by Bob Stanley
‘Half as Much’ was a ballad written by country’s premier songwriter, Hank Williams, who would collapse and die on New Year’s Day 1953. That he never scored a bigger hit than ‘Jambalaya’ (US no. 20 ’52) was down to the segregation of the American chart. Before submitting record sales, Billboard magazine would ask shops to divide them into pop, hillbilly (later country and western) and race (later rhythm and blues, or R&B). This made it almost impossible for music on the outside of white, urban pop to break into the charts. Hank Williams’s ‘Jambalaya’ spent fourteen weeks at number one in the country chart, so presumably sufficient retailers considered it big enough to count as a pop record and filed its sales as such. This musical apartheid would eventually be corrected with the introduction of the Top 100 (soon renamed the Hot Hundred) in 1955, which counted all record sales towards the pop chart. The American singles chart, however, was further complicated by its combination of record sales, jukebox plays, radio plays and – at least in the fifties – sheet-music sales. It lacked the clarity of the British pop chart, which was, and would remain, purely sales based.
Was Rosie buttering us up to become a nation of country-music fans? Despite the fact that the UK isn’t meant to ‘get’ country and western, ‘Half as Much’ would be followed into the chart by her cover of ‘Jambalaya’, the Midwestern swing of Bonnie Lou’s ‘Tennessee Wig Walk’ (no. 4 ’53) and Ruby Wright’s ‘Bimbo’ (no. 7 ’54), neither of which registered in the States at all (though Bonnie Lou had a number-six hit on the country-and-western chart).
=7 Frankie Laine, ‘High Noon’ (Columbia DB 3113)
Westerns were another reason for the unlikely incursions of country music into the UK charts. ‘High Noon’ was the theme to a film in which sheriff Gary Cooper is ‘torn between love and duty’. Though Tex Ritter sang it on the soundtrack, Frankie Laine had the hit – he was already the foremost purveyor of this kind of dark epic. With a choral caravan of courage behind him he sings, over a lazy clip-clop beat that could be a death march, ‘I do not know what fate awaits me … I must face a man who hates me, or lie a craven coward in my grave.’
What darkness there was in the music of 1952 came almost entirely from this square-jawed, geometric man with a letter-box mouth. Frankie Laine had won a marathon dance contest in 1932 and smashed the world record, going for 145 consecutive days. Everything he did was on this scale. His songs were pure Hollywood, set under swirling, swollen skies in bleak dustbowl settings: ‘Cool Water’, ‘Where the Winds Blow’, ‘The Cry of the Wild Goose’. Laine was pop’s Gregory Peck, a tortured stoic, a lion with a thorn in his toe, not any old loser in love but a man who’d had his heart physically ripped out by Jezebel. On ‘Blowin’ Wild’ (UK no. 2 ’55) he was tormented to the brink of insanity by his woman after, improbably, they’d struck oil in their back garden; Laine roars his pain over a backing of doodlebug brass and a howling, near-atonal chorus. His biggest hits, though, were less apocalyptic – ‘Answer Me’ and ‘I Believe’ were safe, ship-steadying ballads that smelt of church and stayed at number one for months in ’53 and ’54.4
=7 Vera Lynn, ‘Forget Me Not’ (Decca F 9985)
The forces’ sweetheart of World War Two had three songs on the first British hit parade. She had barely registered a record sale since the end of the war, but Korea brought her back into the chart. 1952 had seen the Battle of White Horse, the Battle of Old Baldy and the Battle of Triangle Hill, all of which sounded like Frankie Laine hits in waiting. In November ’52 president elect Dwight Eisenhower flew to Korea to kick-start ceasefire negotiations, UN fighting all but stopped, and the war would finally end the following July.
‘Forget Me Not’ was Vera Lynn’s third hit of the year, and was incredibly, impressively dirge-like – its melody recalled ‘The Last Post’ and, though it started with a sprig of flighty strings, like something from I Dream of Jeannie, the tempo soon dropped like a stone; Vera sounded distant, echoing, a ghost of Christmas future; eventually the song simply faded away, with the haunted vocals of the Johnson Singers (one of whom wrote the song) trailing behind her, walking slowly into the distance and the darkness. Joe Meek would have been doing his national service in 1952, as an RAF radar technician, and he’d have been listening to the thunder of ‘High Noon’ and the desolation of ‘Forget Me Not’; almost a decade later he would be recycling and renewing their impact on John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’.
=8 Doris Day and Frankie Laine, ‘Sugarbush’ (Columbia DB 3123)
The summer of 1954 brought Britain’s first pop-music magazine aimed at teenagers, a proto-Smash Hits called Hit Parade, with posters, news, gossip and reviews, and its first cover star was Doris Day. Up to this point, pop fans had to make do with the weightier music papers, the NME and Melody Maker, both of which were effectively specialist newspapers, or the odd article in Picturegoer and Picture Show, but they had never had a magazine of their own. The first Hit Parade featured Frankie Laine’s life story in strip cartoon, the whole month’s listings for Radio Luxembourg (Sunday June 27th: 7.30 Guy Mitchell Sings for You; 9.15 The Alka Seltzer Show – details to be announced; 11.00 Top Twenty), a Johnnie Ray feature (‘I want to marry a British girl’) and ‘Hit Parade’s June Pin-Up’, Doris Day, who was celebrating her current number-one hit, ‘Secret Love’.
The only comparable US magazine was the similarly titled Hit Parader, which paid far less attention to detail and was almost entirely made up of lyrics to the current hits. In October ’54 the NME expanded its hit parade from a Top 12 to a Top 20; the following month the Daily Mirror ran a readers’ poll to celebrate ‘the fabulous world of the gramophone record’. A hundred thousand voters picked Ronnie Hilton as best newcomer, and Winifred Atwell as best instrumentalist; they played in front of seven thousand people at the Daily Mirror Disc Festival. Up to this point singers and bands had performed at summer seasons, pantomimes and Royal Variety Performances – strictly adult territory. The Mirror was clearly aiming at teenagers and, for Christmas 1954, it published Discland, a hardback book and Britain’s first pop annual: ‘Today the spinning disc is the number-one force in show business. The names of recording stars are as familiar around the house as salt, mustard or vinegar. The stars come right into your homes.’
Back in 1952 Doris Day had been singing the flirtatious ‘Sugarbush’, a record that – had the chart existed – would have been a hit a few weeks earlier for Eve Boswell, a British-based, Hungarian-born singer. Boswell was a classically trained pianist who also played the saxophone and the clarinet, had mastered tap dancing and the odd ballet step, and would record an album (Sugar and Spice, 1956) that featured songs in nine different languages. In Blackpool, she once appeared on stage by jumping through a paper hoop while juggling. Somehow – maybe unsurprisingly – she always gave the impression of having ladders in her tights; her only hit would turn out to be the daffy ‘Pickin’ a Chicken’ (UK no. 9 ’55).
Doris Day, on the other hand, cut duets with Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, starred in a Hitchcock film with James Stewart, co-starred in further movies with Rock Hudson and James Garner, became a gay icon for her role in Calamity Jane, set up the Doris Day Animal League in the seventies (which introduced the annual Spay Day USA), and had a son, Terry, who went on to produce the Byrds and would have been a victim of the Manson family if he had been at home one night in 1969.
While Doris got to smooch Rock Hudson, earn an Academy Award nomination and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the enchanting Eve got to do a summer season in Southport with ‘TV’s Mad Magician’ Tommy Cooper. This was the state of Britain in the early fifties – strictly end of the pier.
=8 Ray Martin, ‘Blue Tango’ (Columbia DB 3051)
So-called light music has its own values … it acts as a series of vials, often charmingly shaped and coloured, for the distillations of memory. The first few bars of it remove the stopper; we find ourselves re-living, not remembering but magically re-living, some exact moments of our past.
J. B. Priest
ley
The other major difference between post-war Britain and post-war America was the empire, or rather the end of the empire. Previously, the British working classes had had the option of escaping from their back-to-back terraces via the colonial office, to Canada, India, Africa; you could make your way, reinvent your life. In 1947 India became independent, and suddenly there were fewer places to visit. Our playground would have to be on our doorstep.
This may explain the popularity of instrumentals, the other major pre-rock trend. For one thing, they were, like songs about kids and burgeoning happy families, a way of avoiding mentioning the war – this made them safe choices for BBC radio. Also, they covered much of the ground that Jo Stafford’s silver plane flew over, foreign climes which were now out of the reach of many Britons: Norrie Paramor’s ‘April in Portugal’, Winifred Atwell’s ‘Poor People of Paris’, Frank Chacksfield’s ‘In Old Lisbon’, Lou Busch’s ‘Zambezi’ and Mantovani’s 1953 number one, ‘Moulin Rouge’.
The orchestrated instrumentals were called ‘light music’, a melodic, digestible, atmospheric style that sat between pop and classical, and after which the BBC’s Light Programme had been named in 1945. British band leader Ray Martin was your tour guide on ‘Swedish Rhapsody’ (UK no. 4 ’53), a piece of music that was fifty years old and genuinely Swedish, but was chirpy in the extreme, much like his ‘Blue Tango’ with its accordion, skipping strings and light South American pitter-patter beat.
Other instrumentals on the chart – Cyril Stapleton’s ‘Blue Star’, Leroy Anderson’s ‘Forgotten Dreams’, Les Baxter’s ‘Unchained Melody’ – worked as balm, lullabies for wrecked communities. They tucked a nation into bed while the new world was constructed outside their window. The record that epitomised early-fifties Britain was German in origin – Eddie Calvert’s ‘Oh Mein Papa’, which spent nine weeks at number one in early 1954. Redolent of bottle-green paint and utility furniture, I imagine it on the Light Programme’s morning show Housewives’ Choice, mirroring a yearning for romantic ballroom clinches (maybe with Calvert himself, the Man with the Golden Trumpet and the Brylcreemed hair), a yearning for something, anything, to aid escape from austerity Britain. It has an otherworldliness – which its village-hall organ aggressively attempts to ground – that stems from Calvert’s rather wayward blowing; not exactly jazz but still straying into dreamy, lonesome bullfighter territory. Certainly, it is quite an abstruse take on a tribute to a dead father.5
Instrumentals were for the mass of grown-ups who had experienced quite enough heart-quickening action between 1939 and 1945. For many kids, though, the war had been a constant adventure – they may not have been economically independent, but it had left them a private world of bomb sites, dens built in half-destroyed houses which, for adults, were no-go areas. Their older brothers, though, had gone off to war, and returned as adults with shared experiences, creating an unbridgeable generational divide between them and their siblings.
Those who had experienced the awful realities of armed conflict understood ‘Oh Mein Papa’ and ‘Blue Tango’; those who hadn’t shunned this adult music. It would occasionally resurface, like a buried childhood memory, even decades later, suggesting there was something in the British psyche that needed these soothing, atmospheric instrumentals – the Shadows’ ‘Wonderful Land’, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’, 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’. Their moment of dominance, though, was long gone. Listening to Mantovani’s ‘Moulin Rouge’ is to realise that something significant was lost as well as gained in the rock ’n’ roll era.
9 Vera Lynn, ‘The Homing Waltz’ (Decca F 9959)
At her 1940s peak, Vera Lynn’s main rivals had been the rumbustious Gracie Fields and the sweet, much younger Ann Shelton, wartime heroines whose careers turned to charity work in peacetime, or at least until there was another conflict to rouse the British blood – Shelton scored a UK number one with the grinning, khaki-clad ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ in 1956, just as the Suez crisis threatened to become a full-blown war. By the early fifties, though, there were several other British girls waiting to steal Vera and Ann’s glory.
American stars had the lip gloss, the nylons and the best suits, the accoutrements of class and style. Post-war Britain was another story. Big ball gowns, bigger and fruitier than everyone else’s, that was Alma Cogan’s shtick. She wasn’t especially pretty, and got through by smiling a lot and playing up the cute catch in her voice. She scored hits with chirpy, brass-driven material like ‘Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo’ (no. 6 ’56) and ‘Dreamboat’ (no. 1 ’55) – on which she serenades her lover as if he was an Airedale puppy – but she could also take American R&B hits like LaVern Baker’s ‘Tweedle Dee’ and Fats Domino’s ‘I’m in Love Again’ and present them to a music-hall crowd at the Golders Green Hippodrome without anyone getting alarmed. That was new and brave and, decades later, people still admired her for it.6
Lita Roza was notably more glamorous, with her boyish haircut and catlike grace. She was a Scouser, her dad was a Spanish docker, and she’d risen to prominence singing with the Ted Heath band. When she went solo in 1952, Lita cut albums like Listening in the After-hours and Love Is the Answer, titles that spelt out her name. Her best songs – ‘Allentown Jail’, ‘Hey There’, ‘Leave Me Alone’ – had a mink and smoke-ringed atmosphere that perfectly conjured up the make-do-and-mend glamour of fifties Soho, all cool seduction with hints of illegality. You heard none of this in the voice of Ruby Murray, the breakthrough star of 1955. Genuinely, she seemed like a naif, an Irish colleen whispering ‘Softly, Softly’, a number one, like a stuttering schoolgirl. Britain quickly took to her fluttering eyelashes; at one point in the spring of ’55 she had five singles in the Top 20,7 and was something of a (very quiet) pop explosion. But blushing cheeks could only take her so far. Ill-advised duets with Norman Wisdom were not the way forward. The public had already tired of her by 1956, after which she hit the bottle and sank from view.
Accessibility was often the key to a British pop star’s success. Unlike America, British singers in the early fifties still hoofed around the country playing on variety bills. If Frank Sinatra wasn’t around, then you’d have to make do with ‘the British Frank Sinatra’, another former singer with the Ted Heath band called Dickie Valentine. Of the wave of pre-rock singers who made the British bobby-soxers shriek and sigh, Orson Welles lookalike Valentine was the most interesting. On stage, he would begin his set in a mellow mood – with sleepy ballads like ‘All the Time and Everywhere’ (UK no. 9 ’53) – then he’d crank it up and sing like Johnnie Ray one minute, Mario Lanza the next, Edward G. Robinson for pudding. It was a weird act, but it made him extremely popular. ‘I’m a Jekyll and Hyde, you see,’ he explained. ‘As Dickie Valentine I feel shy and handcuffed. It’s when I’m imitating others, when I’m not myself, that I can throw myself about the stage.’ You can almost hear Morrissey in that quote. If Dickie had emerged three years later, he might have made more interesting records. As it was, he only cut a handful – ‘Finger of Suspicion’ was the best, all waxed-moustache charm, a three-minute chat-up line, and it made number one in December ’54. Unable to shift with the rock ’n’ roll era, by 1971 he was reduced to haring around the country from one small nightclub to another. It was four in the morning, Dave and Ansell Collins’s ‘Double Barrel’ was number one, and he was doing 90 mph when he crashed and died on a single-lane bridge at Glangrwyney, Wales. He was forty-one.
=10 Vera Lynn, ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ (Decca F 9927)
Vera’s first hit of the year had been a much more rousing effort than the forlorn ‘Forget Me Not’. By November it was dropping off the chart, but ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ would turn out to be the biggest seller of 1952. It was also a number-one single in America; Vera was the first British act to achieve this feat. The song’s romantic take on World War Two was shameless – it even references ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – but it was mostly notable for its singalong qualities. In case you missed the point of it, there was a massed choir of s
oldiers almost drowning out the lead vocal. Join in and sing. Follow the leader.
It had a reactionary streak that would remain strong in modern pop. The friction between conservatism on one hand (the deliberately dumb) and art school on the other (pop with pretensions of greatness) caused a crucial tension that would fire glam’s internal battles, would set up Texan garage punk’s blurting aggression as a counterpoint to psychedelia’s cosmic quest, and would play the basic, joyous noise of UK rave off against the perceived ‘intelligence’ of drum and bass.
What would fans of ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ have heard in its simple chant in 1952? They would have considered it a solid song, one you could directly relate to, with real history behind it. In America, country music served a similar purpose; later, metal would become a similarly solid, conservative pop strand. You weren’t taking a risk with this music; you weren’t backing anything that could be here and gone in a flash, or something that could overly embarrass you if a friend pulled it off your shelf two years later. There was no fear of looking silly among your peers if you supported it.
At the same time, ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ sounds older than anything else on the first chart. This was the sound of a closing-time pub singalong, or family get-togethers around the piano in the parlour, decades-old habits. By the early fifties people were dumping their pianos on the street – there were so many second-hand ones on the market, you couldn’t sell them – and replacing them with radios, gramophones and televisions. The fact that the NME singles chart existed at all meant that songs like ‘Auf Wiederseh’n’ were on the wane.
