A New and Concise History of Rock and R&B through the Early 1990s. Eric Charry
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(Guralnick 1999).14
Immediately following the initial success of Elvis, several other Sun Records artists moved onto the national scene, notably guitarist Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes,” pop #2, 1956) and pianist Jerry Lee Lewis (“Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” pop #3, 1957). Johnny Cash (“I Walk the Line,” country #1, 1956) would top the country charts, and Roy Orbison, having only minimal success debuting at Sun (1956–58), would eventually break through when he left for Monument Records (“Only the Lonely,” pop #2, 1960). A photo of a chance meeting of Presley, Lewis, Perkins, and Cash at Sun Studios in December 1956 was captioned “Million Dollar Quartet” (R. Johnson 1956); recordings of the impromptu session were not released until 1981.
Chicago Rhythm and Blues
While a potent urban electric blues scene catering to the black community developed in the 1950s in Chicago, with many of the musicians coming from the South (e.g., Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf), other musicians were able to create a more youthful music, crossing over into the pop market. The most successful was Chuck Berry (1926–2017), born and raised in Saint Louis, perhaps the most musically influential of all the early rock and roll artists. Berry was unique in his mastery of three realms: songwriting, singing, and guitar playing. He has cited Carl Hogan, guitarist with Louis Jordan, as an important influence, which can be heard on the introduction to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” (1946).
Berry’s father was a contractor and church deacon, and his mother was a public school principal, and so he grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. He married in 1948 and worked various jobs to support his family (his daughter was born in 1950). By 1953 Berry was playing in Johnnie Johnson’s trio regularly at the Cosmo Club in Saint Louis. On a recommendation from Muddy Waters he brought a demo tape to Chess Records and made his first record there in May 1955 (“Maybelline,” an adaptation of the country tune “Ida Red”), with Johnson on piano and Willie Dixon on bass. To push “Maybelline” in the New York City market, Chess gave Alan Freed cosongwriting credit (without Berry’s knowledge), and it worked: his debut record became a #1 R&B hit, crossing over to #5 on the pop chart. Berry (1987: 90–91) had a clear understanding of his audiences (he catered to both blacks and whites at the Cosmo Club), drawing his diction from both Nat King Cole and Muddy Waters. He had nine pop Top 40 hits through 1959 (out of a lifetime total of fourteen), five of which were in the Top 10 (see figure 20). Berry is widely recognized as the great songwriter of the early rock and roll era. His only #1 pop hit, though, came in 1972 with the novelty song “My Ding-a-Ling.”
“I don’t think there’s any group in the world, white or black…. You name any top group, and they’ve all been influenced by him. His lyrics that were very intelligent lyrics in the fifties, when people were just singing virtually about nothing, he was writing social comment songs. He was writing all kinds of songs, with incredible meter to the lyrics, which influenced Dylan and me and many other people. The meter of his lyrics is tremendous. He’s the greatest rock and roll poet, and I really admire him” (John Lennon in the 1970s, in Hackford 1987-v).
Bo Diddley (1928–2008), born Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi (changing his name to McDaniel when he was adopted by relatives), moved to the South Side of Chicago at the age of seven. Like his label-mate Chuck Berry, McDaniel was the other transplant to Chicago who was a major part of this early rock and roll era. He learned and played violin at the famed three-thousand-member Ebenezer Baptist Church and later picked up the guitar. His first record, “Bo Diddley,” recorded and released on Chess subsidiary Checker, hit #1 on the R&B chart in 1955. In November 1955 he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as part of New York deejay Dr. Jive’s Rhythm and Blues Revue from the Apollo Theater. Bo Diddley had several trademarks: a signature rhythm, sometimes called hambone (same as the Cuban clave); a percussive style of playing rhythm guitar even during his solos (“Bo Diddley,” “Pretty Thing”); and a band that included a maracas player (Jerome Green) and a woman guitarist (Peggy “Lady Bo” Jones, succeeded by Norma-Jean “The Duchess” Wofford). He had the least commercial success of the early rock pioneers, in part because he put out fewer recordings, but his original, quirky sound, guitar style, personality, and look (he wore glasses and played a rectangular-shaped guitar) has given him an enduring visibility. He was inducted into the second class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2019) in 1987.
Although not based in Chicago, Ike Turner, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, brought his band to Sun Studio in Memphis to record “Rocket 88,” which was issued on Chicago’s Chess Records in 1951 under vocalist Jackie Brenston’s name. It hit #1 on the R&B chart and is often pointed to as a key recording in rock history, due in part to the prominence of the distorted electric guitar in its boogie woogie rhythm. Turner subsequently worked for several years with Sun owner Sam Phillips, who formed Sun Records the following year.
Vocal Groups (Doo Wop)
Primarily a genre associated with northern urban African American communities (especially in New York City), doo wop developed in the mid-1950s from male vocal groups. The Dominoes and Crows were from Harlem, and the Chords were from the South Bronx. Doo wop typically drew not on blues forms but rather on Tin Pan Alley styles of songwriting. This involved a thirty-two-bar verse-verse-bridge-verse structure (diagrammed as AABA), wherein each letter refers to eight bars, and the bridge features a contrasting melody and chords.
Doo wop was an optimistic music that looked to the future, especially with romantic lyrics that pointed to life together as a couple. Whereas R&B and blues were rooted in the past, doo wop represented a more modern urban and cosmopolitan outlook: “The group singers dealt with a completely different situation. For them and their audience, the past was, if not rejected and despised, then often ignored. The present was of greatest importance, and the future was looked at with wonder: Does she love me?—it’s too soon to know. The songs were invariably about unfulfilled relationships—the period after acquaintance has been established, before romance has been confirmed. A smaller number of songs concerned the aftermath of a broken relationship” (Gillett 1996: 162–63).
A series of crossovers from R&B to the pop world in the mid-1950s firmly established the genre and led to a glut on the market, reflecting its popularity in urban neighborhoods. Two of the more well-known groups in the later 1950s, both affiliated with Atlantic Records and the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller were the Drifters (1953–), featuring Clyde McPhatter (who had left the Dominoes) and then Ben E. King (“This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” 1960); and the Coasters (1955–), with hits including “Young Blood” and “Searchin’” (1957), “Yakety Yak” (1958), and “Charlie Brown” (1959).
Buddy Holly (1936–59), from Lubbock, Texas, and the Crickets are missing in Gillette’s (1996:23–35) first-wave five primary styles (1954–56), because they came on the scene in 1957, in a second wave of early rock and roll. Neither do they fit into any of the previously mentioned categories, as a white electric guitar–based quartet with drums coming from Texas, hitting the R&B charts and never making the country charts. After two misses in 1956, they hit #1 (“That’ll Be the Day”) and #3 (“Peggy Sue”) on the pop chart in 1957. They set the model for 1960s rock: they were a distinct unit (a band) that wrote their own songs, and they had a two-guitar (lead and rhythm), bass, and drums quartet format.
PAYOLA
In 1959, on the heels of television quiz-show inquiries, a House of Representatives subcommittee began investigating the practice of payola, the payment of cash by record promoters to radio disc jockeys to play their records. The highest-profile targets were Alan Freed and Dick Clark. Freed was arrested along with seven other radio figures in May 1960 for receiving over $100,000 in bribes from twenty-three record companies over the past two years—it was front-page news for the New York Times (Roth 1960). He had already been fired from his radio and television jobs in 1959 and eventually pled guilty to two of the ninety-nine counts, paying a small fine in 1963. Freed was indicted in 1964 for income-tax evasion and died the following year of cirrhosis of the liver. Clark, who was the subject of an intense hearing in April 1960 and Life magazine profile, managed to escape unscathed by divesting his questionable industry holdings: