Folk Music and Modern Sound

Folk, Popular, Jazz, and Classical Elements in New Orleans

Folk, Popular, Jazz, and Classical Elements in New Orleans Robert Palmer AS A PRACTICINGCRITIC of popular music and a kind of amateur or ad hoc folklorist, I've noticed that among many folklorists and other academics concerned with American music, rock and roll still seems to be a dirty word (or words). This attitude has been around as long as rock and roll, and implicit in it is the idea that rock and roll is a single,monolithic beast, manufactured solely for profit and the shattering of refined eardrums. I've been involved in researching, teaching , and writing about the early history and pre-history of rock and roll for some years now, and the first point I usually make when addressing a new class or beginning a talk like this one is that rock and roll is not one music but many. The term "rock and roll," a black slang euphemism for sexual intercourse, was used in the lyrics of "race records" as early as the mid-1920s, and it was a particularly familiar term to the large segment of the American black population that bought and/or listened to rhythm and blues records in the early fifties. (The term "rhythm and blues" meant in the fifties roughly what "race music" meant in the twenties.) The white disc jockey Alan Freed began calling rhythm and blues, or black popular music, "rock and roll" when he launched his celebrated radio show over Cleveland, Ohio's radio station WJW in 1951, and the name stuck. But the 194 Folk, Popular, Jazz, and Classical Elements in New Orleans 195 rhythm and blues records that were being recorded at that time in Chicago, Memphis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, to name four important recording centers, had very different characteristics—regional characteristics. When the "rock and roll" tag was applied to these musics, and to the blackinfluenced white music coming out of Memphis, Nashville, Texas, and elsewhere, the various musics didn't lose their regional characteristics. The music was being produced by local entrepreneurs, played by local musicians, and sung by local singers, and although in most cases these people were consciously tailoring their music for an increasingly homogeneous mass audience, especially after rock's sudden burst of popularity in the mid-fifties, not even these commercial considerations eradicated the identifiable and often extremely idiosyncratic regional characteristics the musicpossessed. Real musical homogenization came later, with the failure of many of the small independent labels that had produced many early rock and roll hits and the increasing centralization of the popular recording industry in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. Still, during the sixties and even into the seventies it was still possible to differentiate between, say, a soul record made in Memphisand one made in Chicago, even though most of the artists and musicians came from the same rural roots in the Deep South. The musicians' individual styles were different, the way they functioned asensembles was different, their sense of rhythm and time were different, and so on. To the extent that localized recording activity still exists in the South, many of these regional differences are still manifest. Focusing on particular local rock and roll idioms of the fifties, we find that in each case the overall musical and social history of the area played a crucial role in shaping the music and making it special. Folk traditions played a very important part, since most of the first generation of rock and roll musicians came from the lower socioeconomic strata of the community—the same people who tended to preserve 196 BLACKS AND B L U E S traditional rural and urban folklore. The richer an area's musical traditions, the richer the rock androll produced there. I've chosen New Orleans as the focus of this lecture because of the exceptional richness of its musical heritage, and especially because of the dialectic between folk, popular, jazz, and classical elements one finds there amongboth black and white musicians. Asit happens, almost all the performers, producers, and songwriters who made rock and roll records in New Orleans during the fifties were black, and they were heirs to an astonishingly diverse set of influences. Back in the eighteenth century when America west of the Mississippiwas a wilderness, New Orleans had its own orchestral musicians, trained in France, and was beginning to produce skilled, locally trained classical musicians. The city had its own opera company...