Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  After Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Salt Peanuts’ and his flurry of Afro-Cuban experiments with Chano Pozo, bop exiled itself from a mass audience, black or white. As rock historian James Miller explained, ‘the hot new style was jump11, a simplified and super-heated version of old-fashioned swing, often boogie-woogie-based, usually played by a small combo of piano, bass and drums, with saxophone and trumpet’. In 1949, the US music paper Billboard changed the categorisation of its black record sales chart from ‘Race’ to ‘Rhythm and Blues’, reflecting the roots of the new music, and its key element: rhythm.

  The precursors of jump were bands such as Count Basie’s and Lionel Hampton’s; the boogie-woogie piano players; the jive-talking hepcats, Slim & Slam and Cab Calloway; and the blues. As Susan Whitall wrote, ‘The blues were not yet constricted12 by subgenre classifications such as Chicago blues, or electric guitar rock infused with blues, or folk-blues sung by geezers in denim overalls. In the 1940s and 50s, people said “the blues” when talking about rhythm & blues, jump blues – anything with a pulse. In the black community, people would dress up in their best clothes and go out to dance in the evenings, it was a vital part of life.’

  Like their white counterparts, the black big bands – all but the most prestigious, such as the Basie orchestra (and even he disbanded for a year after the war) – fell victim to economic pressures in the 1940s. Widespread use of the electric guitar, and its accompanying amplification, ensured that a small band could make as much noise as a big one, and persuade just as many people to dance, while remaining cheaper to run and to hire. As the war ended, jukeboxes in African-American bars were playing dozens of records that swung and moved, but with minimal orchestration. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, rebounding between the spiritual and the secular, rattled her electric guitar and sang with gospel fervour on the prophetic ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’. Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup came out of Mississippi with a Delta growl and a simple plea: ‘Rock Me Momma’. Private Cecil Gant (‘I’m Tired’) and Joe Liggins (‘The Honeydripper’) rolled out the blues over bare-bones piano, Gant purring sensuously, Liggins too cool to emote.

  The key song of summer 1945 was ‘Caldonia’, with its errant heroine and shouted refrain: ‘What makes your big head so hard?’ The original (‘Caldonia Boogie’) was by pianist Louis Jordan, pumping his left hand in a frenzy; white bandleader Woody Herman arranged it as a sprint; the black trumpeter Erskine Hawkins had his band slow it down a little, to let its blues come out. In their different ways, all three renditions lived up to the phrase coined by Billboard to describe Hawkins’s effort: ‘right rhythmic rock and roll13’.

  By the end of the year, Helen Humes was skipping across the nonsense syllables of ‘Ba-Baba-Leba’ (‘it’s what the hep cats say’) with an ease and swagger that defined the word ‘cool’, while Bill Doggett’s Octet maintained an almost erotic restraint behind her. Illinois Jacquet’s band hammered a simple twelve-bar riff while Wynonie ‘Mr Blues’ Harris bellowed ‘Wynonie’s Blues’ like a gospel preacher. ‘Look out Illinois Jacquet!’ he shouted as if a train was coming, to introduce his leader’s solo. (‘How long can you play14 that kind of music when a hundred or more gibbering idiots gang up around the bandstand and keep shouting, “Go, go, go, go!”?’, asked an incredulous British jazz journalist after witnessing Jacquet in action.) And they kept coming, for the next two years: Roy Milton, T-Bone Walker, Joe Turner, Louis Jordan again (inventing Chuck Berry’s signature ‘Johnny B. Goode’ riff on his piano introduction to the 1946 hit ‘Ain’t That Just Like a Woman’),fn2 and always Wynonie Harris, hottest of them all. ‘She shakes like jelly, and jelly don’t shake itself’, he roared on the lubricious ‘Lollipop Mama’, the forerunner of a thousand rock ’n’ roll trash-talking metaphors to come.

  As if creating rock ’n’ roll weren’t enough, this mercurial era of rhythm and blues translated the sound of the Southern cotton fields into urban electricity, with Arthur Crudup soon outpaced and overpowered by the Chess Records stable in Chicago. Muddy Waters’s sharecropper vocal sent the tape-deck needles soaring into the danger zone as he drawled and snarled ‘I Feel Like Going Home’ over bottleneck guitar that cut like a switchblade. ‘This was the first Rock & Roll15 band’, claimed Chess historian Rich Cohen, which might have riled Louis Jordan. But there was no disputing the rest of his account: ‘It was the loudest music anyone16 ever heard. It had the drive of an engine, the hum of a diesel on an inky black night – music that makes you feel like staying out late, driving too fast, drinking more than is advisable, starting a fight.’ And as one of the anthems of the 1950s would say, baby, that is rock ’n’ roll.

  You needed more? There was country blues from Lowell Fulson and Brownie McGhee; Delta rhythms from the original Sonny Boy Williamson and John Lee Hooker; the roots of Chuck Berry’s proto-rock guitar sound, on records from T-Bone Walker and Pee Wee Crayton; and, for a change of pace, to prove that not everyone needed to rock all night, the ethereal harmonies of vocal groups such as the Ravens and the Orioles, as silky as Muddy Waters was raw. For a final glimpse of the future, the jukebox of December 1948 offered Charlie Parker’s ‘Barbados’: a touch of Latin, a calypso lilt, modal lines, and Miles Davis on trumpet – modern jazz, so fluid that it sent bop sliding down with a spoonful of the sweetest sugar.

  Records only hinted at what was going on in bars and clubs, on what was known as ‘the chitlin circuit’, as this description of T-Bone Walker demonstrates: ‘As the show reached its climax17, T-Bone pushed his guitar above his head, still playing, extending his arms, building to the song’s crescendo. As he inched the guitar down behind his head, he spread his feet and slid his slender legs further apart, still playing, the room’s ecstasy building. Now the guitar strings ran parallel to T-Bone’s shoulder blades, he popped a last pyrotechnic note, and as he landed the splits, the floor around him was covered with cash and feminine undergarments.’

  And we were still in the 1940s: awaiting the golden years of Chess and Atlantic R&B to come, the discovery of Ray Charles and B. B. King, Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis sending the gumbo of New Orleans around the world, Lloyd Price and Johnny Ace turning R&B into the stuff of teen fantasy – and, yes, the 1951 session at which Sam Phillips of Sun Records recorded Jackie Brenston’s band with Ike Turner as they romped through ‘Rocket 88’, and cut what has been acclaimed as the first ever rock ’n’ roll record. Except that, as we know, rock ’n’ roll was actually invented, and named, six years earlier.

  Economists have long predicted18 that the flood of new babies born during the recent war would one day make themselves felt as a greatly inflated teen-age market. Now the record business is feeling the effects of the high World War II birth rate, as these youngsters, just now moving into teen-age brackets, are helping to swell the teen-age influence on the single record market.

  Billboard magazine, January 1956

  Rhythm and blues may turn out19 to be the most healthy thing the music business has had in years. For one thing, it has made the kids dance. True, it’s a pretty elementary sort of dancing, but it’s better than standing there, gazing at the band. And if they listen to enough R&B long enough, the elemental rhythm and vocal won’t be enough for them. They’re going to want music, too.

  Down Beat magazine, March 1955

  In the summer of 1954, Billboard reviewed Teen-Age Dance Session, an album by Dan Terry & his Orchestra: perfect, the review suggested, for teenagers who wanted to roll back the rug. What music did Terry suppose would send the teens on to the dance floor? Eight orchestral instrumentals which, as Billboard noted, were ‘a deliberate attempt20 to simulate the music of the 30s and early 40s’: in other words, exactly the same music that had thrilled their parents.

  In January 1956, the magazine noted with an air of slight bemusement that the baby boom of the Second World War was creating a new generation with needs of its own. Just this month, it remarked, no fewer than five songs had been released which directly referenced this audience: ‘Teen-Age Prayer’, ‘T
een-Age Heart’, ‘Teen-Ager’, ‘Teen-Age Meeting’ and ‘Nina, the Queen of the Teeners’. Even the archaic hyphen in ‘teen-age’ hinted at the novelty of the whole affair: those aged between 13 and 19 were of ‘teen age’, not yet a recognisable social grouping of ‘teenagers’. They were cutting their wisdom teeth on music which their parents could scarcely have imagined.

  The audience for blues and R&B was almost entirely black (although reissues of earlier blues recordings appealed to white jazz fans like those who attended the pre-war rhythm clubs in Britain). There were few white-owned radio stations where managers were prepared to waste their valuable airtime on a minority audience. It required mavericks to buck the trend: people such as Dewey Phillips, a hyper-charged ball of verbal energy who broadcast a dedicated R&B show from WHBQ in Memphis. It was, as Peter Guralnick wrote, one of several similar enterprises ‘springing up in one form21 or another all across the South: black music on a white radio station for a strong Negro audience and a growing, if for the most part unacknowledged, core of young white listeners with a growing, if for the most part unexamined, buying power’.

  Phillips had no ambitions beyond Memphis, though he deserves his place in history for encouraging his unrelated namesake Sam to launch Sun Records in 1950, and being the first man to broadcast and interview Elvis Presley four years later. Both Dewey Phillips and Presley would die at the age of 42 – just a year younger than a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who latched on to the audience for R&B a little later than Phillips, and commandeered it with an entrepreneurial zeal which had international repercussions. In the summer of 1951, he began to broadcast a nightly late-night (11.15 p.m.–1 a.m.) show of ‘Blues, Rhythm, Jazz’ on WJW in Cleveland, which was advertised with the somewhat baffling couplet: ‘He spins ’em keed, He’s Hep, that Freed!’

  The show was called The Moon Dog House, and Freed’s use of the word ‘Moondog’ would eventually attract a court case from the blind street musician and composer of that name. Freed denied ever calling himself ‘Moondog’, but the tag was emphasised when he launched a series of events in Cleveland. The first, hyped as ‘The Most Terrible Ball of All’, was the Moondog Coronation Ball – held, ambitiously, at the 10,000-capacity Cleveland Arena. It featured a bill of black R&B musicians, headlined by Paul Williams, creator of ‘The Hucklebuck’, a 1949 dance novelty. Some 25,000 people forced their way in, and the show was abandoned. On air the next day, Freed broke down, aware at last of the power of what he had unleashed.

  Subsequent Freed presentations, all using the Moondog brand, were better organised, although the rush for admission often sparked violent confrontations. As photographs of the Cleveland gathering illustrate, his audience in 1952 was almost entirely black. Within two years, however, whites were buying between a third and a fifth of the tickets, although the musicians – Muddy Waters and the Clovers in New Jersey, for example, or Roy Hamilton, the Drifters and Big Maybelle back in Cleveland – were almost exclusively African-American. ‘The kids want that music22 with a beat to dance to’, Billboard reported. ‘Alan Freed has found what they want.’

  As Ray Charles recalled, ‘White singers were picking up23 on black songs on a much more widespread basis … it meant that White America was getting hipper.’ White teenagers were now mouthing black American slang: ‘having a ball’, ‘cool’, ‘bug’, ‘drag’, ‘funky’, ‘split’ and the rest. No wonder that in 1958, nearly a decade before the enactment of President Johnson’s civil-rights legislation, commentator Paul Ackerman was able to claim: ‘In one aspect of America’s24 cultural life, integration has already taken place.’ Not that this was apparent in the Deep South – in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, where in 1956 singer Nat King Cole agreed to play before a racially segregated, entirely white audience. His first song passed off without incident. Then the curtain behind him was raised, to reveal that this black man was performing with the all-white band led by Englishman Ted Heath. ‘There was an immediate reaction25’, Heath recalled. ‘A man leapt clean over the floodlights up on to the stage and hurled himself on Nat King Cole. Nat floundered away from the vicious attack, falling headlong over the piano stool behind him, to land in a heap at the feet of the brass section. A whole gang then rushed the stage, but were foiled by the police, who had been standing by in the wings. They charged on stage with batons flailing. Below the footlights, there was a seething mass of fighting men and screaming women, and the skirmish looked like developing into a full-scale riot.’ Heath reacted as only an Englishman could, leading his band into the familiar strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, whereupon, even 5,000 miles away from Buckingham Palace, most of the audience rose respectfully to their feet, and calm ensued. (It was perhaps reports of this fracas that caused a Nat King Cole concert in Newcastle, England a few weeks later to be cancelled: ‘Jazz audiences are too rowdy26 and destructive’, the manager explained.)

  If the sight of black and white musicians on stage together could arouse such fury, it is easy to imagine how alarmed the more conservative sections of American society became when white kids began to fraternise with their black counterparts at Alan Freed’s Moondog Balls. ‘Teenagers are instigating27 the current trend towards R&B and are largely responsible for keeping its sales mounting’, a trade magazine noted in April 1954. ‘The teenage tide has swept down the old barriers which kept this music restricted to a segment of the population.’ Rhythm and blues was ‘no longer the stepchild28 of the record business’, an analyst noted; another adding, ‘Jukebox operators are reporting requests for orders for R&B tunes from pop locations which previously detested the low-down, noisy but exciting numbers … The majority of the locations which are calling for R&B tunes are teen-age spots, transient places and late-closing taverns. The strictly neighbourhood or family-type location still prefers its music on the pop side.’ Black music was a secret pleasure for white kids, not to be shared with parents or teachers. It marked them out as rebels, transgressors, participants in a ritual from which they were supposed to be excluded.

  No coincidence: when it became known that whites were listening to R&B, concern rose about the lyrical content of blues songs; especially their blatant sexuality. In Memphis, which was a cauldron of both racial intolerance and R&B, the mayor’s office had already ordered police to search out and destroy copies of three offensive black records. (The mere titles of ‘Move Your Hand, Baby’ and ‘Take Your Hand Off of It’ were suggestive; only a few seconds’ exposure to Amos Milburn’s ‘Operation Blues’ were required before it became obvious that Milburn’s doctor was using an unorthodox needle to insert his medicine.) The Dominoes’ 1951 hit ‘Sixty-Minute Man’ was an obvious target; less so Willie Mabon’s ‘I Don’t Know’ (countered by his wife Beatrice’s ‘Why I Didn’t Know’), which was singled out for its line ‘sprinkle goofy dust round your bed’, supposedly an invitation for kids to practise witchcraft.

  ‘The R&B field has been doing29 this sort of thing all along’, one radio host said in 1954. ‘It only came into prominence when the pop kids started buying R&B discs … In most cases, the pop kids are buying the R&B discs because of the beat, rather than the lyrics.’ His peers were not convinced. One federation of American disc jockeys in 1954 issued a ‘thumbs down on “way out”30 dialect, obvious double entendre and “liquor” songs where drink is suggested as the cure for all ills’. Another insisted that it ‘is not against blues records31 as such, but it is against a record in which “rock”, “roll” or “ride” doesn’t deal with the rhythmical meter of the tune’. The problem was that it was hard to tell whether, for example, the teenage protagonists of the Flairs’ 1953 single ‘She Wants to Rock’ had in mind a gentle sway on a rocking chair, a romp on the dance floor, or a few minutes’ animalistic coupling.

  The antics of Alan Freed did little to clarify the issue. His radio persona was racially ambiguous (black teens who attended his early Moondog Balls were apparently amazed to discover he was white), adrenaline-charged and fluent in hipster slang. He tossed aro
und the key signifiers of the music in random order, promising listeners ‘your favourite blues and rhythm records’, addressing them as ‘all you moondoggers’ or ‘all you rock ’n’ rollers’. By late 1953 (and possibly earlier, though recordings don’t survive to prove the point) Freed was twinning two sexually loaded words into a single badge of identity: his blues and rhythm records were also, in his vocabulary, rock ’n’ roll. By this, he meant anything he played on the show, which could rage like a hurricane or lilt as romantically as a black Bing Crosby. If it was African-American music, it was rock ’n’ roll. After he was legally required to abandon the ‘Moondog’ name in late 1954, he simply retitled his programme Alan Freed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Show, which is how the sound of black America reached its now increasingly white audience via radio station 1010 WINS in New York through 1955 and 1956.

  For defenders and opponents alike, then, rock ’n’ roll was simply a synonym for R&B, as targeted at a teen audience. ‘[Freed] feels that this term32 better serves his long-range goal of getting the country’s kids back to the dance floors’, said Down Beat magazine in February 1955. But as Freed set that equation in play, record companies – perhaps keen to obscure any sexual connotations – preferred to talk about something they called ‘cat music’. Once again, its origins were tangled. When a US Army private in Korea wrote in 1951 that ‘we intend to teach the POWs33 here how to become a “Cat” in ten easy lessons’, he was planning to introduce his Communist enemy to jazz, and specifically bebop. By 1954, however, ‘cat music’ was being employed by teenagers in the Southern USA as a euphemism for R&B: it was, simply, music for hep cats like them. As parents remained ignorant about the implications of the phrase, MGM Records could inaugurate a ‘Cat Music’ series of R&B singles, many of them performed by black men who until very recently had been making their livings from jazz. (One of these releases, by the Cat Men, was a reworking of a Debussy melody, unlikely to set any adolescent libido aflame.)