I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America

Introduction

Introduction The story of American popular music in the 1950s has about it the feel of absurdist ‹ction. Even the bare outline is strange to recount: how the nation drifted away from its love affair with the grand tradition of big band swing music and into a period of musical nihilism; how once stable conventions of musical style and practice were overwhelmed by tides of aimless novelty; how inanimate musical objects—records—became the most common medium of musical experience; how young, unschooled musicians rose almost overnight to positions once reserved for those of the highest professional attainment; how entrepreneurs with little experience of the music business and just as little capital competed effectively with large and powerful corporations; how the whims of teenagers exerted a deciding aesthetic and commercial authority in the music marketplace; how popular music came to both re›ect and contribute to changes in America’s social and cultural fabric; and how beneath a surface of apparent trivia ran a deep current of transformation. Several historical accounts have mapped aspects of the ‹fties’ musical terrain. Among these, the early standouts are Arnold Shaw’s The Rockin’ Fifties (and its complement, Honkers and Shouters) and Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City, which take an encyclopedic approach to the decade’s tumultuous music business. By contrast, Glenn Altschuler’s All Shook Up, Michael Bertrand’s Race, Rock, and Elvis, and Brian Ward’s Just My Soul Responding concentrate on the music’s role in social history . Philip Ennis crafts a useful hybrid of the two approaches in The Seventh Stream, which will make an appearance in my chapter 4. And James Miller, in Flowers in the Dustbin, offers a critical account from the perspective of a longtime rock music journalist with a scholarly turn of mind. Despite these commendable works, I was drawn deeper into the topic by a host of unanswered questions. The problem might be summarized in a single illustrative musical contrast: compare Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” to the Byrds’ “Mr. Tam- bourine Man,” top-tier pop hits in 1945 and 1965, respectively. Though separated by a mere twenty years, these records bear stark differences in their conceptions of songwriting, performance style, rhythmic feel, instrumentation , arranging, and record production. How does their historical proximity square with such unquali‹ed contrast? What explains such a rapid reorientation of the pop mainstream? How was the musical economy and its lingua franca so transformed? The rise of rock and roll—the unlikely, upstart, music industry party crasher—has long provided the pat answer. But the emergence of rock and roll itself poses yet more questions . What sort of market turmoil would admit largely amateur and inelegant records into the company of the industry establishment’s pop ‹nery? How could inexperienced, overnight stars eclipse Crosby and Sinatra? What public mood encouraged such widespread aesthetic revolt ? The postwar period was clearly a watershed for American pop music , but what were the causes and what changes accrued to the nation’s public soundscape and its musical consciousness? These are the broad questions that impelled this book. The clues to the story would certainly lie in the era’s hit records—those that managed to stake a place in the public ear and heart—which have over time evolved from entertainment commodities to historical documents. While myriad events shaped the postwar musical climate, the key catalyst was sound recording. As collaborative artworks, records represent the spectrum of pop music’s artists and artisans: songwriters, arrangers, performers , producers, and sound engineers. As commodities they fueled the ambitions and imaginations of entrepreneurs and offered the general public—with each retail purchase or jukebox selection—the opportunity to make known a personal aesthetic choice. As historical witnesses, they report what went into their making and give us an accurate account of what captured the contemporary ear. As radio programming, they are mass media; on a phonograph, they provide the soundtrack to an individual life. Operating in all these capacities, records in the postwar years fueled a cultural dynamism beyond anyone’s control. They enabled, even fostered, a revolution and then remained to provide their own account of what had happened. The early signs of upheaval were apparent in the waning position of swing era jazz. The swing era (from roughly 1930 to 1945), which spawned and sustained the big bands, was a time of extraordinary artistry in American popular music. It was a period when popular...