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TRACES THE EVOLUTION OF DIVERSE STREAMS OF AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC FROM THE 1920 S TO THE PRESENT
“I really appreciate the historical approach that David Brackett utilizes in The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader. I think that students get a different perspective by reading rock’s history ‘in the time’ written by people as it occurred. Students enjoy this; it demonstrates that history is a process.”
—Edward Whitelock, Gordon State College
“ The range of The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader is excellent. My students enjoy this book because the readings are manageable and engaging. The headnotes give enough context for students to be able to make sense of the issues raised by the readings. This is the strongest primary source reader on popular music available.”
—Gregory Weinstein, Davidson College
Featuring more than 100 readings from a wide range of sources and writers, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader has established itself as the #1 reader for popular music studies.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
• A total of sixteen new selections from a variety of sources—including mainstream and specialized magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals, and more—exposes students to different styles of writing and analysis
• New essays covering the impact of technology and mass media address topics like streaming audio, the interconnectedness of social media, and the legal battles over file-sharing
• New articles on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Kim Gordon, Patti Smith, and “Riot Grrrls” will inspire class assignments and discussions of classic rock, punk, and 1990s feminist indie music
• Critical overviews of the 1970s and 1980s by leading critics Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau provide students with essential recent historical context
• New selections exploring today’s rap, hip-hop, and contemporary pop scenes include discussions of the resurgence of political engagement in recent African American popular music (with features on Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar) and an account of the meteoric rise in popularity of EDM
Visit www.oup.com/us/brackett for student and instructor resources.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Brackett is Professor of Musicology at McGill University.
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brackett, David.
Title: The pop, rock, and soul reader : histories and debates / David Brackett.
Description: Fourth edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019017639 | ISBN 9780190843588 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—United States—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML3477 .B68 2019 | DDC 781.6409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017639
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
19. From Rhythm and Blues to Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Songs of Chuck Berry
Norman Jopling, “Chuck Berry: Rock Lives!”
20. Little Richard: Boldly Going Where No Man Had Gone Before ...................
Charles White, from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock
21. Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips, and Rockabilly
Elizabeth Kaye, “Sam Phillips Interview”
22. Rock ‘n’ Roll Meets the Popular Press
23. The Chicago Defender Defends Rock ‘n’ Roll
Rob Roy, “Bias Against “Rock ‘n’ Roll” Latest Bombshell in Dixie”
24. The Music Industry Fight Against Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dick Clark’s Teen-Pop Empire and the Payola Scandal
Peter Bunzel, “Music Biz Goes Round and Round: It Comes Out Clarkola”
PART
3
25. The Brill Building and the Girl Groups
Charlotte Greig, from Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Girl Groups from the 50s On
43. Rock Meets the Avant-Garde: Frank Zappa
Sally Kempton, “Zappa and the Mothers: Ugly Can Be Beautiful”
44. Festivals—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Mike Jahn, “Recollected in Tranquility: Woodstock”
PART 4 THE 1970S
45. Where Did the Sixties Go?
Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun”
46. The Sound of Autobiography: Singer-Songwriters, Carole King
Robert Windeler, “Carole King: ‘You Can Get to Know Me Through My Music’”
47. Joni Mitchell: The Power of Insight
Penny Valentine, “Joni Mitchell: An Interview (part 1)”
48. Sly Stone: “The Myth of Staggerlee”
Greil Marcus, from Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music
49. Not-so-“little” Stevie Wonder
Chris Welch, “Stevie Wonder: ‘Hah—the boy is getting MILITANT! You get back to ‘Fingertips’ now!’”
W. A. Brower, “George
51. Heavy Metal Meets the Counterculture
John Mendelsohn, “Review of Led Zeppelin”
Ed Kelleher, “Black Sabbath Don’t Scare Nobody”
52. Led Zeppelin Speaks!
Dave Schulps, “The Crunge: Jimmy Page Gives a History Lesson”
53. “I Have No Message Whatsoever”
Cameron Crowe, “David Bowie Interview”
54. Rock Me Amadeus
Tim Morse, from Yesstories: Yes in Their Own Words
78. From Indie to Alternative to . . . Seattle?
Grant Alden, “Grunge Makes Good”
Grunge Turns to Scrunge
Eric Weisbard, “Over & Out: Indie Rock Values in the Age of Alternative Million Sellers”
81. “We Are the World”?
George Lipsitz, “Immigration and Assimilation: Rai, Reggae, and Bhangramuffin”
Genre or Gender?
Carla DeSantis, “Lilith Fair: If You Want to See a Show, Put on a Festival—
Sarah McLachlan Takes the Girls on the Road”
PART 7 THE 21ST CENTURY
85. Country in the Post–Urban Cowboy Era
Mark Cooper, “Garth Brooks: Meet Nashville’s New Breed of Generously Stetsoned Crooner”
Charles Taylor, “Chicks Against the Machine”
86. New Adventures in Mediation
Joshua Clover, “Jukebox Culture: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Boy Band”
Nina C. Ayoub, “Idol Pursuits”
87. The End of History and the Mass-Marketing of Trivia ..........................
Jay Babcock, “The Kids Aren’t Alright . . . They’re Amazing”
88. A World of Copies without Originals
Testimony of Mr . Lars Ulrich, Member and Co-founder of Metallica (Senate Judiciary Committee on Downloading Music on the Internet, July 11, 2000)
Preface
The music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad and its government is imperiled.
—Lu Be We, ancient Chinese philosopher1
It seems that music is used and produced [in one era] in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by massproducing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises.
—Jacques Attali, contemporary French philosopher2
To some extent the genesis of this project can be blamed on my mother, who gave me a copy of The Rolling Stone Record Review (a collection of reviews from Rolling Stone from the years 1967–70) when I was 13. I became aware of an ongoing world of criticism with its own set of myths and assumptions about what was important in popular music. The contributors to the Record Review took popular music seriously, wrote about it literately, and seemed to share a sense of how the sound and style of popular music were bound up with contemporary social and political currents. I have continued to use that same, now-tattered paperback copy of the Record Review and its successor, The Rolling Stone Record Review, Volume 2, as a reference volume for the subsequent 30 years, and two reviews from the first volume (plus the epigraph by Lu Be We) made it into this book.
As is true of many things that happen during puberty, reading the Record Review had an impact that could not have been foreseen at the time. I subsequently morphed from music fan and fledgling musician to music student to professional musician to music academic, yet these early encounters with music criticism continued to exert a powerful fascination.
The Book’s Approach
In the course of teaching classes on the history of 20th- and 21st-century (mostly) U.S. popular music for several years, I began to ponder ways to explore the interconnections among popular music, musical techniques, current events, and social identity in a way that would make popular music as exciting and powerful for students as it had become for me. I wanted to find material that could address several particularly compelling questions: How did the musicians who made the music explain it? What did the music sound like? Who listened to it? Why did they listen to it? How did they
1. The Rolling Stone Record Review (New York: Pocket Books, 1971), i.
2. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 19.
react? What was the dominant impression made by the music to society at large? Why do some types of popular music still matter today?
Readings Offer Breadth and Flexibility
Over time, it became clear to me that one of the best ways to focus attention on these questions and, in some cases, to suggest possible answers to them was to assign source readings. Source readings challenge readers to re-create the context in which the first expressions of excitement and arguments about value in various genres occurred. This engagement with the social context is a large part of the reason why source readings tend to stimulate critical thinking and lively discussions, as readers relive the controversies and conflicts that accompanied significant events in the history of popular music. The wealth of entries means that readers and instructors using this book can pick and choose readings to correspond to a variety of interests and emphases.
Readings Provide Diverse Perspectives
A collection of source readings provides a different sense of history than do more conventional narrative histories, which tend to emphasize continuity. By contrast, the sense of history that emerges from an anthology of source readings is more disjunct in some respects, since different voices present authoritative versions of historical events that may compete or conflict with one another. This unresolved quality can be wonderfully stimulating. In this volume, for example, artists such as James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix can be seen through a prism of shifting perspectives consisting of critics writing at different times, as well as interviews and autobiographies of people involved in the creation of the music. This lack of resolution may also provide the impetus for classroom discussions.
Commentary Provides an Overarching Historical Backdrop
This book is a hybrid of sorts, differing from most other anthologies in that it furnishes its own sense of linear history. In addition to the usual sort of material found in headnotes (introductions to the entries), I have provided historical background about different artists, eras, and genres. This was necessitated by several factors: First, the large social and stylistic distances between genres grouped within the larger rubric of “popular music” made transitions between some entries difficult. It didn’t seem right, for example, to go from an entry discussing the aesthetic innovation and cultural importance of disco to entries discussing the different aesthetic and social context of punk, with only a headnote to function as a transition. Second, these transitional historical passages allowed me to discuss a broader range of sources than I could include in the book as entries, and they opened the book up to a wider range of uses.
Organization Allows Broad Usage
The book is arranged chronologically by decades, with the first part of the book devoted to developments prior to the 1950s. Throughout this collection of source readings, I’ve woven in commentary that provides context preceding the articles and, on occasion, in the midst of them, thereby creating a hybrid text/reader. Thus the book can be used either as the main text for a course or as a supporting reader. In addition to courses on the history of 20th- and 21st-century popular music, the content applies to courses on American music, American studies, media studies, history, and sociology.
behind what I referred to earlier as the “hybrid” nature of this anthology. The presence of these multiple streams is reflected in my title: I avoided calling this book The Rock ‘n’ Roll Reader or The Rock Reader precisely because those terms seem somewhat more limited to me, especially in that they are frequently understood as not including the full range of African American popular music since World War II. The usage of “rock,” for example, sometimes refers to all popular music after 1955; at other times the term refers to popular music made by (mostly) white, (mostly) male musicians after 1965. Neither “rock ‘n’ roll” nor the twin usages of “rock” do justice to the rich range of genres that have dominated popular music of the past 50 years. Dave Marsh’s notion of “rock and soul music” comes close to capturing the complex range of styles discussed in this book and granting recognition to the importance of African American musicians, although I felt it necessary to expand “rock” and “soul” further by adding “pop.”3
One question that readers are bound to raise concerns the boundaries of popular music itself. While my title, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader, may project capaciousness in terms of styles and genres, I am sure that despite my best efforts, the issue of inclusiveness will inevitably arise. It is, of course, not possible to include everything (imagine how large a book that would be!); nevertheless, I believe that the material presented here is diverse enough to encourage and enable the tracing of a variety of histories with different points of emphasis. The ability to refocus on a varying assortment of genres makes it possible to shift which dates, places, and personages seem important.
A Note on Chronology and Sources
That this anthology provides a variety of routes through history by allowing the reader to pick and choose from among the entries also underscores the fuzziness of generic borders, in that our perceptions of these borders may shift, depending on which points of view we consider. By the same token, a genre’s temporal boundaries may also appear to be imprecise if we view them from different perspectives; therefore, the histories of genres will not necessarily begin or end clearly on specific dates. Acknowledging the lack of a specific point of origin for genres, however, does not preclude the possibility that certain types of historical emphases within genres will correspond more strongly than others to the perceptions of a particular socially or culturally situated group. For example, from the point of view of the first wave of baby boomers who came of age as fans in the 1950s, 1955 may seem like an obvious date for the transformation of popular music. On the other hand, this date may seem less important to those who formed strong attachments to popular music in the 1990s or 1930s. That the book goes back to the turn of the last century suggests that the intrageneric dialogue that we now associate with rock ‘n’ roll had already started by the early decades of the 20th century.
Although I was tempted, I decided not to divide chapters by dates that create the appearance of a significant point of arrival (e.g., 1955, 1964, and 1977) in order to open the use of the book to those who disagree about when significant breaks occur. Even the division by decades does not provide an easy solution, however, since many artists who are presented here through autobiography or interview had careers that spanned several decades, and their thoughts were inflected by the period in which
3. The phrase “rock and soul” comes from Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: Da Capo Press, [1989] 1999).
and mind. Finally, I must mention my debt to our children, Sophie and Fred, whose growing love of music and wide-open ears inspire me to keep listening and playing. I extend my thanks to the following reviewers commissioned by OUP, who helped enormously with the preparation of the new edition, including
Stephen Allen, Rider University
Brian Fauteux, University of Alberta
Paul Fehrenbach, Pennsylvania State University
Daniel Koppelman, Furman University
Rebecca Rinsema, Northern Arizona University
Benjamin Tausig, Stony Brook University
Edward Whitelock, Gordon State College
A Note on the Text
There are two kinds of footnotes in this anthology: those I prepared myself and those that are being reprinted from the original source readings. I have indicated my notes with numbers and the others with symbols.
PART 1 Before 1950
1. Irving Berlin in Tin Pan Alley
For most of the 19th century in North America and Western Europe, popular song publishing was built around a sheet-music trade aimed at home performers. In the United States during the 1890s, organizers of the variety entertainment known as vaudeville and theatrical producers increasingly consolidated their offices in New York City, which had already become the center of the music publishing business. Located first on West 28th Street in Manhattan and then moving uptown (eventually to the neighborhood between West 42nd and West 56th Streets), the area where the publishers set up shop became known as “Tin Pan Alley,” a name that would later stand for the kind of songs created there. In the close connection between the stage and the publishing trade, both the vaudeville circuit and the Broadway show relied on Tin Pan Alley songwriters for their music; in turn, the stage, with its national circuits of theaters and touring attractions, popularized and circulated this music among customers who enjoyed listening to, singing, and playing it.
The decade of the 1890s dawned on a popular music scene dominated by Victorian-style ballads and waltz songs composed by European American songwriters such as Charles K. Harris, Paul Dresser, and Harry von Tilzer. Before the decade was over, however, a vigorous new style created by African American musicians called ragtime was introduced. Both types of song (as well as others) persisted through the years 1900–20, each developing in its own way. The classically trained Broadway composer Jerome Kern brought a cosmopolitan harmonic and melodic richness to the first type. As for ragtime, in the hands of the self-taught Russian immigrant songwriter Irving Berlin, rhythm and exuberance came to stand less for ethnic difference than for social liberation, especially as expressed in such new dances as the grizzly bear and the turkey trot. Songs from Tin Pan Alley (and from Broadway, its highertoned relative) were heard live on stages and in other entertainment
information about life and culture in the Lower East Side.* Born Israel Baline in Tumen in Western Siberia on 11 May 1888,† the youngest of the eight children of a cantor, Moses Baline, and his wife, Leah (Lipkin), he had come with his parents and five of his siblings to the New World, arriving in New York aboard the SS Rhynland on 13 September 1893. The family found temporary lodging in a basement apartment on Monroe Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then settled at 330 Cherry Street, in the southeastern corner of the Jewish quarter, in a flat that remained the family home until 1913.
The father was able to find only part-time employment, as a kosher poultry inspector and a manual laborer, and, as in so many immigrant families, everyone in the Baline household was expected to contribute to the family income. The mother became a midwife, three of the daughters found irregular employment wrapping cigars, the oldest son, Benjamin, worked in a sweatshop,‡ and young Israel peddled newspaper and junk in the streets while attending public school and receiving religious instruction at a cheder. With the death of the father in 1901, matters became even more difficult for the family, and Israel decided to strike out on his own:
[Berlin] knew that he contributed less than the least of his sisters and that skeptical eyes were being turned on him as his legs lengthened and his earning power remained the same. He was sick with a sense of his own worthlessness. He was a misfit and he knew it and he suffered intolerably. Finally, in a miserable retreat from reproaches unspoken, he cleared out one evening after supper, vaguely bent on fending for himself or starving if he failed. In the idiom of his neighborhood, where the phenomenon was not uncommon, he went on the bum.§
Faced with the necessity of supporting himself, the fourteen-year-old Israel fell back on his one obvious talent: singing. According to Woollcott, he was paid for singing popular songs on Saturday nights at MacAlear’s Bar, not far from Cherry Street, was hired briefly in the chorus of the road company for The Show Girl, which had opened in New York on 5 May 1902, and briefly plugged songs from the balcony at Tony Pastor’s Music Hall. Most of the time, however, he was one of the company of buskers who, having learned the latest hit songs brought out by Tin Pan Alley publishers, “would appear in the bar-rooms and dance-halls of the Bowery and, in the words of Master Balieff, ‘sink sat sonks’ until the patrons wept and showered down the pennies they had vaguely intended for investment in more beer.”¶
Early in 1904, Izzy, as he was now called, found a more secure position as a singing waiter at the Pelham Café, a saloon and dance hall at 12 Pell Street in Chinatown that was owned and operated by Mike Salter, a Russian Jewish immigrant whose dark complexion had earned him the nickname Nigger Mike. Salter capitalized on the location of his establishment in this sordid quarter to attract tourists, college
*Alexander Woollcott, The Story of Irving Berlin (New York: Putnam, 1925). Later biographies include Michael Freedland, Irving Berlin (New York: Stein & Day, 1974) and A Salute to Irving Berlin (London: W. H. Allen, 1986); Ian Whitcomb, Irving Berlin and Ragtime America (London: Century Hutchinson, 1987); and Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Viking, 1991). See also Charles Hamm, “Irving Berlin’s Early Songs As Biographical Documents,” Musical Quarterly 77/1 (Spring 1993): 10–34 and Vince Motto, The Irving Berlin Catalog, Sheet Music Exchange 6, no. 5 (October 1988) and 8, no. 1 (February 1990).
†According to research conducted recently by Berlin’s daughters. See Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 98–99.
‡Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer, p. 11.
§Woollcott, The Story of Irving Berlin, p. 21.
¶Ibid., p. 27.
students, and other “slummers” looking for vicarious thrills in the bowels of the city. In truth, though, “the sightseers usually outnumbered the local talent [at the Pelham], and the grand folk who journeyed eagerly from Fifth Avenue to Nigger Mike’s seeking glimpses of the seamy side of life were usually in the predicament of those American tourists who retreat to some quaint village in France or Spain only to find its narrow streets clogged with not strikingly picturesque visitors from Red Bank, N.J., Utica, N.Y., and Kansas City, Mo.”*
Izzy served drinks to the patrons of the Pelham Café and also entertained them by singing for coins tossed his way, specializing in “blue” parodies of hit songs of the day to the delight of both regular customers and tourists. In his free time he taught himself to play the piano, an instrument available to him for the first time in his life at the Pelham, and tried his hand at songwriting, his first attempt being “Marie
From Sunny Italy,” written in collaboration with the Pelham’s resident pianist, Mike Nicholson. For reasons never fully explained, he chose to identify himself in the published sheet music of that first song as Irving Berlin, a name that he retained for the rest of his life.
His way with lyrics came to the attention of representatives of the popular music industry, who supplied him with the latest songs. Max Winslow, for instance, a staff member of the Harry Von Tilzer Company, came often to the Pelham to hear Izzy and was so taken with his talent that he attempted to place him in that publishing firm. As Von Tilzer described the episode in his unpublished autobiography: Max Winslow came to me and said, “I have discovered a great kid, I would like to see you write some songs with.” Max raved about him so much that I said, “Who is he?” He said a boy down on the east side by the name of Irving Berlin. . I said, “Max, How can I write with him, you know I have got the best lyric writers in the country?” But Max would not stop boosting Berlin to me, and I want to say right here that Berlin can attribute a great deal of his success to Max Winslow. Max brought Berlin into my office one day shortly afterwards, and we shook hands, and I told him that I was glad to meet him and also said, “You have got a great booster in Winslow.” Berlin told me that he had a song that he had written with Al Piantadosi and said he would like to have me hear it. I said I would be glad to hear it.†
Even though Von Tilzer agreed to publish the song, “Just Like The Rose,” he didn’t offer Berlin a position on his staff.
In 1908 Berlin took a better-paying position at a saloon in the Union Square neighborhood run by Jimmy Kelly, a one-time boxer who had been a bouncer at the Pelham, and moved into an apartment in the area with Max Winslow. Collaboration with such established songwriters as Edgar Leslie, Ted Snyder, Al Piantadosi, and George Whiting strengthened his ties with Tin Pan Alley, and in 1909, the year of the premiere of Zangwill’s The Melting-Pot, he took a position as staff lyricist at the Ted Snyder Company.
Even though Berlin had left home as a teenager to pursue a life unimaginable to his parents and their peers, he retained close ties with his family, as well as with their community of immigrant Eastern European Jews. When he was the featured performer at Hammerstein’s vaudeville house in the fall of 1911, as the wealthy and world-famous writer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and dozens of other songs, the New York Telegraph for 8 October reported that “a delegation of two hundred of his friends from the pent and huddled East Side appeared . . . to see ‘their boy,’ as one
*Ibid., pp. 49–50.
†Unpublished typescript, “Story of Harry Von Tilzer’s Career,” Library of Congress, p. 123.
else to take down his tunes in musical notation and to work out details of the piano accompaniment; as he put it, “when I have completed a song and memorized it, I dictate it to an arranger.”† Though he has often been criticized for this, it was in fact standard procedure for Tin Pan Alley songwriters, even those fluent in musical notation, from Charles K. Harris on.
The point of this discussion of the Tin Pan Alley mode of song production is not merely to justify the inclusion in the Berlin canon of pieces written by him in collaboration with others but, more important, to underline that the creation of a popular song is a vastly different process from the composition of a classical piece. And the difference between popular and classical music extends far beyond the mechanical details of how a new piece within each genre comes into being to such issues as the concept of “originality” and the relationship of music and its composers to the community for which it is created.
The Material Form of Tin Pan Alley Songs
Tin Pan Alley songs were disseminated primarily in the material form of published sheet music. Production of such a piece began with its collaborative oral creation and its subsequent capture in musical notation, as described earlier, after which the song was sent off to be engraved. . . .
In their material form as published sheet music, Berlin’s early songs appear to exhibit a high degree of uniformity, among themselves and also in relation to pieces by other songwriters. Structurally, virtually every one of them is made up of the same component parts:
1. a brief piano introduction, drawn usually from the final bars of the chorus or the beginning of the verse
2. a two- or four-bar vamp, with melodic and rhythmic material drawn from and leading into the verse
3. two (or sometimes more) verses, usually sixteen or thirty-two bars in length, depending on the meter of the song
4. a chorus, usually equal in length to the verse, with first and second endings. The first ending indicates a repeat of the chorus; the second gives instructions for either a da capo return to the introduction or a dal segno return to the vamp
The songs also appear to be quite uniform in melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic style. Texts are set in a predominantly syllabic fashion, to mostly diatonic tunes confined to a vocal range of an octave or less, with an occasional chromatic passing note. Harmonies are tonal and triadic, shaped into two- or four-bar phrases, with secondary dominants and other chromatic chords sometimes lending variety. Modulation may lead to another key for a phrase or two, and from early on Berlin had a mannerism of abruptly shifting a phrase to a key a third away from the tonic, without modulation.*
Most of what has been written about Berlin’s early songs takes this sheet music as the primary (and often only) text, and most recent performances of these pieces are more or less literal readings from this text. But the songs were rarely performed just
† Green Book Magazine (February 1915), cited in Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer, p. 57.
*For a general discussion of the musical style of these songs, see Hamm, Irving Berlin: Early Songs, vol. 1, pp. xxv–xxviii.
as they appear on the printed page. A literal reading from the sheet music results in a performance shaped as follows:
• piano introduction
• vamp
• first verse
• chorus with first ending
• repeat of chorus, with second ending
• vamp
• second verse
• chorus with first ending
• repeat of chorus, with second ending
But we know from period recordings and other evidence that this sequence was subject to change in performance. Only the first verse might be sung, or additional verses not found in the sheet music might be added. The chorus might be sung only once after each verse, “catch” lines of text might be interpolated into the second chorus, or there might be a completely different set of lyrics, not found in the sheet music, for the second chorus. The singer might alter notes in the melody or deliver the entire song in a semispoken way without precise pitches. The accompaniment might take over for a half or a full chorus without the singer(s), the instrumental introduction might be repeated after the last chorus, or the song might end with a coda not found in the sheet music.
The problem with taking the notated form of these songs as the primary text, then, is that, unlike compositions of the classical repertory, which throughout the modern era were assumed to be “ideal objects with an immutable and unshifting ‘real’ meaning,”† a popular song may be “rearticulated” in any given performance.‡ In other words, “dissemination of [a popular song] as printed sheet music was only the beginning of its history; it then became fair game for performers, who according to the conventions of the genre were free to transform [it] in details of rhythm, harmony, melody, instrumentation, words, and even overall intent.”§
Throughout its history, popular music has been marked by the extraordinary flexibility with which its text has been treated by performers, and also by the variety of meanings that listeners have perceived in these songs. Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks At Home” was sung by amateurs clustered around pianos in private parlors, performed on the minstrel stage in blackface, sung on the concert stage by famous performers of the classical repertory, interpolated into stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sung around campfires by groups of Civil War soldiers of both sides, reworked into elaborate display pieces for virtuoso pianists and trumpet players, paraphrased in classical compositions by Charles Ives and others, and quoted in Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” In each instance, the overall shape, stylistic details, and the performance medium were different, as was the meaning of the song for its performers and listeners.*
†Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 150.
‡See Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), particularly pp. 16–32.
§Charles Hamm, review of The Music of Stephen C. Foster: A Critical Edition, ed. Steven Saunders and Deane L. Root, Journal of the American Musicological Society 45, no. 3 (1992): 525–26.
*For a book-length discussion of the varied and changing meanings of Foster’s songs, see William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks at Home”: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours (New York: Macmillan, 1975).
Technology, the Dawn of Modern Popular Music, and the “King of Jazz” 9
Further Reading
Crawford, Richard. America’s Music Life: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Furia, Philip. America’s Songs: The Stories behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
_______. Putting Popular Music in Its Place. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Jablonski, Edward. Irving Berlin: American Troubadour. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Sears, Benjamin. The Irving Berlin Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sheed, Wilfrid. The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. New York: Random House, 2007.
Van Vechten, Carl. “The Great American Composer.” Vanity Fair, April 1917.
Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Discography
Fitzgerald, Ella. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook, Vol. 1. Polygram Records, 1990. Irving Berlin: A Hundred Years. Sony, 1990.
The Melody Lingers On: 25 Songs of Irving Berlin. ASV Living Era, 1997.
Songs of Irving Berlin. Castle Pulse, 2004.
2. Technology, the Dawn of Modern Popular Music, and the “King of Jazz”
Prior to the 1920s, popular music in the United States mainly circulated as sheet music and in what we would now call live performance. The introduction of new technology in the 1920s for music consumers began a process that revolutionized the industry, leading to a shift from musical re-creation, featuring performances of sheet music in the home, to an emphasis on listening to recordings or broadcast performances. Record players and discs had become standardized enough by this time to permit several companies to produce compatible equipment on a mass scale. Radio broadcasting of music developed during the decade to become a popular source of domestic entertainment.
Recording is perhaps the most difficult task in the day’s work—or the lifetime’s. A slip may pass unnoticed in concert, whether across the footlights or over the radio, and even if noticed, it may be forgiven, since living flesh and sensitive will cannot always achieve mechanical perfection. But a slip in a record after a time becomes the most audible thing in it. Everything else will be neglected to wait for the slip and to call the attention of someone else uninstructed in music to a great artist’s false note. So every composition has to be recorded until it is perfect. If things go fine from the first, well and good; but if, from the three records of each number usually made, there is none which will quite pass the exacting standards of the committee, there must be another afternoon of making and remaking. Every faculty of the artist, emotional as well as physical, must be expended in producing a perfect result.
In late recording practice, with highly improved methods of capturing sound and with new scientific principles, it has grown more and more practicable to record large bodies of instruments without losing volume, without having a large quantity of tone dilute and diffuse itself before reaching the actual path of the recording apparatus.
In the laboratory, as we worked, the possibilities of the orchestra began to loom large and the original plan with a single player for each type of instrument began to expand. The saxophone, for instance, had always had a shadow or understudy. A third saxophone now was added and in time the orchestra developed the full Wagnerian quartette of instruments in this group. The one trumpet was reinforced by a second and the now popular combination “straight” and “comedy” trumpets came into existence. The banjo instead of just marking time began to make new excursions into the realms of rhythm and the fox trot began to change without, however, disturbing the pedestrian order of things.
Not all these changes took place, of course, in the laboratory. Most of the rehearsing and discussing and rescoring was done in consultations outside—consultations not always free of the heat of argument. The actual business of recording is a star chamber matter but it is no violation of a secret to admit that some of our early records were spoiled by men swearing softly at themselves before they learned the new adroitness which the delicate mechanism of the recording room required.
The records of our orchestra that I have liked particularly are fox trots like the “Song of India,” with its burst of two part harmony, the “Waters of the Minnetonka,” with its wood wind accompanimental figure and its swinging climax and the insidiously delicate “Oh, Joseph.”
One sees all one’s friends and some of one’s enemies at the recording laboratories and the exchange of experience between the classicist and “coonshouter,” the string quartette and the clarinet jazz band is illuminating for everybody.
Not long ago, Rosa Ponselle, Mischa Elman and I were all recording at the Victor, though in different laboratories. We had lunch together and regardless of the fact that the temperature was above 90, the great dramatic soprano demonstrated a dance step for us in the best Broadway style. Then we sat for our pictures, she in her bungalow apron, Elman minus collar and coat and I in plus four knickerbockers.
It interested me that the singer should have been familiar with the current fox trot step, for with the almost weekly changes in the dance I had begun to believe that only orchestra leaders and college boys could possibly keep pace. We have even to anticipate the change and that has become our chief problem as the public is well aware. Dancers and musicians, as a rule, are harder to bring together than the various labor unions working on a big building. Ballroom dancers persistently refuse to conform to accepted or classical styles, or to any styles which they do not determine for themselves in the ballrooms of the hour. Any study of the long list of our fox trots will reveal peculiarities in tempo, rhythm and general style not to be accounted for
Technology, the Dawn of Modern Popular Music, and the “King of Jazz” 13
on the basis of “individual variation,” or the time-honored principle that “nature makes no two faces alike”; the simple truth of the matter is, that a dance, almost, is no sooner in the hands of the public than the style changes.
During the past half-dozen years there have been several powerfully marked variations in the ordinary, or “two-step” fox trot. The original “glide two-step” fox trot of the “Japanese Sandman” period soon was succeeded by the “radio roll” or the “scandal walk” (the two passed into one another) by the “blues,” which was officially earlier but in point of fact later in the experience of many dancers than the “collegiate,” which set up an entirely new style of dancing and called for an entirely new type of music. The “tango fox trot” prevailed in a few cities, the “military fox trot,” and entirely local dances with fanciful, and in some cases meaningless, names, in others.
All of these changes of style or local and individual caprices in taste, have to be ministered to by a dance organization as large as ours, or we soon perish. Few new dances, except those for stage use, are ever brought forward by teachers; they are developed, in public, by persons of no particular skill, and with little or no knowledge of the dance as an art. It is avowed, and on excellent authority, that the “collegiate” sprang from the use of rubber-soled summer footwear and slow, sticky dance floors at public resorts, where the skate-like slides and pivots of the old-style dancer were impossible. With footwear of this sort it was possible to do little else than stamp up and down. From this developed a polka-like dance with crude hops and jumps, calling for agility, but with no great degree of sophisticated grace.
Small items like this determine the whole power of survival of an orchestra. When a method crystallizes or a dance is standardized, it is done. For the younger generation everywhere who invented it, without half knowing most of the time what they were about, are now through with it.
One phenomenon I noted when I was playing dance music at the Palais Royal on Broadway. A fox trot was played in a rhythm exactly that of the Habanera or Tango, but much swifter in time. The result was that the easy “chasse” skips peculiar to this type of dance became impossible to the dancers who thereby changed their rhythm from that of the tango to the easier two-step with the result that six hundred fox-trotters—not all of whom could be charged with profound musical knowledge— automatically were dancing in cross rhythm.
Further Reading
Magee, Jeffrey. “Before Louis: When Fletcher Henderson Was the ‘Paul Whiteman of the Race,’” American Music 18, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 391–425. Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Discography
Austin, Gene. Voice of the Southland. ASV/Living Era, 1997. Etting, Ruth, and Helen Morgan. More Than You Know. Encore, 1996. Holman, Libby. Scandalous: Something to Remember Her By. Jasmine, 2005. Jolson, Al. Best Of. Universal Music Group, 2001. Whiteman, Paul. Greatest Hits. Collector’s Choice Music, 1998. ______. King of Jazz. ASV/Living Era, 1996.
