Ready For a Brand New Beat: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America
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About this ebook
The Beatles had landed in the U.S. in early 1964. By the summer, the sixties were in full swing. The summer of 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the lead-up to a dramatic election. As the country grew more radicalized in those few months, “Dancing in the Street” gained currency as an activist anthem. The song took on new meanings, multiple meanings, for many different groups that were all changing as the country changed.
Told by the writer who is legendary for finding the big story in unlikely places, Ready for a Brand New Beat chronicles that extraordinary summer of 1964 and showcases the momentous role that a simple song about dancing played in history.
Mark Kurlansky
Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Milk!, Havana, Paper, The Big Oyster, 1968, Salt, The Basque History of the World, Cod, and Salmon, among other titles. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appétit's Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City. www.markkurlansky.com
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Reviews for Ready For a Brand New Beat
38 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For those who are unfamiliar with the importance of the March on Washington 50 years ago, Mark Kurlansky's recent book makes for a good introduction to the civil rights movement and understanding why hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in an effort to end segregation.
In 1963, America was "a-changin" and Kurlansky condenses the political and social attitudes of the era to the sound of Martha and the Vandellas', "Dancing in the Street."
He champions the song as an anthem about integration while filling out the rest of his book by documenting black music culture and its influence on Rock 'n' Roll. He also discusses Motown Records' impact on breaking down racial barriers, but sadly, there are only brief snippets of Martha Reeves' own story, as well as other soulful singers who were part of the Motown Sound.
With well-informed speculation, Kurlansky tries to unmask the political interpretations which may or may not be the song's original intent. He then wedges the track between the nonviolent civil rights movement and the more aggressive Black Power ideology, arguing its importance as an integral part of the social freedoms gained during the 1960s.
Yes, Kurlansky's thesis might have read better as a short magazine article, but that doesn't matter. The premise is still a good call out to the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech."
Once again, the time is right to invite everybody across the nation to recognize that change is possible when locked hand in hand with fellow believers. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book discusses the influence of music, especially Motown and particularly the song of the title upon the civil rights movement of the 1960's. A lot of the history and facts presented are interesting and especially fun if you lived during that era. Unfortunately, the writing is not up to par: many sentences are not well constructed, grammatical errors abound and the structure is often clumsy and disjointed. As I received this as a pre-pub edition, I am hoping that an editor still has a shot at it. It could be condensed into a great magazine article that would be especially timely with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom being celebrated this year.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mark Kurlansky's book, Ready For A Brand New Beat, was an interesting monologue on how music impacted a generation. Beginning with a brief outline of rock and roll's infancy in the 1950s, Kurlansky's focus is on Motown's ability to provide a bridge - whether directly or indirectly - constructed out of music, for a nation divided by color. Who's to say if the song, Dancing In The Street, performed by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, had political undertones? No one can answer that except the songwriters: Mickey Stevenson, Ivy Jo hunter, and Marvin Gaye, but there's no denying that that the song was adopted and used to advantage by the civil rights movement during the 1960s, a period of crisis in U.S. history. If you're interested in a highly readable overview of this era, then I suggest you put Kurlansky's new book on your reading list.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I read this book as an early reviewer and I'm not so sure what to expect in a pre publication versionso I will get that bit out of the way. There were typos and it seemed to need a bit of editing to get the author's thoughts strung together.
Its a good history of early rock and folk and the birth of Motown. It ties in nicely to the civil rights movement and the brave actions taken by early civil rights leaders. I just didn't think it was strung together well. It read more like a text book. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How do you write an entire book about one short pop song? Filler. Lots and lots of filler. This is not entirely a bad thing, but readers should go into this book prepared to wander, stroll and wade around all things 1960s. Kurlansky has previously written about other strangely singular topics (salt and fish), but they have the advantage of a long, long interaction with humankind, so finding interesting information to share with the reader doesn't seem like such a stretch as it does finding relevant facts and thoughts about a fifty-year-old song. As a long article, Ready for a Brand New Beat would get high marks, as a book, it feels forced. It's still a worthy read, but don't feel too bad about skimming and skipping a bit.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 60s was a pivotal point in American history. And an argument can be made that any one of the years within that time period might best represent that transition. 1964 works as well (maybe better) than any. The Vietnam War was starting, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and there was an election campaign that was even more divisive than the ones we have just experienced. In this book, Mark Kurlansky builds on the proposition that, not only was the year a game changer, but the song "Dancing in the Street" was part of the motivation for that change.
I would say the author is stretching things just a bit. That it was a song that represented that change, yes. That it was an actual catalyst for change, not so much. Some of the conclusions Kurlansky makes seemed strained, and he appears to fall into the classic trap of picking and choosing the references that support the point he is trying to make. (Let me quickly add, it only appears that way. I have not done the exhaustive research he has, and it may only be my cynical nature that causes me to make that assumption.)
However, all that being said, this book is an excellent slice of our American history. 1964 was a pivotal time. And Kurlansky does an excellent job of explaining why. This includes a fascinating insight into the start of Motown, and the role of the various participants. As a musician, this aspect attracted me the most. But that is not to say that his discussions of politics, civil rights, and Vietnam were not also engaging.
In writing this, I may have implied serious issues with this book, or I may have made it sound dry and scholarly. My issues are minor quibbles. And the writing is anything but dry. Kurlansky tells a great story while explaining, as well as anyone can, what it was like to be in that time period. The old saying is "Buy the premise; buy the bit." I may not buy the premise. But I definitely "buy" the book. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was pleasantly surprised by the ambition of this book. Instead of focusing on a single song, it situates the hit single in its cultural and political context, recognizes the many interpretations of the song within that context, and gives a valuable history lesson about Motown, Detroit, and the civil rights movement. Kurlansky doesn't really get to the song until fairly late in the book--at one point I wondered why the book was touted as being about the importance of the song--but once he gets there the reader understands the point of the historical details that precede it. This isn't a book for a scholar of popular music or civil rights, but if you're looking for an introduction to the events of the summer of 1964, this is a good one.
Thanks to Library Thing's ER giveaway for this copy. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don't be fooled by the title. This work is much bigger than the humble beginnings and subsequent impact of just one song. Retracing the musical roots of rhythm and blues, jazz, and rock and roll Kurlansky tackles the history of these musical genres (and the musicians who played them) and leaves no stone unturned. The best part of this book was the unveiling of the profound impact technology had on music. As technology continues to change the course of marketing music, buying music, and listening to music it is worth remembering that this trend started a long time ago.
There is one prediction I can make about this book. Whether Kurlansky intends for this to happen is another matter, but I bet people will be reaching for their old Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley albums after reading Ready for a Brand New Beat. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's rare that you find an entire book written about one song, but Mark Kurlansky's thesis is that "Dancing In the Street," recorded by Martha and the Vandellas, is no ordinary song. What was originally intended to be a party song and Mntown hit became an anthem for black power during the turbulent 60s--so much so that it was believed, although never proven, that some radio DJs were told not to play it. Kurlansky supports his thesis; what he doesn't do is show why it's worthy of an entire book. I think it would have made a fine New York Times magazine or New Yorker article, but the book is padded with facts about rock and roll and Motown that most people who would be inclined to read it already know. And while Kurlansky clearly is passionate about his subject--and this great song--his writing is often clunky and cliched.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A detailed study of the creation, rise, and phenomenal durability of one of the most popular party songs/battle cries of modern time. Much like his wonderful work on salt, I really enjoyed the depth of research Mr Kurlansky accessibly presents on a "simple" subject most of are exposed to often, but think little about. I was oh so close to assigning a 5-star rating, but the author quietly slipped into some mercifully brief sessions of well-concealed-but-not-quite-invisible "PC White Guilt" that rang a subtle sour note on the historical objectivity scale for me. If you're a sociology/cultural studies/US history/music appreciation professor, you'll teach your students a lot and still earn some shiny apples by adding this to your class reading list, but I'd recommend it to just about anyone. Even the most die-hard Motown fans are sure to find a few surprises in here.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It’s interesting to me that a couple of the last books I’ve reviewed for LibraryThing Early Reviewers have been books on music, of a sort. A couple of months ago, it was DINNER WITH LENNY, the intelligent and compelling interview recorded by Jonathan Cott of the “last long interview” with Leonard Bernstein. This time, it’s READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT: How “Dancing in the Street” became the anthem for a changing America, by Mark Kurlansky. In both books, I have been impressed by the authors’ vibrant vocabulary of music. Mark Kurlansky gives us not only the history and development of a song, but also the full-bodied examination of one of the most convulsive periods of social and political adjustment known in the United States. Somehow, he is able to do this through smooth and seamless movement between the birth and evolution of “Dancing in the Streets” and that of the Civil Rights Movement.
Having been a young girl through some of the most violent times described in the book and having been deeply attracted to and influenced by the music coming out of that period, including Motown, I was enriched and educated by Kurlansky’s work. In the 1950’s, it was through music that the marginalized African American culture began to call the shots, unseating white culture as the defining one for the country. Just because every effort was made to disguise that fact and prevent it from happening didn’t change reality. Kurlansky gives specific examples of how it all happened.
READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT holds many surprises, especially for one so nominally educated in this recent period of our history. As Kurlansky says, history is not how things happened, it’s how they are perceived as having happened. Or something like that; I am not able to quote directly since this is the uncorrected proof of the book. In any case, who knew that the first Freedom Ride wasn’t the one taken by Rosa Parks in 1955, but the one taken by one Bayard Rustin, an African American Quaker, in 1942? According to Kurlansky, Bayard was rejected as a galvanizing emblem for the movement because he was homosexual. One passage I will dare to quote from the book, “In the study of history, beginnings and endings are usually artificial,…” So true.
Stereotypes are unseated throughout. For example, rock and roll “rioting” is clarified beautifully, completely reconfiguring my personal assumptions and miseducation about it. And this isn’t just because I came along at a time when my white culture was defensively struggling to adjust to the monumental changes that were happening. Stereotypes about the rock and roll era continue to abound in our current media. It is a stage of our growth as a nation that deserves to be revisited, as it serves as a reminder of our particular reality in the U.S., and the historical wounds from which we still suffer.
“Dancing in the Streets” was first recorded in Berry Gordy’s little studio on the Eastside in Detroit in July of 1964. That Martha Reeves happened to be hanging around that day and was pulled in from the hallway to sing it is just one of the serendipitous elements that went into the making if “Dancing in the Streets”. She liked doing things right the first time and was a little miffed that a mistake was made, it hadn’t gotten recorded and had to be redone. The slight edge to her second take was vital to the magnetic quality of the recording and certainly had some role to play in the relentless rise to popularity of the song and its remarkable staying power.
Mark Kurlansky follows the song from this humble beginning, through its rise on the charts, its becoming the song that inspired demonstrations from coast to coast, the many covers done of it through the decades and its extraordinary endurance. It wouldn’t surprise me if the book excites a revisit to those decades that revolutionized this country and the Motown originals that carried them. For certain, I am going to dig out all the Motown albums I own, dust them off and play them again. I pity those who don’t have access to those original analog versions. Although I encourage you to get whatever version of “Dancing in the Streets” you can lay your hands on, if it’s digital you’ll literally be missing something. Read this book! - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The central premise of Mark Kurlansky's READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT is, to begin with, a pretty thin one: How a single Motown record, "Dancing in the Street," became a major unifying factor in the civil rights movement of the sixties. And how the Motown sound in general served to soften the gradual move toward integration by providing a music that appealed to youth of all colors.
While the book is constructed in a fairly coherent and consistent fashion to support these things, I'm not sure it's all that convincing. And I was - and still am - a huge fan of those peak Motown years. I have vivid memories of dancing in the dark smoke-filled "pit" of a GI dive in Germany in 1965 to the captivating sounds of the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go" and "Baby Love," as well as the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself" - a tune I will always associate with learning to do the "mashed potatoes," under the careful tutelage of my Philly friend and roommate, LeRoy Thomas. Yeah, Motown was just becoming huge on the jukeboxes around the world. I heard their tunes in Kassel, Copenhagen and Hamburg that year, all nearly as popular as the Beatles and other Brit bands that were dominating the music charts world wide.
But this book? Well, it's just a bit too much like a history book - which it IS, I realize. It is filled with facts, stories and minor anecdotes about the origins of Motown and how "Dancing in the Street" was written and recorded. And that part I rather enjoyed. It was all the background information about R&B, "race music" and rock and roll's early days that became rather a chore to plow through, because it's all been written before - and I've read a lot of those books already. And then the sections about the the freedom marches, the "burn, baby, burn" inner city riots of the sixties - what started them, how they escalated and played out. Again, it's all been done before. Attaching the Motown element and one particular song to all these events is, as I said, a rather thin thread upon which to weave a whole 'nother book. There are a few interesting facts here I'd not heard before, although a bit off the author's central subject, such as, didja know that Desi Arnaz's trademark song, "Babalu," was African in origin, an homage to "a Yoruba religious spirit from Nigeria?" On the other hand, if you'd read anything at all about Motown records or its founder, Berry Gordy, Jr., then you already knew about all his women and the many children he fathered and also how "the musicians were not paid well and many ended their lives in poverty." He also controlled how they dressed, moved, and behaved. In fact those matching glittery and pastel costumes and careful robotic choreography often reminded me of what Lawrence Welk was doing with his band members and singers around the same time. Creepy and unlikely comparison, I know, but still ... Yeah, all this stuff is interesting, but it's not new.
And how "Dancing.." became "the sound track of the Civil Rights era" as no less than President Obama has called it, is a question that remains open to interpretation. After all, Martha Reeves herself has always insisted that "'It is a party song' .. She was horrified that she would be associated 'with people rioting and burning.'" I do get it, however, that song lyrics can take on new lives and mean different things to different people, which is what this whole book is about, I suppose. But the later chapter about the dozens of other artists and groups who have covered "Dancing..." seemed forced and largely irrelevant. Who, after all, would remember or care that Brenda Lee, Neal Diamond, the Everly Brothers and Michael Bolton - just to name a few - all recorded the song. I'm pretty sure that any real music fan associates the song solely with its original artists, Martha and the Vandellas.
But how I ramble on. Like Kurlansky's book did, actually. It's not really a bad book, but it became, finally, something of a slog, just a bit too tedious and scholarly for my taste. Kurlansky had an interesting idea, one that might have worked well as a magazine piece, say. But a whole book? Nope. Maybe he was hoping to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of the song coming up next year. But whatever his reasons, he was reaching. There's simply not enough NEW information here to justify yet another book about Motown or the civil unrest of the sixties.
Book preview
Ready For a Brand New Beat - Mark Kurlansky
INTRODUCTION
CALLING OUT AROUND THE WORLD
Detroit, July 1964
Summer’s here and everything is about to change. Although the United States is not yet in full-scale combat in Vietnam, there are some troops there, and on May 27 President Lyndon Johnson said to his close friend Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a conversation that he secretly recorded, We’re in the quicksand up to our necks, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.
Other invasions are in the works. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a vanguard of the civil rights movement, had begun what they called the Mississippi Summer Project,
but it became famously known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
SNCC had gathered hundreds of volunteers, mostly college students, black and white, on a college campus in Oxford, Ohio; trained them in the tactics of engaged nonviolence, which included such skills as how to act while someone is beating you; and were now sending them to penetrate the heart of segregation, rural Mississippi, and register black voters. In Mississippi villages, so-called klaverns of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were reviving, and preparing to meet the nigger-Communist invasion of Mississippi
with raw violence. Three volunteers for the Summer Project are missing, and President Johnson, under intense public pressure, has sent thousands of federal agents to Mississippi to look for their bodies. The grim hunt is occupying the front pages of most newspapers.
A group of academics, including Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley, are off to travel to Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia for a series of discussions on the crumbling Soviet bloc. Kerr is not thinking about things crumbling at home as well, and in fact has said that the current college generation is easy to handle.
After the summer he would return to student demonstrations on his campus that would alter his assessment.
This is an election year, and this summer there will be party conventions that will change the American political landscape. Even as the now almost-twenty-year-old nonviolent civil rights movement is having its most dramatic summer, another kind of black voice is emerging: At the same time that Martha Reeves is heading into her recording studio, in June 1964, in another week Malcolm X, a dissident voice with a growing following in Detroit and other cities, will declare, We want freedom by any means necessary.
Another invasion, the British Invasion, is already under way. In February, four Liverpudlians rushed through America on a one-week, three-city tour. They appeared on Ed Sullivan’s popular television variety show. It was the biggest coup for the tight-shouldered host in a suit since he had brought on Elvis Presley in September 1956. With songs such as She Loves You
and I Want to Hold Your Hand
—songs that seem adolescent when compared to the heart-wrenching rhythm & blues from Detroit—they seem to have won over huge numbers of teenagers. More and more teenage boys are showing up with dark, collarless sport jackets that make them look like waiters, their hair seemingly trimmed with a salad bowl over their head, in a style weirdly reminiscent of Moe from the Three Stooges.
The four were to return for a far bigger tour that summer, but before they landed in August, another group, the Rolling Stones, arrived for a tour in June. More and more British groups are coming, and a country that only a few years before had so few rock concerts that young people went to American rock ’n’ roll movies instead is now starting to dominate American music.
Black-owned Motown, in Detroit, would be one of the few companies to withstand the Anglophile encroachment and produce top American hits. But Motown’s success, with a bunch of untried black kids from inner-city Detroit, had been as improbable as that of the Beatles in Liverpool. Since the birth of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, popular music has been a field that offers enormous stardom, and it is seemingly and excitingly unpredictable whom the young public will choose. A man in ringlets and mascara calling himself Little Richard; a wild-looking black man named Chuck Berry, who hopped around the stage madly; an even wilder Texas redneck named Jerry Lee Lewis, who could play the piano with his feet—who could say who the next star would be, or the next big hit?
• • •
America is about to change, but for very different reasons, so is the life of Martha Reeves. Living with her mother and father and ten siblings in the two-story wooden Eastside house that her father had bought with earnings from his job with the city water company, Martha will soon turn twenty-three years old. It has been only three years since she gave up her job with a dry cleaner. She has now had three Top 40 hits with her group, the Vandellas. In fact, she is a famous R&B singer not only in the black world but on the white charts as well, reaching number 4. People who know popular music know who Martha Reeves is. She is one of the top recording stars of the now very hot Motown studios.
But to her this is still new and strange. Growing up, she knew that she was a good singer and a gifted musician. Her family told her so, and so did her teachers. But being famous was never something she had seen in her future. A few years later, black Detroit high school kids would dream of going to Motown and becoming famous, but when Martha was in high school, such things did not happen.
Now, despite her fame and her three hit records, she is taking the bus across Woodward Avenue to that warm family-like studio that felt like her second home, the little place that has made her famous.
As far as she knows, the studio has no new song lined up for her at the moment. She is between records, so she is going there to get instructions that will improve her act. On this particular day Martha is going to the studio to see Maxine Powell, a tiny woman who had a finishing school and advises Martha and other Motown singers on their public demeanor. She always respectfully calls her Miss Powell.
Sometimes she goes there for music instruction from Maurice King, an old pro from the big band days, whom she always calls Mr. King.
Even though her twenty-third birthday is in a few weeks, in some ways she is still a kid going to school.
She takes the westbound bus on Grand Boulevard. She is not thinking about Vietnam or Mississippi. The conflict she thinks about every time she takes the bus past the country houses and busy factories of Detroit is an ongoing gang war between the Eastside and the Westside. An Eastsider like herself could get beaten up just for crossing Woodward Avenue if she wasn’t on the bus.
She gets off the bus deep in the enemy Westside territory and walks into a house about the size of her own, with a hand-painted blue wooden sign on the front that says Hitsville U.S.A. She is in Motown.
She hears that Marvin Gaye is in Studio A recording a song called Dancing in the Street.
She doesn’t think much of the song, or at least the title.
But the song was written by Mickey Stevenson, the director of Artists and Repertory, the division responsible for developing talent. Stevenson had brought her into Motown as his secretary, and among his coauthors of the song is Marvin Gaye. Martha had begun her Motown career singing backup for Gaye and developed enormous admiration for him and always wanted to hear his recording sessions. Many people did. In fact, at twenty-two Martha still has what appears to be a teenage crush on Gaye. Gaye was a sexy, enigmatic man who crooned, played several instruments, wrote songs, and wandered the little Hitsville house wearing a hat and sunglasses and smoking a corncob pipe. Almost a half century later, in her seventies, she will still get misty-eyed speaking about him, and drives through Detroit listening to his recordings. I followed him around,
Martha confessed.
On this June day, Martha steps down into Studio A—a not very large room with white padded walls and a wooden floor, with a piano resting on one side of the room and four microphones hanging by their cables from the ceiling—and it is empty. The track has already been recorded, and Marvin is at the control console in the glass booth at one end of Studio A, listening to his take and singing over it. Martha immediately changes her view of the song when she hears the bouncy brass introduction. This song has a special sound. And she is hooked from the first line: Calling out around the world.
This is good. There is a sense of a call going out. Marvin is singing it in his romantic way. When Marvin sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ it was romantic,
Martha said many years later.
Mickey Stevenson, another tall, handsome man, is in the control room with Marvin and their small, quick-witted coauthor, Ivy Jo Hunter. Seated at the controls is Lawrence Horn, the sound engineer. According to Martha, and this is one of her most cherished memories, suddenly Gaye looks down in the studio and then turns to Mickey Stevenson, who is producing the record, and says, Hey, man, try this on Martha.
Martha at this point has decided it is a good song but a song for a male voice, which in fact it never was intended to be. But she doesn’t argue with Marvin Gaye. She puts on the headphones and stands in front of a hanging microphone as a music track unlike anything she has ever heard erupts into her ears. Normally a demo tape was made and taken home and studied for a week or two before the recording session. That was what Gaye was trying to make. But Martha just sings it, as she would later say, the way she felt it. It reminds her of summers in Detroit. Someone would put a record player on the porch and everyone would go out in the street and dance.
When she is done, Ivy Jo Hunter has bad news for her. The take is great but they have failed to put the recorder on, and she will have to redo it. And so for the second time she sings Dancing in the Street.
This time it is a bit edgier because she is irritated. She doesn’t like to redo takes. Her mother always said, Put your best foot forward so you don’t have to do it again.
And that is the way Martha likes to work.
But when she finishes the second take she looks up at the control booth window and the men are congratulating each other as though something special has just happened. It happened in less than ten minutes. The take, like many recordings in those days of 45 rpm single records, is only two minutes and thirty-six seconds because that is the length that radio stations like to play. There is no talk of revising or altering anything. Rosalind Ashford and Betty Kelly, the two other Vandellas, are called in to sing the backup. Ivy Jo Hunter sings along with them to show them how it should go.
• • •
In June 1964 the social, political, and cultural upheaval that would be known as the sixties
was about to explode, and Martha Reeves, knowing little about such things, has just sung its anthem.
CHAPTER ONE
ARE YOU READY?
For my generation rock was not a controversy, it was a fact.
My earliest memory of rock ’n’ roll is Elvis Presley. For others it may be Bill Haley or Chuck Berry. For people born soon after World War II, rock ’n’ roll was a part of childhood. The rockers, especially Elvis, are remembered as controversies. But there was no controversy among the kids. They loved the songs, their sense of mischief and especially the driving beat. The controversy came from adults. Only adults attacked Elvis or rock ’n’ roll. The controversy was only in their minds—on their lips. It was the beginning of what came to be known as the generation gap,
a phrase coined by Columbia University president Grayson Kirk in April 1968, shortly before students seized control of his campus.
There has never been an American generation that so identified with its music, regarded it as its own, the way the Americans who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s did. The music that started as a subversive movement took over the culture and became a huge, commercially dominant industry. The greatest of the many seismic shifts in the music industry is that young people became the target audience. In no previous generation had the main thrust of popular music been an attempt to appeal to people in their teens.
Since this music was an expression of the changing times, it is not surprising that it was profoundly about racial integration. When it started, blacks and whites lived in two completely different worlds within America. It was not only that they lived in separate places and sent their children to different schools. They had separate cultures, listened to completely different music on separate radio stations, had different jokes, different professional baseball leagues, different Boy Scout troops, and a totally different perspective of America and the world.
White people knew very little about, and most gave little thought to, the people they politely referred to as Negroes.
Negro, a Spanish word, descended, like the people it labeled, from the slave trade. Whites were called white
because it was good to be white, but to call black people black,
to remind them of their blackness, was to insult them. In slave times the words nigger and black were used almost interchangeably, often as a label. If Joe was black, he would be called Black Joe
or Nigger Joe,
so as not to be confused with a white man named Joe.
The language reversed itself in the great social shift of the 1960s. The first well-known figure to promote the term black was black nationalist Malcolm X, who almost always used it, and when he used Negroes, he would say so-called Negroes.
His point was that blackness should be a source of pride. He also attempted to turn the tables by making white a pejorative as in the frequent white devils.
Martin Luther King, on the other hand, rarely used the term black and almost always said Negro.
So the shift in language represented not only a shift in white thinking but an important cultural and political schism among blacks, even those who were politically active. By the end of the 1960s, both King and Malcolm had been murdered, and the word black had completely overtaken the word Negro, proving that the more militant Malcolm X’s point of view had a greater impact than is commonly recognized. Negro has become a pejorative for a black who lacked pride. This shift in language showed that there were enormous upheavals and changes in thinking taking place. Music, like languages, also showed these shifts, and only a few songs, such as Dancing in the Street,
were able to stand solidly on both sides of the social fissures.
• • •
What became popular music in the 1950s was a fusion of many influences, some of them white and some black, but it all began with a black form known as the blues.
The blues came out of African music by way of slavery, but no one has been able to date its exact origin. Among the many rhythms and traditions of African music that went into the blues and other African American music was the West African tradition of call-and-response, in which a chorus responds, often repeatedly, to the song line of the leader, and the leader reprises the chorus. In the blues, often performed by a single singer, the singer responds to him- or herself. This call-and-response form was central not only to blues but also to its later offshoot, rhythm & blues, and eventually Motown. Dancing in the Street
would be only one of many examples. Jazz also bears traces of call-and-response. In the West African version, as in jazz, the chorus could improvise, going into long or short riffs as the moment moved them.
Another African characteristic found among blues singers and black vocalists who followed is a style of vocal distortions that has come to be thought of as the black style of singing.
It is why most black vocalists of the 1960s or earlier, including Martha Reeves, even unseen on the radio, would never be mistaken for white. These distortions include a variety of raspy shouts, growls, and, in the case of gospel singers such as Reeves, the stretching of one note into several tones.
Amiri Baraka, born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934, originally named LeRoi Jones, a leading Beat poet, playwright, and commentator on black culture and especially music, wrote in his 1963 book on jazz, Blues People:
Melodic diversity in African music came not only in the actual arrangements of notes (in terms of Western transcription) but in the singer’s vocal interpretation. The tense slightly hoarse-sounding vocal techniques
of the work songs and the blues stem directly from West African musical tradition. (This kind of singing voice is also common to much other non-Western music.) In African languages the meaning of a word can be changed simply by altering the pitch of the word, or changing its stress. . . . Philologists call this significant tone,
the combination of pitch and timbre
used to produce changes of meanings in words.
Highly improvisational jazz is said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, although it is difficult to define a beginning, since this music is rooted in blues, which is rooted in earlier forms of music. Big blues bands with blaring brass sections developed in the 1920s, particularly in western towns, most notably Kansas City, which was known for its casinos and nightclubs. These led to a style known as the shouting blues,
owing to the singers’ efforts to make themselves heard, because the bands were so loud. The influence was not only on singers but on jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, whose instruments flew off into a kind of shout. While blues had been essentially a rural music for an essentially rural population, a growing urban black population developed an urban blues sound from these big bands, and this was the origin of a new black music called rhythm & blues. It was music purely for black people, and this, according to Amiri Baraka, spared it from the sterility
that might have resulted from total immersion.
Most historians credit a singer and sax player named Louis Jordan as the critical early step in the development of rhythm & blues and by extension one of the early roots of rock ’n’ roll. He was in fact one of the first to use the word rock in his music, and recorded a number of pieces in the 1940s that may be considered among the first experiments in rap. He performed with six- to eight-player bands and took the important step of including the guitar. His music was aimed at newly urbanized blacks so that seemingly rural songs such as Beans and Cornbread
turned out to be about actual urban life. He had several recordings in the 1940s that sold more than a million copies, including Is You Is or Is You Ain’t (Ma’ Baby)
and Caldonia.
His appeal was partly musical innovation and partly humor, in both his songs and his constant asides.
R&B music was always regarded as an exclusively black form—in the music business, the definition of rhythm & blues was often simply music for black people
—but Jordan also found popularity with whites. So this phenomenon known in music as crossover
—blacks that could appeal to whites—was at the very beginning of rhythm & blues.
After World War II black bands occasionally became popular with white listeners, with the help of such musicians as vibes master Lionel Hampton and trumpeter Erskine Hawkins. Hampton, raised in Alabama and then in Chicago, was a natural for crossover. A percussionist, he took up and became the master of the vibraphone, which was thought of as a white instrument, developed in the 1920s for vaudeville orchestras. It was Hampton who brought it to jazz. Trumpeter Erskine Hawkins seemed destined for crossover as well. He was named after Erskine Ramsay, a wealthy Alabama-based Scottish industrialist who gave a bank account to any child named after him. As a musician, composer, and band leader, Hawkins became associated with many famous big bands of the World War II era. White bands such as the Glenn Miller Orchestra played his music. Nat King Cole, a gifted jazz pianist, abandoned his superb trio to croon songs such as Irving Gordon’s Unforgettable
in 1951 and Victor Young and Edward Heyman’s When I Fall in Love
in 1957. Although Cole sang white songs in a white style for white audiences, he still held on to black fans.
A few of the R&B bands, especially Jordan’s, were able to record for big national record companies such as Capitol, Decca, and Victor. One of the reasons for this crossover phenomena was swing, big band dance music with an up tempo and strong rhythm that became extremely popular during World War II. Many historians believe it began as black music in Harlem in the 1920s but never took off in the black community because the huge nightclubs and big payrolls required for the enormous size of the bands made it too expensive. It became associated with white musicians such as Benny Goodman. Benny Goodman even had a handful of black musicians. That was how Lionel Hampton became crossover. But swing’s audience was white. Amiri Baraka wrote, Swing music was the result of arranged big band jazz, as it developed to a music that had almost nothing to do with blues, had very little to do with black America, though that is certainly where it had come from.
When jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong was asked about swing he said, Ah, swing, well, we used to call it syncopation—then they called it ragtime, then blues—then jazz. Now it’s swing. White folks, yo’all sho is a mess.
Whites and blacks had taken black music in two different directions. Blacks had R&B and whites had swing. But after the war, swing was found too expensive even for white people, and though it fostered individual artists who were enormous stars, such as Frank Sinatra, and a legacy of enduring songs, swing itself began to falter and white audiences were looking for something new. Ironically, once they got something new, the new singers frequently sang swing songs. Rock ’n’ rollers Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis all sang a few swing songs, such as Presley’s 1960 Are You Lonesome Tonight?,
which was written in 1927 by vaudeville greats Lou Handman and Roy Turk.
In the early 1950s the white music industry seemed to be struggling to find a name for the new black music. All black music was called race music.
The pejorative attitude was unmistakable. Race at the time was a word like black, implying a second-rate status. Though there was a Caucasian race, race music would not mean white music because race almost never meant white.
Only blacks were race. Race music
was immediately understood. Bruce Morrow, the popular white 1960s rhythm & blues disc jockey known to most of New York City as Cousin Brucie, said in a recent interview, It is still upsetting to me that in my life I lived through something being called race music.
While the name persisted for more than a decade longer, in the late 1940s Decca started talking about sepia music
while MGM used the term ebony.
Billboard, the magazine whose weekly sales charts define hits, in 1949 stopped calling its chart of black music race
and it became the rhythm & blues chart.
It was not difficult for Billboard to distinguish between sales to black people and sales to white people, since each had their own radio stations and their own record stores.
R&B, like all black music, came from the blues. It had influences of gospel, which came from traditional spirituals and in the 1930s became the music of the black church. But it was also influenced by big bands and, most important, had a driving rhythm. It was distinctly urban, with the electric throb of the city characterized by the use of electric rather than acoustic guitars and the thump of a new instrument, the electric bass.
Jerry Wexler, the future record producer who is