A New and Concise History of Rock and R&B through the Early 1990s. Eric Charry
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United Independent Broadcasters was formed in 1927, which that year joined with Columbia Phonograph Record Company to form the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, the birth of the second national network. CPRC soon pulled out, and their name was shortened to Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1928. In the late 1930s a major dispute between ASCAP, which was planning to significantly raise the rates of their blanket licenses to radio stations, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) led to the NAB founding the second performing rights organization, Broadcast Music, Inc. BMI attracted younger composers and especially those in nonmainstream styles not served by ASCAP.
As a result of an FCC monopoly probe, NBC’s red and blue networks split in 1943, and so NBC sold its blue network to American Broadcasting System, soon to be renamed American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Three major radio networks were now in place: CBS, NBC, and ABC. All three began commercial broadcasting on television in the 1940s, and to this day they remain the three major television networks (joined by Fox as the fourth in the 1990s).
In 1946 RCA put its black-and-white television sets on the market. By 1954, 354 television stations were broadcasting to more than half of U.S. households (twenty-six million). Contrary to fears of television putting them out of business, AM radio stations went from 948 in 1946 to 2,824 in 1954 (Douglas 1999: 219, 223). Popular music got a major boost in 1948, when CBS launched Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan, soon renamed the Ed Sullivan Show, the most important single venue for launching national music acts from the mid-1950s through the 1960s (see figure 5). American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark in Philadelphia, became the first major show exclusively devoted to teen music. In 1957 it went on the air for ninety minutes every day. Within two years it was being broadcast to 101 affiliates to an audience of twenty million. Television began to be broadcast in color in 1965. A series of short-lived shows in the 1960s featured musical performances, and in the 1980s new cable networks, such as MTV and VH1, came on the air to broadcast music full-time, aimed at teens.12
As television initially expanded, taking advertisers with them, radio began to specialize in response. The immediate post–World War II era saw the rise of the disc jockey, who introduced and played records on the air. Radio stations playing R&B and jazz significantly expanded during this time, catering to an African American audience unable to afford the new TV sets and finding little interest in white middle-class television programming (Smulyan 1994: 159).
FM radio, with a better overall sound quality than AM, took off in 1965, when the FCC required that all AM/FM stations in markets of more than a hundred thousand people broadcast different material at least half of their airtime; this impacted more than half of the almost thousand FM stations. Some AM stations devoted FM to noncommercial programming. Tom Donahue (1967), a disc jockey and program director in San Francisco, was a pioneer in playing a wide variety of music on his eight-to-midnight FM show, including longer cuts with less chatter. It became known as free form, underground, or progressive radio, an alternative to AM. By 1972 about 400 of the 2,700 FM stations on the air were programming this format (Sanjek 1996: 543).
In the mid-1960s African Americans, long excluded from starring roles in television (with few exceptions such at Nat King Cole), began starring in a limited number of ongoing TV network prime-time series (see figure 6). In the early 1970s a flurry of Hollywood films with predominantly black casts and directors appeared, with several of them featuring strong musical soundtracks, including Shaft (music by Isaac Hayes) and Super Fly (music by Curtis Mayfield). This coincided with the rise of the style called funk. A similarly remarkable flurry occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with increasing public attention to rap, this time including rap artists such as Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur as stars (see figure 42).
MAGAZINES, CHARTS, AND INDUSTRY AWARDS
Billboard magazine has long been the standard weekly publication for news about the music industry. In the latter half of the 1960s, magazines devoted to rock began to be published, with journalists treating the music as a serious cultural phenomenon for the first time. The monthly Rolling Stone magazine, established in 1967 with a countercultural aura about it, is the longest-lasting magazine of this type (see figure 7).
Commercial success in the music industry can be measured by sales figures and popularity charts, although this should not be confused with artistic merit, which is a matter of subjective critical debate. Record sales figures are registered with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which certifies gold (half a million) and platinum (one million) awards.13
Popularity charts are published weekly by Billboard magazine, which is the standard measure for the industry (see figure 8). When new markets opened in the 1920s, record companies advertised and distributed them to specific demographics, and so the categories of hillbilly and race records were born. In the early twentieth century the term race had some positive connotations: “She was what is termed a ‘race woman,’ and desired to work for her own people” (Lilian Wald 1915, qtd. in OED 2019c). “A ‘Race Man’ was somebody who always kept the glory and honor of his race before him…. It was a mark of shame if somebody accused: ‘Why you are not a Race Man (or woman).’ … They were champions of the race” (Zore Neale Hurston 1942, qtd. in OED 2019c).14 The category was definitively relabeled in 1949 as rhythm and blues (or R&B). Hillbilly, a pejorative term, was relabeled as country.
In the 1950s separate charts tracked record sales, radio airplay, and jukebox plays. Since the 1960s sales figures and radio airplay were combined into a single chart. Billboard published separate charts for the three primary markets: pop; rhythm and blues; and country (or country and western, C&W). In recent decades many new markets have been added, including dance, Latin, world, and Christian/gospel. Popularity charts matter for several reasons. They are the clearest measure of the exposure that a record is receiving. Reaching the Top 40 indicates a significant degree of national airplay and sales and consequently public attention. The Top 10 in any chart signifies a more elite status of getting massive national exposure.
Two significant industry awards are decided by vote of industry personnel. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has offered Grammy (originally Gramophone) Awards in a wide assortment of categories since 1959 (see figure 9). The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation has inducted honorees since 1986, and a dedicated physical space, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, opened in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio (home of disc jockey Alan Freed’s radio show in the early 1950s).15
A series of reference books compiled by Joel Whitburn (1990–2013b) provides quick and easy access to an artist’s or group’s various Billboard chart rankings, with one series reproducing the actual Hot 100 singles charts. AllMusic (2019) lists Grammy Awards for artists, and Wikipedia typically includes artist discographies that provide Billboard chart rankings.
TECHNOLOGY
Technological innovations have been a driving force in the music industry (e.g., recording devices and audio-storage formats) and in musical performance. New solid body electric guitars and basses, guitar amplifiers, keyboard synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers would all contribute to significant, sometimes revolutionary, musical change (see figure 10).
Commercial recording onto magnetic tape dates to 1948, when Ampex released its first model (200A), with the new medium improving audio fidelity and adding the ability to edit, erase, and reuse tape. By 1950 magnetic tape recording became the professional standard. In 1956 guitarist Les Paul began experimenting with an eight-track tape recorder, and in 1958 Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd was using an Ampex eight-track recorder. Multitrack recording enabled individual instruments or voices to have their own unique track of tape to be mixed with the other tracks down to two-track stereo in a separate mixing session. It also allowed some tracks to be recorded in one session and additional tracks to be added at later sessions (called overdubbing). This kind of flexibility opened up the recording studio to new creative possibilities. The industry in general did not move to eight-track recording until 1968 (Horning 2013: 174–80, 203).16
For decades the primary audio-storage format was a disc made of thick fragile shellac, ten inches in diameter, spinning