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

In I Don't Sound Like Nobody, Albin Zak adroitly synthesizes the way in which various strands of music combined to become what is known today as rock and roll. Popular music in America underwent a dramatic upheaval in the 1950s as disparate types of music were combined in unusual ways. For example, see Rosemary Clooney's 1951 hit "Come On-A My House," which occupied the #1 spot for eight weeks. Featuring a wonderfully anachronistic boogie-woogie harpsichord accompaniment, this record is one of hundreds that Zak discusses in his book. He provides musical descriptions born from a keen ear and includes portraits of important performers, producers, and disc jockeys both well known and obscure in the industry. But perhaps his most important contributions are the interesting and evocative episodes that illustrate the transition from swing to the rock era.

In his first chapters, Zak details a number of technological changes that laid the foundation for music's evolution. Local radio stations expanded their signals, thereby eroding what were often rigid social and regional musical divisions. Powerful stations in Chicago beamed black music (originally termed "race" records) into the homes of white America, while Nashville's stations introduced country and western music to listeners from New Orleans to Detroit. Yet the most radical changes occurred during the production of the records themselves. Arrangers and producers manipulated recorded sounds in more extravagant ways, enabling less-polished performers and novelty acts to achieve successes normally restricted to mainstream artists. "Making hits was all that mattered, which meant listeners' responses were a record man's chief guide" (p. 83). Even as established producers and executives expressed ambivalence about the new aesthetics dominating the marketplace, they nonetheless felt the need to provide the latest hit record.

Zak brightens his narrative in the third chapter, "Hustlers and Amateurs," by introducing an assortment of colorful characters. These men populated a series of small, independent record companies outside the main centers of record production, namely New York and Los Angeles. Despite their small size, these so-called "indies" were heavy players in the marketplace and introduced a singer's emotion or "feel" as a newly prized element in a hit record. Various producers, writers, and engineers make appearances in this chapter: in Clovis, New Mexico, Norman Petty inspired Buddy Knox, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly; in Chicago, the Chess brothers produced pivotal artists including Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. But it was Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee, who discovered Elvis Presley, an artist who synthesized and transformed the traditions of blues, pop, and country. In other words, Phillips discovered a new way to stimulate the marketplace.

In chapter 4, Zak details how the pop market became saturated with elements from various distinct strands of music (country and western, rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, etc). The technique of "covering" instigated this process. By tracing the development of a song from one style to a more polished "cover," Zak reveals complex relationships between the different versions of a single song. For example, see Zak's discussion of the song "Sh-Boom": originally recording in 1954 by the Chords, a quintet of black men born in the Bronx, "Sh-Boom" was "punctuated by extended phrases of non-sense syllables. And its music, though somehow infectious, was repetitive nearly to the point of minimalism" (p. 128). Soon thereafter, the Crew Cuts, a group of white men born in Canada, produced a version that was "a stylized declamation rendering the song but not the attitude of the original recording" (p. 128).

Despite his astute examination of a song's transformation in the hands of different artists, Zak's analysis does not properly account for the ramifications of an artist's race. In the example mentioned above, he introduces the racial difference between the Chords and Crew Cuts only to dismiss it soon thereafter. Although the...