In My Checkered Career, I wrote about some of the ways I discovered jazz – primarily through record stores and radio. But all through the 1950s, I listened mainly to the popular music of the day, both the residue made for adult audiences and rock&roll (very broadly defined) specifically aimed at the new Youth Market, kids with disposable incomes.
During the early part of the decade, radio and tv were dominated by the former – music geared to the tastes of adults, tastes formed during the 20s and 30s, when a certain level of musicianship was expected, when clear articulation was valued, when clever and fresh variations on standard chord progressions and bridges and lyrics could still be appreciated. So Crosby clones like Perry Como and Vic Damone and Dean Martin became hugely popular and got their own tv shows and plenty of air play and plenty of promotion for their single releases and their brand new long-playing records. And even the creations for the new teen market, singers like Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson and Connie Francis and Gogi Grant, could sing on pitch, could articulate lyrics clearly, and produced vocal tones not terribly unlike those of their predecessors.
While the big jazz bands had become, by and large, economically unsustainable and had mostly passed from the scene, a thoroughly diluted residue remained with such bands as Paul Weston’s and Jackie Gleason’s, the latter specializing in sort – of – jazz arrangements of soupy ballads, “Music for Lovers,” music to get sloshed and pretend you’re still young to. Then, in the mid 50s, television coughed up a genuine novelty, a popular pianist who played (gasp) genuine classical music! Not only that, he dressed funny and came on like an oversexed undertaker and had a candelabra for his totem gimmick.
Liberace captivated my entire family, even my Dad, who rarely watched television and surely must have recognized that he was watching a flaming nance in action, yet never missed a show or denigrated “Lee” in any way. As for the rest of us, while my mother may have been aware of the existence of homosexuals, I’d guess she’d repressed whatever knowledge she had, and refused to apply it to Liberace, who played the sort of florid, showy “classical” pieces us middlebrows had been trained to admire.
Neither my sister nor I can remember harboring any awareness of “gays.” While I’d certainly heard my peers calling each other “fruits,” and had a general sense that the word meant “unmanly,” I had no idea at all what “unmanly” might mean, other than that it seemed to mean ballet dancers and people like that. I was captivated by Liberace because he was so flat-out weird, and getting away with it on national tv. He opened up a huge space for unconventional behavior that I’d never before imagined, and I’m still grateful to him for that. In his own flaming way, he was like Dylan a few years later: he gave people – me, anyhow – the sense that there were many more possible ways to be than Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent Peale or Ike had suggested, let alone approved.
Black music began to slide into acceptance mainly by Passing, at first, with a new generation of black crooners like Clyde McPhatter and Tommy Edwards who were pretty much indistinguishable from their white counterparts – no traces of accent left, only a few, very restrained melismas, no growls or shrieks yet. Black vocal quartets, first the Mills Brothers, later the Ink Spots, had found a place in the pop world of the 30s and 40s, and their successors were the innumerable doo-wop groups with increasingly fanciful names – The Drifters, The Elegants, the Dominos, the Flamingos – singing endless variations on I-VI-IV-V (C-Amin-F-G, for example), the variations mainly consisting of setting those changes to some novel variety of 2/4, 4/4, 6/8, or 12/8. The most enduring of these groups was the Coasters, who repeatedly topped the pop charts with one Leiber-Stoller tune after another, from “Searchin'” to “Little Egypt” to “Poison Ivy.” The long-established reaction of The Music Industry to some unexpected outbreak of interest in some facet of black music – “We’d better clone that, and clone it fast” – soon kicked in and brought forth the Del-Vikings and the Crew Cuts.
But the real entry of black music into the mainstream, of course, was brought about by Elvis, whose singing style amalgamated 30s crooners, 40s hillbillies, and country blues into something new, a white man whose music sounded black on purpose, whether written by a black performer (“Hound Dog,””That’s All Right”), a bluegrass star (“Blue Moon of Kentucky”) or a team of tin-pan-alley white boys (“Jailhouse Rock”). The Biz soon coughed up a new crop of Elvis Clones, aping one or another of his peculiarities – Fabian, his bad-boy, greaser side, Buddy Holly, his patented solarplectral hiccup.
But Elvis had captured enough of the feeling of real, backwoods country and blues to blow an opening for its original creators’ progeny to come through into our radios and even – gasp – onto television. Even onto American Bandstand, that last bastion of imitation-adult teendom. He prepared a place for them in the presence of their enemies. Before anyone could have prepared for him, here came Little Richard.
Little Richard and his white counterpart Jerry Lee Lewis burst into the still-proper world of rock&roll presided over by Dick Clark with true wildness, untamed exuberance, untrammeled vocals and pianos played as percussion instruments. They appeared suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, like a couple of wolverines leaping into the middle of a petting zoo.
Not that I was thinking about all this music in any such anthropological terms. I was just absorbing it all, liking what I liked, not liking what I didn’t – and there wasn’t much I didn’t like, not even, I blush to say, Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” or Frankie Lane’s “Cry of the Wild Goose.” Like the rest of my peers, I immediately went wild for Elvis, and I vaguely felt there was something different about his music, but I had neither the tools nor the inclination to analyze what made it different. And I knew there was something different about Little Richard. He was as unfettered and joyous in his performances as Pat Boone was not. (Boone’s hilariously wooden rendition of Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” is still sloshing around YouTube and ought not be missed.)
During the early 50s, baseball was integrating at a glacial place; the popular music world moved faster, once Elvis had gone national. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Coasters, Ray Charles, Jackie WIlson . . . within a few years, the segregation of popular music into “pop charts” and “race records,” the segregation of radio into the lily-white networks and a scattering of black-owned stations like Chicago’s WGES* and Memphis’ WDIA, became a thing of the past. The kids of my generation just wanted to boogie, and if the hardest rocking was being done by black musicians, we didn’t give a damn what color they were. We were like the Brooklyn fans, once they got a load of Jackie and Roy and Newk. Lifetimes of training in racism were dismissed by the opportunity to see and hear undeniable talent.
Or at least that’s how it was for me. I fell in love with black music in as simple and uncomplicated a way as I fell in love with Gene Baker and Ernie Banks when they came to the Cubs. I’m no more immune to the poisonous idiocy of sweeping generalization than anyone else, but the intense life in black musicians – and not just in the “stars,” but in the South Side church singers I listened to every Sunday morning on WGES, and, shortly, in the scratchy, nearly incomprehensible accents of the first original blues 78s – resembled the intense life in the play of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and other black players, and it was so powerful that it rendered considerations of race utterly nugatory.
The sheer joy of pioneering, of breaking new ground for one’s family, for one’s people, comes through those old recordings still. If I lacked sufficient knowledge to understand what it contained, what lay behind it, that didn’t keep me from feeling it, from loving it. And that love sent me off on a lifelong search to know more, understand more, and to try to learn to play it myself.
