Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  In keeping with the sonic segregation that mirrored the social segregation of the era, white music industry executives and the white musicians who served as their faithful foot soldiers seemed hell-bent on having white rock & roll cover versions replace the black rhythm & blues original versions on the charts, on the radio, in the jukeboxes, and in the records stores. Looking at this situation from the point of view of the black pioneers of rock & roll and not the longstanding tendency to view it almost exclusively from the point of view of the white popularizers of rock & roll, it is rather apparent that the very same media machine that tended to have a racially biased response to the Civil Rights Movement put into play a similar response with regard to the cover version craze. Pop radio, by definition, is supposed to play the most popular songs at the time. We need mince no words about this. It should be obvious.

  However, roughly between 1954 and 1957 the prevalence, persistence, and sheer power of anti-black racist attitudes and assumptions appear to have influenced the economic agendas of white music industry executives, ultimately allowing them to either downplay or completely dismiss the ways in which their business practices translated into the sonic segregation, musical colonization, and economic exploitation of rhythm & blues and black rock & roll singer-songwriters. To put it as plainly as possible, seriously analysis of pop radio during the Civil Rights Movement reveals the ways in which social segregation intersected and overlapped with sonic segregation because the fact of the matter is that pop radio quite simply did not always and in every instance play the most popular songs in the United States if they were by African American artists. Once again, where most rock critics have downplayed or attempted to gloss over the very real, historically documented sonic segregation, musical colonization, and economic exploitation at the heart of the cover version phenomenon, Portia Maultsby (1985) has described it in contrast and more correctly as “the most widespread, systematic rape and uncompensated cultural exploitation the entertainment industry has ever seen” (xi).

  Even when rock critics rattle off how a handful of rhythm & blues singer-songwriters in fact turned an incredibly exploitive and oppressive situation such as the cover version controversy into an avenue of personal and professional advancement, they fail to fully acknowledge how absolutely wrong and actually anti-black racist it was for white music industry executives and white musicians to take advantage of brutally segregated and already incessantly exploited black musicians. White music industry executives and white musicians’ exploitation of black rhythm & blues singer-songwriters virtually during the peak period of the Civil Rights Movement (circa 1954 to 1965) is incredibly ironic and, to say the least, speaks volumes about why many African Americans eventually came to view rock & roll as a sonic symbol of cultural banditry or, as Ward worded it above, an act of “artistic theft.” As a matter of fact, even the great Elvis Presley, the “King of Rock & Roll,” directly and undeniably participated in the exploitation of black rhythm & blues singer-songwriters. Take, for example, the fact that he knowingly did nothing when his manager, the cutthroat Colonel Tom Parker, required Otis Blackwell—the composer of bona fide rock & roll classics such as “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and “Return to Sender”—to share specious songwriting credits with Presley even though Presley wrote not one single lyric or note of these classic songs. Colonel Parker claimed that by giving Presley songwriting credit it would generate greater interest in the songs and, as a result, additional publishing royalties. In other words, even a musical genius like Otis Blackwell, who also composed Jerry Lee Lewis’s classics “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless,” Little Willie John’s “Fever,” Gene Pitney’s “I’ll Find You,” Charlie Gracie’s “Cool Baby,” and Solomon Burke’s “Home In Your Heart,” was subjected to unambiguous and unadulterated musical colonization and economic exploitation at the hands of the acclaimed “King of Rock & Roll.”[27]

  There is something very sick and very twisted about this situation that is heightened by the fact that it took place during the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement. How could white music industry executives and white musicians not comprehend that by exploiting black rhythm & blues singer-songwriters they themselves became complicit in the very oppression and exploitation, the very racial segregation and “separate and unequal” treatment that rhythm & blues was innovatively created to exorcise (especially via its honking and shouting formative phase)? Hence, even the most conservative reading of the previous chapter will surely show that rhythm & blues was much more than post-war black dance and party music. Indeed, it was dance and party music, but it was also a lot more. To put it plainly, rhythm & blues was the first post-war black popular music to spiritedly blur the lines between “race records” and “white pop.” Much like the Civil Rights Movement challenged social segregation, rhythm & blues and its rock & roll offspring challenged sonic segregation.[28]

  Obviously, rock & roll ultimately eclipsed rhythm & blues in the world of mainstream American popular culture. But, we need to critically comprehend how rhythm & blues’ blurring of the lines between “race records” and “white pop” was a musical metaphor for the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement was crisscrossing and contradicting the “color-line” and the wider world of American apartheid at the time. This, of course, brings us to a discussion of how and why Cashbox, Billboard, and Music Vendor created music sales charts that not only divided American music into genres, but also made often disparaging distinctions about music consumers, for the most part, based on widely held assumptions (and much misinformation) concerning race and class. Needless to say, even American music sales charts were segregated along race and class lines prior to, and during the Civil Rights Movement, and Cashbox, Billboard, and Music Vendor, although typically thought of in neutral terms, each respectively contributed to the sonic segregation, musical colonization, and economic exploitation of rhythm & blues and black rock & roll singer-songwriters. In What’s That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History (2012), John Covach and Andrew Flory helped to drive this point home by writing directly about the often clandestine race and class assumptions of the charts during the early days of rock & roll:

  The charts in these industry periodicals were divided according to the professionals’ assessment of how consumers could most effectively be separated, so they were driven by purchasing patterns. Thus, pop charts listed records that would likely be marketed to white, middle-class listeners. Rhythm & blues (originally called “race” and then “sepia”) charts followed music that was directed to black urban audiences, and country & western (originally called “hillbilly” and then “folk”) charts kept track of music directed at low-income whites. This system of parallel charts was based on assumptions about markets and audience tastes, not musical style. The arrangement suggests that rhythm & blues listeners would not enjoy country & western or pop, but all it really tries to predict is who is most likely to buy records or play them on the jukebox. . . . Contrary to beliefs about such segregated listening, anecdotal evidence suggests that many black listeners enjoyed pop and country & western, and that many country & western listeners enjoyed pop and rhythm & blues. Young, middle-class white listeners already knew some country & western from network broadcasts, although most white adults were apparently not interested in rhythm & blues. One of the most significant changes to these business practices that occurred during the early 1950s was when middle-class white teens discovered rhythm & blues, which led to the softening of the boundaries between chart classifications. (85–86)

  Covach and Flory emphasized that it was rhythm & blues, not pop, and not country & western, that “led to the softening of the boundaries between chart classifications.” Obviously rhythm & blues was more or less doing in the immediate post-war American music industry what the Civil Rights Movement was doing in the immediate post-war period in American society. Moreover, just as black music consumers contradicted latent “segregated listening” assumptions, members of the Civil Rights Movement con
tradicted segregationist social and cultural assumptions. Indeed, the very same post-war energy, excitement and, this should be strongly stressed, adroit inventiveness captured and conveyed via the major sacred soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, which is to say, gospel and its freedom songs subgenre, lies at the heart of the major secular soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, which is to say, rhythm & blues and rock & roll. It is only when rock & roll’s undeniable black popular music roots are taken into serious consideration that the integrationist ethos and integrationist impulse of the Civil Rights Movement free-floating through early rock & roll can be adequately understood.

  Perhaps it could go without saying that because rhythm & blues served as a musical metaphor, its rock & roll offspring was also understood to be a musical metaphor for, not simply the “softening of the boundaries between chart classifications,” that is to say, a form of sonic desegregation and sonic integration, but also a form social desegregation and social integration. To be clear here, Ward (1998) weighs in, “rock & roll was not necessarily a dilution of R&B” (52). Sometimes, and almost invariably at its inception, “what was dubbed rock & roll simply was

  R&B” (52, Ward’s emphasis). At other times, however, especially as it attracted more and more, not merely white consumption but also white participation, rock & roll represented “an innovative hybrid which fused R&B with other influences to make a new subgenre which, like all forms of popular music, could be good, bad, or indifferent.”

  Returning to the notion that for many, if not most African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement there was a common belief that black folk could implicitly sing what they were unable to explicitly say, it would seem that the extra-musical elements of rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll (i.e., the integrationist ethos and integrationist impulse) were not widely embraced and unambiguously advocated (as they actually could have been in a customer-driven market—à la the Montgomery Bus Boycott Movement) by most white musicians and fans during rock & roll’s golden age between 1954 and 1964. Sadly, then, during the peak period of the Civil Rights Movement the majority of whites who enthusiastically embraced rhythm & blues via its rock & roll subgenre rejected or, at the very least, turned a blind eye to the alarming plight of African Americans between 1954 and 1964. As Glenn Altschuler (2003, 48–49) regretfully albeit correctly observed, even though “[m]any whites in the music industry recognized that rock & roll was a metaphor for integration,” truth be told, it “did not always raise the racial or political consciousness of fans.” In fact, he candidly contended, “[s]ome listeners remained blissfully ignorant of the racial connotations of rock & roll,” as vanilla version after vanilla version of rhythm & blues hits were copied or, rather, “covered” and began to dominate the radio airwaves.[29]

  On the one hand, rhythm & blues and rock & roll can be viewed as the popular secular music soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement. What began as rhythm & blues and eventually evolved into rock & roll subtly and frequently unwittingly expressed aspects of the social mission and political sentiments of the Civil Rights Movement. However, as rock & roll garnered more and more white fans, and soon the participation of young white musicians, the music, its modes of communication, and the virtually integrated popular culture that quickly sprang up around it progressively challenged American apartheid and the longstanding color-line. The increase in rhythm & blues on radio airwaves that previously adhered to sonic segregation (“white music only”) policies that mirrored the social segregation (“white people only”) policies of the larger society, as well as integrated rhythm & blues and rock & roll concerts and dances, steadily exposed post-war white youth to positive or, at the least, more realistic representations of African American life and culture.

  In a nation where long-held anti-black racist stereotypes and more than a century of blackface minstrelism-informed misconceptions had regularly blocked the development of serious social dialogue and cultural understanding between African Americans and European Americans, the rock & roll phenomenon initially gave many African Americans high hopes that American apartheid, that the stigma of enslavement, that the long and degrading shadow cast by blackface minstrelism and Jim Crowism might finally come to an end. At long last, African American culture, via rock & roll, was being presented to mainstream American society in dignity-endorsing and unambiguously-uplifting ways that ran counter to the anti-black racist assumptions that were previously projected onto African American life, culture, and aesthetics. Bearing all of this in mind, rock & roll indeed did contribute to white youths’ (and, perhaps, many white adults’) re-evaluation of race relations and the emerging Civil Rights Movement.

  On the other hand, however, echoing Altschuler’s caveat above, in Race, Rock, and Elvis (2000), Michael Bertrand cautions us to keep in mind that “rock & roll was not a panacea that magically cured the South’s [and the nation’s] racial ills” (55). By the 1950s, America had been suffering with its anti-black racist affliction for several centuries and, as with any serious illness, time, patience, aggressive treatment, and consistent recuperative care were desperately needed. Bertrand adamantly further asserted:

  Shifting tastes in musical preference did not necessarily obliterate racism. It would be naïve to think that the cultural process functioned in such a rapid, thorough, and uniform fashion. One generation could not completely reverse what had taken centuries to develop. Racism in the United States, moreover, has never been simply a history of attitudes and prejudices. It has been, more importantly, the product of an exploitative economic and political system whose institutions favor wealthy white males. The persistent realities of inadequate and subservient employment opportunities, substandard housing, poor healthcare, and inferior public education not only oppressed the black community but also reiterated the second-class nature of its existence. One must use caution, therefore, in alleging that popular music miraculously healed [the nation and] the region’s divisions. Rock & roll did not directly influence the existing social structure, and it did not command or seek the power to abolish institutional discrimination and inequality. As forces for substantive and lasting change in the racial realm, commercial music and culture of the period were limited. (55)

  There is only so much music can do to impact and, more to the point, enact social change. And, no matter how aurally insurgent any form of music might be at its inception, if it is hyper-commodified, if it is increasingly utilized to tout the latest corporate product or teen dance craze, and if by some perplexing turn of events it is distanced and completely disassociated from its social, political, spiritual, cultural, and musical roots in the lives and struggles of a racially oppressed and economically exploited group, then that music becomes, for all intents and purposes, a part of the very system and social conventions it was created to critique and contest. Guralnick (1999, 34), as perceptive as ever, dispiritedly declared that “[r]ock & roll today, to my mind at least, is a middle-class phenomenon almost exclusively.” Moreover, it may not be stretching his statement too far to say that it could actually be read as “[r]ock & roll today . . . is a [white] middle-class phenomenon almost exclusively.” The truth of the matter is that race, racism, and anti-racism were actually intrinsic to rock & roll at its inception, and the history of its first decade—from the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” in 1954 through to the Rolling Stones’ acclaimed eponymous debut in 1964—is dotted with either unsuspecting or subtle reflections on, and references to race, racism, and anti-racism during the Civil Rights Movement years.[30]

  In contrast to the often-unacknowledged fact that, not only did almost all of the early African American rock & rollers have working-class and poverty-stricken backgrounds but, as Bertrand (2000, 22) importantly observed, “virtually all the [early white rock & roll] artists were from working-class backgrounds” as well. How, then, did “[r]ock & roll today” eventually grow into “a [white] middle-class phenomenon almost exclusively?” Indeed, something was lost in translation as rock & roll was distanced and almost completely d
isassociated from its roots in rhythm & blues and black America and increasingly bleached to make it more appealing to the “us” white youth versus “them” white adults attitude so prevalent in suburban white youth popular music and culture from the late 1950s onward. Offering even more insight into this issue, Charlie Gillett (1996) not only discussed the whitening and lightening of rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll, but also the ways in which the black pioneers of rock & roll were sonically and racially resegregated in the aftermath of their eclipse by the white popularizers of rock & roll:

  Rock & roll narrowed the reference of songs to adolescence and simplified the complicated boogie rhythms to a simple 2/4 with the accent on the backbeat. And once these new conventions were established, the rhythm & blues singers were obliged to either adapt to them or resign themselves to obscurity, at best playing for a local audience in some bar, and at worst abandoning music altogether. Wynonie Harris tended bar until he died in 1969, Amos Milburn worked in a Cincinnati hotel, Percy Mayfield became a songwriter, Harvey Fuqua of the Moonglows became a producer at Berry Gordy’s Motown Corporation. A few—[Big] Joe Turner, Jimmy Witherspoon—became jazz singers, and several—John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson—played alternately in local bars and as “folk-blues” singers before white audiences in coffee houses and concert halls. A remarkable number died before they were forty, and a handful—Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke—managed to become pop stars.

  Meanwhile rock & roll ran its course—inexplicably long to some, and disappointingly brief to others. To those young people in its audience who did know its source, rock & roll seemed like a necessary, and surely eternal, part of urban life. The industry, with typical sleight of hand, killed off the music but kept the name, so that virtually all popular music (with the exception of what came to be called “easy listening”) was branded rock & roll. . . . Upon a younger generation than that which had discovered and insisted on the original rock & roll was palmed off a softer substitute which carried nearly the same name. And, finally, a section of this new music was stuff that still went by the name “rhythm & blues,” although much of it had slight connection with the pre-rock & roll style of the same name. (167–168)