by Ben Yagoda
The deejay was mainly a local phenomenon (the networks relied heavily on soap operas and other serials), and in fact, during the forties, the focus of radio music dramatically shifted from network to local. There were 813 AM stations in 1940, and 2,127 in 1949, and virtually all the new ones were small, independent operations that filled the bulk of their broadcast day with local deejays spinning records.
In 1946, Roy Kohn was a song plugger for a publisher called Mood Music. One day his boss had an idea for him: drive from New York to Boston and stop at radio stations along the way to pass out copies of a Tony Martin record of one of their songs. “As I got to the outskirts of Bridgeport,” Kohn recalled, “I saw an antenna on top of a hill. I found the road and went up to the radio station WICC. I got to the door, and since it was open, I just walked in with the Tony Martin record. I got to the control room/studio and the guy on the air called me. His name was Bob Crane, who later moved to KNX in Hollywood, and then years later, starred on television in Hogan’s Heroes. Bob told me I was the first song plugger to give him a record to play on the air.”
The plugging process, haphazard at that early moment, quickly became codified as the industry collectively shifted toward a single goal: getting a record into a deejay’s hands and getting him to play it. The process began when a publisher or his plugger took the elevator to a record company A&R man’s office. Because so much was decided there, writes Philip H. Ennis, the place was “hated by the majority of the traditionally oriented publishers and feared by the song pluggers.” It was a dismal numbers game. Music historian Russell Sanjek estimates that about two hundred new songs were offered each week by publishers, and another hundred by songwriters, of which fewer than a dozen got any real attention. And even if a song was taken on, it had only about a one-in-twenty chance of making it to the charts.
Once songs were recorded, they were turned over to the labels’ substantial plugging departments, which were dedicated to getting disks into jockeys’ hands. That was good business, because the evidence was growing that a deejay could single-handedly create a hit. In 1948, Al Collins was a jock in Salt Lake City; he specialized in jazz, hence his nickname, “Jazzbo.” One day he got a copy of a record called “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover” from the sweet bandleader Art Mooney, along with a personal note from Mooney. Unaware that the song was a fairly corny novelty number from 1927, Collins put the record on for a spin during his Jazzbo Jamboree show. “As it twanged its way through its three minutes, Collins’ ears got redder and redder,” recounted author Arnold Passman. “Incensed that he, a jazz jock, would be sent such as song, Collins continued to spin it, giving it a different title every time in protest.” He ended up playing it for three and a half hours. Unaccountably, the record became a hit in Salt Lake, and then the country—number one on the charts for five weeks and charting in five additional versions. Two other deejays famously broke records in the late forties, both with songs that were decades old. Chicago’s Eddie Hubbard launched a version of “Peg o’ My Heart” by the novelty group the Harmonicats, and, even more remarkably, Kurt Webster, of Charlotte, North Carolina, played Ted Weems’s original 1933 recording of “Heartaches” into the second most popular song of 1947, right behind “Near You.”
The power of these new forces in the business was quickly understood; Variety described the rise and reign of the disk jockeys as “a postwar show business phenomenon as revolutionary as the atomic bomb.” In hearings before the House of Representatives in 1948, a lawyer for Petrillo’s AFM—not pleased with any development that limited live performances—brought up the ostensibly scandalous fact that an unnamed deejay had made $185,000 the previous year. Billboard responded that “the disc jockey, in our opinion, plays an important role in the sale of phonograph records. In fact, he plays just about the most important role, having supplanted the jukeboxes as the makers of hits. These hundreds of disc jockeys on the various radio stations have brought recorded music to the homes of people who were never reached by the jukes.”
A young graduate student named Philip Ennis, hired by BMI to prepare material to defend against the Arthur Schwartz lawsuit, did an in-depth study of the phenomenon and discovered that it was mainly taking place far away from the Brill Building. “It was believed . . . that the city was isolated from the main action,” Ennis wrote later. “‘You can’t make a hit in New York anymore,’ was the insistently repeated statement. I didn’t know then why this was the case, but I quickly learned that the industry was willing to go wherever the hits were made. Every Sunday evening the flights from LaGuardia to the Midwest and to the West Coast were filled with song pluggers and record company men flying to visit disk jockeys from Pittsburgh to Seattle, from Detroit to Phoenix.”
Howie Richmond started his own publishing company in 1949 and went a bit against the grain, specializing in novelty and specialty numbers instead of the staple of the trade, ballads. “Ballads take a long time to develop,” he told Billboard years later. “You can get novelty songs started quickly.” One way Richmond tried to do so was by airmailing a copy of each new release to some three hundred especially influential deejays. He estimated that he spent half his working day on the phone talking to jocks, and an additional sixteen hours on weekends. His methods paid off: in just four years his company had big hits with “Music! Music! Music!”; Phil Harris’s massively successful novelty “The Thing”; “A Guy Is a Guy”; “I Believe”; and the Weavers’ double-sided hit, their cover of “Good Night, Irene” and “Tzena Tzena Tzena.”
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Two days after “Tzena Tzena Tzena” was released, another version of the song, by “Mitch Miller and his Orchestra & Chorus,” came out; it eventually climbed to number three. For Miller the recording was characteristic in at least two respects. First, it showed his alacrity in regard to cover records. When a label bought exclusive rights to a particular song, that implied a guarantee that no other company would even see the words or music until the record was released. But after that, all bets were off, and if it smelled like a hit, a half-dozen or more competing versions went in the works. The Beard’s speed earned him another nickname—“Cut ’em, press ’em, ship ’em” Miller.
The Chorus was front and center in his “Tzena”—prefiguring the wildly successful “Sing Along with Mitch” albums that started coming out in the late fifties—but there were other notable elements: handclaps, tambourine, accordion, and, improbably, the French horn. As such, the record illustrated a second Miller trademark. “Oddly enough for a man of such musical ability, Miller . . . achieved his power through the use of gimmicks,” observed George Frazier in a Vogue article on the music business. The Beard had expanded the traditional role of the A&R man beyond just signing artists and selecting their songs. He was involved in every aspect of the recording process, from orchestration and arrangements to setting the sound levels; beyond that, he was the first music man (the term “producer” hadn’t yet been adopted by the industry) to think of recordings in terms of production values, or sound effects. Miller told Will Friedwald: “What makes you want to dig in your pocket and buy a record? It’s got to be something you want to play over and over again. You look for qualities to make somebody buy it. I was trying to put stuff in records that would tighten the picture for the listener.”
One of his most famous pieces of “stuff” was on “Mule Train,” put out by Frankie Laine in 1949, when both he and Miller were at Mercury. The record tried to simulate the feel of a real wagon train through the use of an echo chamber (essentially invented by Miller), assorted shouts and grunts, and two wood blocks, which simulated the sound of a cracking whip. Paul Weston, then music director at Capitol Records, made a thinly veiled swipe at his Columbia competitor in a Down Beat interview that came out when the song was riding the charts: “Whatever became of music? . . . Arrangements and interpretations have become so big that they’re bigger than the music. You’ve got to snap whips and crack bones to get attention now
. . . we’re not getting good new songs these days. I don’t think anything has been written in the last few years that has a chance of becoming a standard, nothing that can compare with the wonderful tunes that were being turned out in the ’30s.”
That hardly stopped the Beard, who at Columbia only added new tricks to his bag. He backed up “Come On-a My House” with a sort of barrelhouse harpsichord, and amplified the same instrument on “Delicado,” a 1952 number-one hit by Percy Faith. (Faith, one of Miller’s go-to guys through the fifties, was a Canadian conductor and arranger who, like his boss, came from a classical music background, and was a pioneer of the “semi-classical” genre, also known as “easy listening.” “Delicado” was one of Jack Lawrence’s international specials, in which he gave English lyrics to a Brazilian song.) Miller was a pioneer of overdubbing, first at Mercury with Patti Page, whose close-harmony “duets” with herself became her trademark. Less successful was his decision to have bagpipes accompany Dinah Shore on a song called “The Scottish Samba.” The recording enraged one DJ so much that he took the record off the turntable and broke it on the air. Miller’s own choral version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” which knocked “Rock Around the Clock” off the number-one spot in the charts in 1955, had a relentless snare drum. It found a target in Stan Freberg’s satirical version, in which Freberg complains that the “snare drum covered up the tra-la-las” and finally can’t take it anymore:
HOLD ON! HOLD ON! Hold on, you smart-aleck Yankee drummer, you!
You can cover up “yellow” and you can cover up “rose,” buddy buddy,
But don’t you cover up TEXAS!
Or I’ll stick your head through that cotton-pickin’ snare drum
And secede from the band, so help me Mitch Miller I will!
Donald Clarke, in his book The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, has a nice description of the not altogether disastrous way the Beard diminished popular music:
Miller had too much power and not enough taste. . . . Miller was as responsible as anyone for turning pop music into jingles, and it was on his watch that pop records began to sound like self-conscious productions rather than straight recordings of musical events. . . . Still, live pop music seemed to be dead by Miller’s time and, as jingles went, Miller’s jolly records had more personality than most. His own instrumental “Oriental Polka” was a wacky twittering tune for woodwinds doubled by a marimba. Percy Faith’s “Funny Fellow” was a slowish, cock-eyed samba with a cheerful, noisy rhythm section and a piccolo carrying the tune, to test the speaker on your “hi-fi” record player; in the middle of the arrangement the band laid out and the tune was carried by a solo bassoon, and the band’s “funny fellow” made you chuckle.
It wasn’t just Miller. All sorts of musicians and producers were becoming intrigued with unusual sounds, and the public was responding. Anton Karas, a Viennese zither player, scored The Third Man, a 1949 film directed by Carol Reed; his instrumental rendition of the film’s bouncy Middle European theme, released by London Records, was number one on the charts for eleven weeks in 1950, as was Guy Lombardo’s version, which replaced the zither with a more domesticated guitar and trumpets. (Four other versions also charted in 1950, including two with unfortunate lyrics by Walter Lord, which speak of a distant dream that “seems to glimmer when you hear The Third Man Theme.”)
Les Paul was a Wisconsin native who’d started off a country guitarist and then turned to jazz, successfully accompanying Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, and Nat Cole. In the late forties, Paul cultivated his remarkable aptitude for engineering. He pioneered the solid-body electric guitar and, encouraged by Crosby, built his own recording studio in his Los Angeles backyard. The critic Jon Pareles recounts:
There he experimented with recording techniques, using them to create not realistic replicas of a performance but electronically enhanced fabrications. Toying with his mother’s old Victrola had shown him that changing the speed of a recording could alter both pitch and timbre. He could record at half-speed and replay the results at normal speed, creating the illusion of superhuman agility. He altered instrumental textures through microphone positioning and reverberation. Technology and studio effects, he realized, were instruments themselves.
He also noticed that by playing along with previous recordings, he could become a one-man ensemble. As early as his 1948 hit “Lover,” he made elaborate, multilayered recordings, using two acetate disc machines, which demanded that each layer of music be captured in a single take.
Paul and his wife, the singer Mary Ford, started recording for Capitol in 1950; on most of their productions, multiple layers of Ford’s vocals blended with Paul’s breakneck guitar runs and electronic effects. With Ford and by himself, he put out twenty-seven records that reached the Billboard charts through 1953, most strikingly “How High the Moon,” which sounded as if four Fords were singing and Paul’s guitar had been speeded up to quadruple time. It was number one on the charts for nine consecutive weeks in 1951.
The voice could be its own special effect. Crosby had established the crooning prototype, and Sinatra worked his own variations on it, but Frankie Laine’s records with Miller, first at Mercury and then at Columbia, introduced a new register to male vocals: the shout. It proved capable of expressing more, or at least different, emotions than pop music had been thought capable of. Sometimes the emotion descended into sentimentality. Ervin Drake and three other songwriters put together a lachrymose hymn called “I Believe” that begins, “I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.” After that, it actually gets more sentimental. At a 1953 session, Miller backed Laine’s exerted vocals mainly with a gospel choir whose strains reverberated in Columbia’s fabled recording studio on East Thirtieth Street in New York. The song went to number two on the charts and sold more than 20 million copies in dozens of recordings.
In 1952, an A&R man from Columbia’s subsidiary Okeh, which specialized in rhythm and blues, discovered a young singer named Johnnie Ray at a Detroit nightclub. Ray’s first record, a raucous blues called “Whiskey and Gin,” led some listeners to conclude he was black and/or female, though in fact he was a white native of rural Oregon with a rather high-pitched voice and an emotive delivery of the sort traditionally linked with African-American vocalists. The record did well enough to attract Miller’s attention, and he produced Ray’s next release, “Cry.” In rendering the song, Ray stretched out syllables, moaned, and actually appeared to sob; in live performances, he would pound on the piano and writhe on the bench. The record was released in November 1951 and by the following April had sold two million units. That month, New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote an article attempting to explain the phenomenon to the paper’s middle-aged, middlebrow readers. “It’s easy to laugh at Johnnie Ray, the newest wonder among popular singers, just as it is a comforting self-indulgence to feel thoroughly superior to the vast audience which, in a matter of months, has lifted him from obscurity to dominance,” Taubman began. He could not completely shed his condescension, but he correctly sensed that Ray was something more than a novelty. “If one may hazard a guess,” he concluded, “one would suspect that this young man’s style speaks for young people beset by fears and doubts in a difficult time. His pain may be their pain. His wailing and writhing may reflect their secret impulses.”
True to his comment about snapping whips and cracking bones, Paul Weston didn’t go in for special effects, but he also contributed to the general movement toward production over song in popular music. Weston was an arranger for Tommy Dorsey from 1935 till 1943, when he joined Capitol Records as music director. The following year he put out under his own name Music for Dreaming, a two-disk album of smooth, string-heavy orchestral versions of standards. He followed it up with Music for Memories, Music for Romancing, and, in 1950, Music for the Fireside. Weston’s son, Tim, defined the sound: “Take a jazz-tinged band, add strings. It’s the ambience of a get-together.” Coronet magazine gave the so
und a name, in 1950 dubbing Weston “the master of mood music.” That final two-word phrase had traditionally been used to refer generally to the background music in films or radio dramas. It was now a genre, but would have to wait for technological developments over the next several years to fully come into its own.
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Mitch Miller’s apparent attention to all aspects of a recording other than the song may not seem so odd when you consider where he was coming from, and where popular music had gone. A child prodigy on the piano, he had studied oboe at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, the city of his birth, and graduated in the same class as Alec Wilder and Goddard Lieberson, who would become president of Columbia Records and bring Miller to the company. As a professional oboist, Miller played with the Budapest String Quartet and under the batons of Leopold Stokowski and Igor Stravinsky. The latter professed to be struck by his “finest musicianship combined with technical perfection together with the rare human qualities of sensibility, dignity, and modesty.” The composer Virgil Thomson called him “an absolutely first-rate oboist—one of the two or three great ones at that time in the world.” He was in the orchestra accompanying George Gershwin’s concert tour as a pianist, and he was in the pit when Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in 1935. Miller was a member of CBS’s house symphony orchestra from 1936 to 1947 and as such was a member of “Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra”—the fictional combo heard in Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio hoax.
