Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story

5. All Night Long

Like other musicians during the 1950s, Johnny Otis often had to defend himself against charges that he was “polluting” the youth of America by performing and promoting sensual, provocative, and even “obscene” Black music, music that purportedly poisoned the minds and morals of young whites. Crusaders opposed to rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues music alleged that these genres promoted illicit sexual behavior. Executives at major record labels, radio and television programmers, and watchdogs of public morality in and out of government sought incessantly to censor lyrics and smooth the rough edges off rhythmically complex songs. When Mercury Records selected white singer Georgia Gibbs to record the cover version of the Etta James and Johnny Otis song “The Wallflower” (originally “Roll with Me Henry”), the label’s executives renamed the song “Dance with Me Henry.” The record company’s officials knew that when stations had played the Etta James song, broadcasters received warnings from the FCC complaining that the word roll in the lyrics (as in “rock with me Henry, roll with me Henry”) could be construed as obscene. The FCC censors believed that roll was a slang term for having intercourse. An incredulous and annoyed Johnny Otis telephoned Etta James to inform her that the FCC had virtually banned their record because of the word roll, even though that word appeared in hundreds of other songs. Gibbs’s record became a big hit, however, and Otis, James, and Hank Ballard profited from the writers’ royalty payments they received. Nevertheless , Otis felt that the FCC and Mercury Records had deprived Etta James 92 Five ALL NIGHT LONG of her just recognition and reward, that a combination of racism and an excessive fear of sexuality was responsible for the inferior cover version of this song outselling the artistically superior original. Puritanical policing of sexuality was detrimental enough in itself, he believed, because it portrayed beautiful things like sensuality and pleasure as dirty, but in so many cases in the United States it also had a racial agenda. White supremacists channeled popular anxieties about sexuality in general against Blacks. They turned a threat to their racial privileges into a threat to sexual purity in an attempt to make desegregation appear unnatural and obscene. They drew on a long history of sexual racism that portrayed Black men and women as hypersexual , licentious, and likely carriers of sexually transmitted diseases. Like people in power all over the world, they tried to preserve their privileges by treating what they viewed as a social transgression as if it were a biological threat. Censoring popular songs sometimes backfired. Telling young people in a sexually repressed society that an innocent song like “Roll with Me Henry” had obscene connotations probably made the song more attractive to them. Yet these efforts to police the racial border with sex-negative censorship inevitably distorted relations between Blacks and whites, subjected Black artists to higher levels of scrutiny than white musicians faced, and systematically channeled unfair gains and unearned rewards to mediocre white performers. In the case of “The Wallflower,” the decision to censor struck Johnny Otis as especially ridiculous. “If ever a song was about dancing with no sexual connotations, this was it,” Otis argues. Yet he adds in disgust, “Not that there’s anything wrong with honest sexuality—it’s a dance record. Try to tell that to the establishment of 1954.”1 The same scenario repeated itself with “Willie and the Hand Jive.” Even though the song’s lyrics expressly compare the Hand Jive to other dances (the Walk, the Stroll, and the Suzie Q) and even though the Three Tons of Joy demonstrated the Hand Jive on stage countless times while Johnny sang the song, would-be censors complained that its lyrics presented a coded tribute to masturbation, an interpretation that has persisted for years. An interviewer for National Public Radio in 1992 asked Johnny if the song was really about masturbation. He thought, “Damn! Can’t you understand the lyrics? It’s about dancing . . . DANCING!”2 Fears of teenage sexuality in general, and of interracial sex in particular, permeated the moral panics about popular music in the 1950s, as they have propelled many other attacks on Black music before and since. On several occasions, however, complaints about the alleged immorality of rock ’n’ roll hid other All Night Long 93 motives. In certain cities where the authorities informed Otis that some had objected to...