Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Between 1925 and 1930, much of the newly settled black population of the north chose to fill its brief hours of leisure with the sound of preachers in full hellfire cry. Reverend J. C. Burnett declaimed on the subject of the ‘Downfall of Nebuchadnezzer’, while his congregation hummed in soulful warning. There was a ‘Black Diamond Train to Hell’, according to Reverend A. W. Nix, who shouted and groaned like the rawest bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. ‘Death’s Black Train is Coming’, said Reverend J. M. Gates, transforming his lament for the fate of his flock into a passionate gospel chorus. As gospel historian Viv Broughton noted, these records illustrated ‘the prevailing atmosphere12 that encompassed all the extremes of show-business melodrama and religious ecstasy’; and they previewed the ambiguous careers of the tele-evangelists to come.

  For those who chose to avoid the preacher’s call, there was both sweet and sour fruit. With the death slab revealed in Louis Armstrong’s funereal ‘St James Infirmary’, the mortality of flesh was laid plain. Not that life was any more welcoming: Ethel Waters, stepping gracefully along the border between jazz and the blues, exposed the weight of adult experience on the rhetorical ‘Am I Blue?’ That was merely the prelude to the much darker colouring of ‘(What Have I Done to Be So) Black and Blue’, a vivid portrait of her race’s suffering. With typical insouciance, Louis Armstrong chose to laugh in the face of such truth-telling: he sang all around the melody of ‘Black and Blue’, as if dismissing the burden it carried, and then let his cornet carry the voice of freedom, as it climaxed with a sustained high note which would become first a trademark, and then a gimmick, in the years ahead.

  The most carefree vision of the future, however, came from an Alabama piano player named Clarence ‘Pine Top’ Smith, who had followed the trail up to Chicago. Late in 1928, he recorded ‘Pine Top’s Boogie-Woogie’, an early celebration of the eight-to-the-bar piano style which, complete with the left hand walking up and down the scale, would become one of the steadfast foundations of rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s and 50s. Not content with signposting the destiny of young America, Pine Top stamped his egotism across the tune, firing out dance instructions like a jaundiced drill sergeant: ‘When I say “Hold yourself”, everybody get ready to stop … Boogie-woogie – that’s what I’m talking about!’ He was Jerry Lee Lewis, glossing every piano solo with self-congratulation; Ray Charles, calling his crowd to ‘shake that thing’ and ‘mess around’; even Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, targeting ‘you in the glasses’ amongst all the young dudes. But he was destined to die in his natural habitat, just three months later, victim of a nightclub shooting. A shock of even greater magnitude awaited America before the year was out.

  The day of the popular record13 as a big money maker is past.

  Phonograph Monthly Review magazine, New York, August 1931

  The public has lost its thrill14 in record-buying. There is little enthusiasm, and the hope of a return to the previous high figures is still remote.

  Music Seller magazine, London, October 1931

  ‘I thought I was building a dream’, sang Bing Crosby in 1932, in a timely borrowing from a Broadway show named Americana. ‘Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?’ He was excoriated for delivering anti-capitalist propaganda, but the song in question, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, provided a rare insight from the creators of American popular music into the prevailing mood of their nation. Al Jolson redressed the political balance by portraying a ‘happy hobo’ with ‘Hallelujah! I’m a Bum’. But as ever, Louis Armstrong had a more ambiguous response to Armageddon. His 1933 hit ‘Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train’ was playful, exuberant, swinging as if all the carriages were swaying from side to side – and pointed, too, in its exclusion of those without a penny to their name from a train that might just as well have been bound for glory.

  The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 wiped almost 40% off the value of American stocks in less than a month. As Variety magazine, the daily showbiz newspaper, declared: ‘Wall Street Lays an Egg15’. The Great Depression, as the financial crisis that afflicted the entire Western world was known, left many millions unemployed, plunged their families into poverty, erased the optimism of a generation, and arguably set Europe on a collision course with the illusory salvation of fascism. It was certainly not the only slump within living memory: the depression of 1893–7 had thrown a quarter of American men out of work. The reason why the 1929 crash passed into mythology as well as history was the abruptness of its arrival, just as America’s financial community was boasting that the nation was about to enter a decade of unparalleled prosperity.

  In such a crisis, music can offer consolation. Despite the popularity of ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’, there was little appetite for grim social realism. But several of the most compelling songs of 1930–1 betrayed America’s rickety state of self-confidence. While Harry Richman invested ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ with a young man’s carefree zeal, the public preferred Ted Lewis’s reading of the lyric as an old man’s regret for pleasures that could never return. In such a climate, dignity and decorum had to be sacrificed. Ruth Etting revealed the despair of the overworked dance teacher in ‘Ten Cents a Dance’, where ‘trumpets are breaking my eardrums’. (The lyric by Lorenz Hart included an almost modernist rhyme of ‘hero’ and ‘queer romance’.) Several months of dire necessity later, Libby Holman – her voice jaded with exhaustion and self-disgust – was offering ‘Love For Sale’, albeit ‘love that’s only slightly soiled’.

  ‘There was a kind of desperate16 urgency that took over all of us in the early 1930s’, recalled singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. ‘Everyone who could tried to shut out personal loss [and] the depression, and carry on as if the era were to last a thousand years.’ As cultural historian Evan Eisenberg recounted, ‘poor and rich alike felt17 shattered, splintered, isolated. What they found in radio, I think, was the solace of solidarity and of predictable, structured time.’ More prosaically, radio required a modest initial outlay, and then continued to provide entertainment, week after week, for the price only of batteries or electrical current. Record companies had already viewed radio as a threat to their business when stocks were riding high; now, during capitalism’s most profound slump, radio appeared to be smothering their industry in its adolescent prime.

  Two days after the crash, Thomas Edison pulled the plug on his own faltering record business, ceasing manufacture of discs, cylinders and the equipment with which to play them. Instead, he concentrated his production lines on radio. Corporations slashed almost thoughtlessly at their rosters, erasing entire divisions which promised to be unprofitable, regardless of individual sales figures. In an industry controlled by whites, black music was a predictable victim: only the most prominent performers, such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, retained their contracts. Popular singers and sweet dance bands survived; jazz was marginalised. Wall Street’s excesses effectively killed the ‘classic blues’ tradition overnight: when Bessie Smith was asked to record again, in 1936, it was because producer John Hammond felt nostalgic for the pleasure she had brought him a decade earlier. Highbrow classical selections were also dropped in favour of light orchestral pieces and mock-serious arrangements of popular tunes. In 1927, more than 100 million records had been sold in the United States. By 1932, the collective figure had fallen to somewhere between 6 million and 10 million (embarrassment prevented some companies from revealing the depth of their commercial failure).

  The more pessimistic analysts of the music business examined the decline in ticket sales for theatrical productions (although the newfangled ‘talking picture’ bucked the trend), the slashing of profits from sheet music, and the catastrophic collapse of the record market; and predicted that in future their industry would exist merely to service radio. Even that medium briefly seemed to be in jeopardy, as advertising revenues plummeted, and many smaller stations went into liquidation. In such a dark climate, however, radio was a familiar, comforting presence. Many
of the biggest names in show business transferred their attentions from the variety theatres to the radio networks, where a single broadcast exposed them to more people than a year of vaudeville or concert performances. The likes of Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee were now radio stars first, with the movies a close second, and records trailing far behind. There were exceptions to the prevailing gloom: the specialist trades in so-called ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ recordings weathered the hurricane with more courage than their mainstream ‘popular’ counterparts. The rest struggled: dance bands set out on ever more treacherous tours of far-flung small towns that they would never have deigned to visit five years earlier, sometimes performing for free in the hope of creating a loyal audience for the better days to come.

  Many of the leading record companies in Britain and America amalgamated or changed hands. The Victor label in New York warned its artists that they would only be allowed one ‘take’ of each song they recorded, to save on studio bills. The same company also led a frenzied death-dance of technological innovation, in the apparent conviction that a change in record size or speed might revive a business that was being enervated by poverty. In the winter of 1931–2, Victor made the prophetic but tragically ill-timed decision to launch a new series of extended-length records, which would play at 33 rpm rather than the industry standard of 78 rpm. The new format would allow symphonies (Beethoven’s Fifth was the initial release) to be contained within a single two-sided disc, rather than comprising four or five 78s in an ‘album’, as in the past. Besides full-length classical works, the longer-playing record – as yet untitled – could collect together all the songs from the score of the new Fred and Adele Astaire musical, The Band Wagon. Twenty years later, original cast recordings and anthologies of music from film soundtracks would help to guarantee the success of 33rpm reproduction. In 1931, when few potential buyers could afford the discs, let alone the machines on which to play them, no manner of creative thinking could give the new format life.

  If length didn’t work, then brevity might, or so Victor hoped. When the Woolworth’s chain of stores issued its own brand of eight-inch discs featuring dance tunes, Victor copied the idea, and slashed their price to a dime, making it impossible for anyone else to undercut them – or, indeed, for Victor’s scheme to be commercially viable. In Britain, a company named Homophone effectively invented another popular format of the 1950s, the extended play (EP) disc, featuring four songs for the price of two: another bright but doomed initiative. All the while, the established companies were losing profits to the Durium label, which was marketing ultra-cheap, single-sided recordings of current Broadway favourites. They were sold at news-stands rather than in music stores, and briefly commandeered the market, until the major labels persuaded the public that they should pay a little more to hear authentic Broadway stars instead of Durium’s bargain-basement nobodies. To accentuate the charisma of their famous performers, labels such as Columbia indulged in gimmicks such as manufacturing records in bright colours, rather than a greyish-black, or engraving them with realistic autographs of the performers in the grooves. In the early 1930s, however, there was an easier way to manufacture stars: by ensuring that they were represented in the medium that was rivalling radio as the Western world’s most intoxicating form of entertainment, the talking picture.

  The talking films are going18 to be a real nuisance. We are going to be deluged with a particularly unattractive form of American sentiment because, with few exceptions, the talkies make their appeal through sentiment and not through wit and humour.

  Gramophone magazine, July 1929

  At home, and in the synagogue, he is Jakie Rabinowitz: a cantor’s son, groomed as his father’s successor, to place his voice at the service of Adonai. At night, on the vaudeville stage, he is Jack Robin: serving up sentimental ballads and ragtime for the Gentiles. ‘The songs of Israel are tearing at my heart’, he declares, ‘the call of the ages – the cry of my race.’ But the theatre has its own siren call, and for most of the action he is pulled between the secular and the spiritual. When his father arrives home unexpectedly to find him serenading his mother with a jazzed-up rendition of Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’, full of vim and voo-dee-o-doh, he refuses to acknowledge his son. Jakie opts to live as Jack, until he hears that his father is on his deathbed, and the synagogue has no cantor. Can he still sing the ‘Kol Nidre’ that will send his father to his rest with a satisfied mind?

  This was a movie, so of course he could; faithful to his race, respectful to his family, Jakie can become Jack once more with his mother’s blessing, for which she is serenaded with the Oedipal love song, ‘My Mammy’. Yet Jack is cursed with a compulsion which proves more telling than the mark of Cain. To become who he is at heart, he must pretend to be what he is not, and don the stage make-up which delights his mother, but will damn his act for posterity.

  The movie is The Jazz Singer (1927), the first full-length feature in history to include synchronised dialogue; and Jakie and Jack are two of the faces of Al Jolson. We see him adopt another face during the movie: the burnt-cork make-up, exaggerated white smile and curly black wig of the ‘blackface’ performer.

  Like Jolson himself, The Jazz Singer was both intensely modern, and a throwback to a minstrel tradition that was already in decline. Sixteen years after his first appearance on Broadway, there was still nobody with Jolson’s charisma or panache; nobody who could match the way he threw his arms wide as he sang to encompass the world, and punched home the key syllables of every line. Critics found the film’s drama meretricious and banal; but the public lapped up every word (and gesture, during the lengthy silent-film sequences between songs). Jolson’s career scaled new heights, and Hollywood reacted predictably by shepherding him through a series of hasty follow-ups, among them The Singing Fool, Say It With Songs, Mammy (with a final reel in Technicolor, no less) and Hallelujah I’m a Bum, by which time audiences were reacting to Jolson’s trademark cry of ‘Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet’ with a jaded ‘Actually, I think we have’. But The Jazz Singer offered a propulsive boost to his popularity, ensuring that his career would survive the onslaught of the Great Depression.

  The tale of Jakie and Jack was far from being the earliest merging of music and film. During the silent era, pianists would improvise an emotionally appropriate soundtrack to what they and the audience were watching, or small bands would perform specially written scores. In many picture houses, the management installed one of the mighty theatre organs that are so redolent of the pre-talkie age: with multiple keyboards and even more multiple ‘stops’, they acted as a manual precursor to the synthesiser, allowing one man to represent the entire palette and scale of the orchestra. As early as 1894, music publishers concocted what were, in effect, promotional films for their latest offerings. A succession of slides would be arranged to accompany a song, delivered either by a live performer or a phonograph.

  The popularity of the silent film, and the increasing vogue for recorded sound, convinced many entrepreneurs and inventors that there must be a viable method of combining the two. In the winter of 1894–5, inventors Thomas Edison and William Dickson combined a Kinetograph camera and an Edison phonograph to produce a sixteen-second synchronisation of sound and vision, Dickson playing an operatic theme on a violin while two men danced uneasily alongside him. In 1909, several leading Broadway stars were filmed while singing their best-known songs, and this footage was screened in a Brooklyn vaudeville theatre while gramophone records of the same songs were played simultaneously. The audience was unimpressed by this early experiment in lip-syncing, because the discs produced insufficient volume to reach beyond the front rows of the stalls. Sonic shortcomings also doomed another Edison venture, the Cinephonograph, which was used in 1913 to capture Nursery Favorites, an eight-minute operetta.

  Not until 1923 did the physicist and inventor Lee de Forest succeed in using strips of film to document not only visuals but an appropriate soundtrack: a process he dubbed Phonofilm. Arou
nd 200 short films of vaudeville and (in Britain) music-hall stars were made and exhibited until the end of the decade, early offerings including A Few Minutes With Eddie Cantor (chronicling his collection of mother-in-law jokes), duets by ragtime pianist Eubie Blake and singer Noble Sissle, and a delightful routine by Mark Griver and his Scottish Revellers, whose riotous mix of jazz and comedy included a surreal medley of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Ain’t She Sweet’. Business intrigue and battles of ego doomed de Forest’s venture to failure, although his invention was effectively borrowed by Walt Disney for pioneering animations such as Steamboat Willie (1928), during which Mickey and Minnie Mouse ‘performed’ the traditional tune ‘Turkey in the Straw’ on a variety of helpless cartoon animals.

  Meanwhile, Warner Brothers were investing in a rival system named Vitaphone, which depended heavily on ‘live’ recording while filming was in process. Inevitably the microphones sometimes mislaid the voices of the performers, and picked up the whirring of the cameras instead. This revolutionary (according to Warners) innovation was showcased with a gala premiere in New York on 6 August 1926. Guests were treated to a succession of classical performances, interrupted only by a showcase for the multi-instrumentalist Roy Smeck (‘The Wizard of the String’), showing off his talents on Hawaiian guitar, banjo, ukulele and harmonica. Two months later, a second Vitaphone presentation featured lighter fare. Its highlight was A Plantation Act, a short film featuring Al Jolson in rags and blackface delivering two of his hits plus his latest recording, ‘When the Red Red Robin’. Here, encapsulated, was all the Jolson charisma. It might be grotesque, from this distance, racially demeaning, awash with fake sincerity, yet it was still utterly compelling – a testament to the ability of show business to build and sustain illusions beyond sober analysis.