were men and a few women—like the black ladies Lillian Claiborne, who founded the DC label in Washington, Deborah Chessler, who mistress-minded the Orioles’ flight from a Baltimore street corner to national celebrity, and Vivian Carter, co-owner of Vee Jay in Chicago—who had been in and around the music business for years. Genuine industry newcomers, like Ahmet Ertegun, the wealthy, jazz-loving son of a Turkish diplomat who founded Atlantic Records, were rare. And even Ertegun had some experience of booking black acts to perform at the Turkish Embassy in Washington and at the city’s Jewish Center, which provided a rare opportunity for integrated entertainment at a time of widespread segregation in the nation’s capital. When Ertegun formed Atlantic in 1947, he did so in partnership with Herb Abramson, a talent scout and producer for National Records who had already run his own label, Jubilee, before selling his share to partner Jerry Blaine. Moreover, when Abramson was drafted into the military in 1953, Ertegun brought in another music business insider, ex-Billboard staff-writer Jerry Wexler.⁸

Like Abramson and Wexler, most of the key figures in the Independents had industry backgrounds in record retailing, nightclub ownership, music journalism, broadcasting, songwriting, arranging, and record manufacturing. A good many began their careers as jukebox operators. The half-million jukeboxes in place in the mid 1950s devoured between a quarter and a third of all the disks produced in America, but they also acted as “free” advertising for individual records, thereby stimulating further domestic sales. Moreover, as the number of plays each jukebox selection received was regularly checked, they provided operators and record companies with a peculiarly accurate insight into changing consumer preferences in different locations and among different sections of American society.⁹

Thus it was as industry veterans, as insiders, that these Independent impresarios were able to spot the potentially lucrative gaps in the services provided by the Majors. Art Rupe, who founded Specialty in Los Angeles in 1945, having initially dubbed his label Jukebox, recognized the symbiotic relationship between the Independents and the rest of the industry. “I looked for an area neglected by the majors and in essence took the crumbs off the table of the record industry”.¹⁰

Prior to setting up Specialty—later home to r&b stars like Jimmy Liggins and Little Richard—Rupe had worked for Thomas Robinson’s tiny black-owned Atlas label in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, relatively few of the more than 2,000 labels in operation by the late 1950s, as many as 600 of which had some involvement in r&b, were black-owned. Of those which were, fewer still—Class, Dootone, Fortune, Peacock and Vee Jay—were really national, or particularly durable, operations.¹¹

Black music, whether r&b, gospel or jazz, was actually only one of many minority markets explored by the Independents in the decade after the Second World War. While some of the white entrepreneurs, writers and producers involved, like Ertegun, Wexler and Ralph Bass at King-Federal in Cincinnati, had a genuine interest in, admiration for, and understanding of black music, most cared little if the product was r&b or rhumba, as long as it sold. And even Atlantic in its early days was happy enough to release all manner of product, from poetry and children’s stories to Shakespeare plays, to try to turn a dollar. Many Independents issued a similarly eclectic mixture of minority styles and novelty records in their search for an untapped market niche. Ike and Bess Besman’s Apollo label grew out of their New York record shop and cut some fine r&b by the likes of the Four Vagabonds and Larks. But Apollo also released calypso, Jewish, Hawaiian, gypsy, polka and country records, while ex-record manufacturer Lew Chudd initially aimed his Los Angeles-based Imperial label, whose r&b catalogue subsequently included Amos Milburn and Fats Domino, at the Mexican market.¹²

Such opportunism was not restricted to white-owned companies. Dootsie Williams’ Dootone label, responsible for many of the finest west coast vocal group recordings of the mid-to-late 1950s, made much of its early profit from comedy albums and party singalong records. Jack and Devora Brown’s Fortune label, which set up its studio in the garage behind the Browns’ Detroit record shop, was one of several “r&b” Independents, including King-Federal, Imperial, Super Disc, Gilt-Edge and National, which maintained hillbilly or country music lines.

Another consequence of the simplistic Majors/Independents distinction in writings on r&b has been a tendency to use the collective term “Independents” to describe a diverse range of recording companies, from relatively stable, nationally distributed labels like Atlantic, Chess, Imperial and King, to tiny, economically vulnerable, and often short-lived, community-based labels like Angeltone in Los Angeles or Celeste in New York. Such casual usage suggests an entirely spurious homogeneity regarding both the sound and business operations of these labels.

Large Independents tended to develop discernible house styles and exert a more consistent musical influence on their performers than small labels, which often recorded local solo or group heroes in a more or less documentary style. To develop and maintain a distinctive label style required a fixed team of writers and arrangers with a broadly shared musical vision and, ideally, a resident house band. At the very least, it required the financial wherewithal to send artists to record with musicians, arrangers and producers who worked together regularly. Imperial and Specialty, for example, hired Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans studio and let Fats Domino and Little Richard record there with the cream of the Crescent City’s session players, usually under the musical direction of Dave Bartholomew and Bumps Blackwell respectively.

At Atlantic, an in-house writing-arranging-production team of Jesse Stone, Rudolph Toombs, Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun and later Ray Ellis concocted “something like the authentic blues, but cleaner, less rough and perforce more sophisticated”, while a semi-permanent studio band built around the formidable talents of ex-jazzmen Mickey Baker, Willis Jackson, Panama Francis, Sam Taylor and Van Walls provided the complementary instrumental touch. The extraordinary engineering skills of Tom Dowd ensured that the music produced by the likes of the Drifters, Joe Turner and Ruth Brown was committed to disk with astonishing clarity. Moreover, while many Independents preferred to pursue hit songs, racking up a succession of one-off hits with transient artists signed to short-term contracts, Atlantic preferred to recruit performers it felt could sustain longterm careers. Many Atlantic artists stayed with the label for years, which again promoted a certain aural consistency when contrasted with the revolving-door policy of other labels.¹³

Although the Brooklyn-based Onyx label, established in 1956 by Jerry Winston—a typical white r&b entrepreneur who had previously tried his luck with a specialist mambo label called Mardi Gras—regularly featured Sammy Lowe and his Orchestra, such neighbourhood companies rarely enjoyed the luxury of a resident band. Often they simply recruited available local musicians on an ad hoc basis to make a session in a hired studio. Moreover, the material they recorded was rarely conceived in terms of a full orchestration. For all their undoubted charm and emotional integrity, many of the vocal group recordings of the 1950s simply sounded like the work of street-corner groups who were used to performing a cappella, or with a single guitarist or pianist, onto which a full instrumental arrangement was sometimes crudely grafted.¹⁴

By the early 1950s, the seven largest r&b Independents (Aladdin, Atlantic, Chess, King, Modern, Savoy and Specialty) accounted for almost two-thirds of the best selling black singles, and regularly notched up sales of over 100,000, and sometimes many more, to what remained principally a black market. By contrast, the biggest seller in the history of a typical local label like Celeste in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn was the Mellows’ “Sweet Lorraine” which sold barely 2,000 copies. The label’s usual expectations can be better gauged by the fact that it pressed only 200 copies of the Minors’ “Jerry”, half of those as free promotional copies for deejays. Some locally oriented labels did enjoy sporadic national success. “Stranded in the jungle” by the Jayhawks on Flash sold over 120,000 copies in 1956, but sales were usually much more modest. The Jayhawks’ previous release, “Counting my teardrops”, sold just 987 copies and the label’s day-to-day operations were primarily geared to servicing black Los Angeles.¹⁵

Throughout the decade, most of the national hits on neighbourhood labels were the result of distribution deals with bigger labels, or of selling the rights to a recording outright. In 1958, Al Silver—the owner of the Herald-Ember labels—bought the Silhouettes’ hugely popular crossover hit “Get a job” from black deejay Kae Williams’ nascent Junior label. Williams simply could not exploit the full potential of a record which was selling rapidly in the group’s native Philadelphia. Silver also bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Deliver me from the days of old
• Part II People get ready
• Part III One nation (divisible) under a groove
• Notes
• Sources
• Permissions
• Index