Beat music

Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat (after bands from Liverpool and nearby areas beside the River Mersey) is a pop and rock music genre that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll (mainly Chuck Berry guitar style and the midtempo beat of artists like Buddy Holly), doo-wop, skiffle and R&B. The genre provided many of the bands responsible for the British Invasion of the American pop charts starting in 1964, and provided the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, including the format of the rock group around lead, rhythm and bass guitars with drums.

Use of the term

The exact origins of the terms 'beat music' and 'Merseybeat' are uncertain. Beat music seems to have had little to do with the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s, and more to do with driving rhythms, which the bands had adopted from their rock and roll, rhythm and blues and soul music influences. As the initial wave of rock and roll declined in the later 1950s "big beat" music, later shortened to "beat", became a live dance alternative to the balladeers like Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard who were dominating the charts.

Would You Believe? (The Hollies album)

Would You Believe? is an album by the Hollies, released in 1966.

Background

It features a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock," which displayed progression for the band at the time – the rising folk-rock nascent was on the horizon. However, Would You Believe also features covers of Buddy Holly's "Take Your Time" and Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" — by 1966, R&B and blues covers were becoming passé.

Another sign of growth for the band on Would You Believe includes the Evie Sands cover, "I Can't Let Go", a major hit for the band.

The band-written songs (under the pseudonym, "Ransford") are also considered to be among the more progressive tunes on the album: "Hard Hard Year", "Oriental Sadness", "Fifi the Flea" and "I've Got a Way of my Own". "Fifi", covered by the Everly Brothers (see the 1966 Two Yanks in England album), had lyrics outside of the band's norm; "Oriental Sadness" featured distinctly Asian-sounding chords; and "Hard Hard Year" and "I've Got a Way of My Own" (which had previously appeared on the B-Side of "If I Needed Someone") are both folky-sounding waltzes.