Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds. Moving across genres established—pop, country, opera—and transfigured—experimental, rock, jazz—Wierzbicki delves into the social dynamics that caused forms to emerge or recede, thrive or fade away. Red scares and white flight, sexual politics and racial tensions, technological progress and demographic upheaval—the influence of each rooted the music of this volatile period to its specific place and time. Yet Wierzbicki also reveals the host of underlying connections linking that most apprehensive of times to our own uneasy present.
Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds. Moving across genres established—pop, country, opera—and transfigured—experimental, rock, jazz—Wierzbicki delves into the social dynamics that caused forms to emerge or recede, thrive or fade away. Red scares and white flight, sexual politics and racial tensions, technological progress and demographic upheaval—the influence of each rooted the music of this volatile period to its specific place and time. Yet Wierzbicki also reveals the host of underlying connections linking that most apprehensive of times to our own uneasy present.
Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds. Moving across genres established—pop, country, opera—and transfigured—experimental, rock, jazz—Wierzbicki delves into the social dynamics that caused forms to emerge or recede, thrive or fade away. Red scares and white flight, sexual politics and racial tensions, technological progress and demographic upheaval—the influence of each rooted the music of this volatile period to its specific place and time. Yet Wierzbicki also reveals the host of underlying connections linking that most apprehensive of times to our own uneasy present.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252040078 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2016 |
| Series: | Music in American Life |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Music in the Age of Anxiety
American Music in the Fifties
By James Wierzbicki
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08156-9
CHAPTER 1
The Pop Music Mainstream
In 1950 the two most successful commodities in the field of popular music were "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Goodnight, Irene" "The Tennessee Waltz" was a cover by Patti Page of a country-western song first recorded three years earlier by Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys. The version by Page was released on the Mercury label in November 1950 as the flip side of a holiday-oriented product titled "Boogie Woogie Santa Claus." Before the year was out Page's version had reached the very top of Billboard magazine's "Most Played by [Disc] Jockeys" chart; although other recordings of the song were suddenly abundant, Page's treatment remained on the Billboard chart for twenty-six weeks, and for thirteen weeks it held the number one position. Compared to its rivals, the treatment by the twenty-three-year-old Page and a studio orchestra led by Jack Rael was a marvel of postwar sophistication, for it had its star performer singing in four-part harmony that could only have been realized by means of the magnetic tape recorders that had been developed by German scientists and that, after being appropriated by the Allies, had first come on the American market in 1948. In the bargain, it gave Mercury a marketplace foothold for one of the music industry's new formats: Mercury simultaneously issued Page's version of "The Tennessee Waltz" on 78 and 45 rpm discs, but it was as a 45 that the recording eventually sold more than six million copies, and with its commercial success it likely "established the 45 rpm format."
"Goodnight, Irene" had total sales of only two million, but in the short run it made just as strong an impact as "The Tennessee Waltz." Released in the summer of 1950, it stayed on the Billboard chart for twenty-five weeks and occupied the number one position for more than three months. Like "The Tennessee Waltz," "Goodnight, Irene" was a recycling of older material, but in this case the song's provenance is more complicated. The lyrics for "Goodnight, Irene" apparently belong to Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, an itinerant folksinger (and convicted murderer) who committed the words to paper as early as 1943. The tune, however, is one that Woody Guthrie concocted in 1941 when he was employed by the U.S. Department of the Interior to write songs that somehow commented on the dam projects that were then being constructed by the Bonneville Power Administration on the Columbia River. In their heydays both Ledbetter and Guthrie had been symbols of populism, and presumably this made them attractive to the left-leaning folk group called the Weavers that in 1948 began to hold forth in Greenwich Village bistros. Curiously, the song's political resonances seem to have gone unnoticed by the record-buying public in the early years of the Cold War. Along with Gordon Jenkins, the bandleader/arranger for the Decca label who recruited the Weavers and produced "Goodnight, Irene," the public apparently was interested only in the Weavers' cheerful sound.
As is obvious from its title, "The Tennessee Waltz" is a composition in 3/4 time, and so is "Goodnight, Irene." In terms of meter alone, these two extraordinarily successful songs from 1950 stand as much in contrast to the rock 'n' roll music that captured the attention of American teenagers later in the decade as to the swing music that appealed to Americans of diverse age groups in the years leading up to and including World War II. But meter is not the main thing that distinguishes "The Tennessee Waltz," "Goodnight, Irene," and contemporaneous hits from their swing and rock 'n' roll counterparts. To be sure, other waltzes topped the charts during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but most of the period's songs were cast in 4/4. Rather than meter, or tempo, or even rhythm, what most distinguishes these songs from earlier and later efforts is their treatment of rhythm.
A few hit songs from early in the Fifties, most of them novelty numbers or dance tunes based on newly fashionable Latin styles, were indeed highly energetic. These exceptions, however, only prove the rule. The very terms "swing" and "rock 'n' roll" suggest a powerful relationship between the music itself and physical responses on the part of its audiences; more than a half century after the fact, there is still no kinetic-based nickname for the stylistically homogeneous American popular music that won the attention of large numbers of record buyers in the 1946-1954 period. Compared with so much American popular music that came before and after, the postwar pop music mainstream was remarkably sedate.
A New Era in American Popular Music
The number one spot on Billboard magazine's Top 100 chart for 1943 was held, for a dozen weeks beginning in early November, by the Mills Brothers' recording of "Paper Doll." "Paper Doll" is perhaps not so memorable as "In the Mood," "Chattanooga Choo Choo," and other recordings that today serve as aural icons of the World War II years. Yet it is a historically important recording, and not just because with eventual sales of more than six million copies it became "the biggest hit of the decade"; "Paper Doll" is historically important because its success arguably heralded "the demise of big-band swing music."
The Mills Brothers were African Americans, but there is nothing in their vocal stylizations that even remotely resembles the "race music" recordings that had been in circulation since the 1920s. After its slow introduction "Paper Doll" indeed sets a listener's toes a-tapping, but compared with the products of the mostly white big bands its "swing" elements seem quite tame. One of the things that makes "Paper Doll" stand strikingly apart from big band recordings is its sound: "four smoothly harmonizing voices accompanied only by acoustic guitar, keyboard, and bass." Another thing that sets it apart — something more significant, in terms of how it foreshadowed the immediate future of American popular music — is the fact that both on the charts and in the popular press "Paper Doll" was linked not to a band but to a quartet of singers.
Bing Crosby's phenomenally successful 1942 recording of "White Christmas" focused attention on a single vocalist. However, this was an anomaly, due in large part to Crosby's well-established status not just as a soloist but also as a movie star. While many of the hit recordings of the late 1930s and early 1940s indeed involved lyrics, the singers of these lyrics were typically regarded as members of an ensemble whose main attraction clearly was the bandleader. With few exceptions, the hits of the swing era are attributed to "So-and-So and His Orchestra." Between 1939 and 1943, when Billboard magazine polled college students to determine the "most popular" of the big band male and female vocalists, favorite singers were indeed identified, but for the most part they figured no more importantly in the hierarchy than did favorite drummers or saxophone players.
An important exception was Frank Sinatra, who as featured vocalist with Tommy Dorsey's band ranked high on the Billboard collegiate polls of 1941 and 1942. Even during his short stint with the Harry James band in 1939, Sinatra was starting to become "the center of a cult of teenaged girls" who were popularly known, because of their preferred footwear, as "bobby-soxers." Affirmation by the Billboard polls was incentive enough for Sinatra, aided by press agent George Evans, to strike out on his own. On December 20, 1942, Sinatra began a four-week engagement, as guest artist, with the Benny Goodman band at the same Paramount Theater in New York where six years earlier a horde of dancing teenagers had assured Goodman's place in the pantheon of swing music. Although by this time Goodman was accustomed to the adulation of young fans, he was nonetheless "astonished by [the] wall of screaming" that greeted Sinatra's onstage entrance. Donald Clarke perhaps exaggerates when he writes that, with this, "modern pop hysteria was born." Clearly, though, the popularity of Sinatra — coincident with the recording of "Paper Doll" by the Mills Brothers, for whom there was no hysteria at all — marks the start of a new era in American popular music.
Not until September 1943, a month and a half before the release of "Paper Doll," would Sinatra have a hit record whose packaging identified him as featured performer, and not until 1946 would he again reach Billboard's Top 100 chart. The seeds of Sinatra's success had been planted in his recordings with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, and the dramatic sprouting of his fame can be directly linked to the extraordinary interactions between performer and audience that transpired during his appearances with Goodman's and other bands. Sinatra's stardom in the mid-1940s, however, owes less to his recording and concert activity than to his radio broadcasts. To a large extent, it owes as well to Sinatra's developing persona.
Early in 1945 Sinatra starred in The House I Live In, an eleven-minute film during which he sang the poignantly egalitarian title song and admonished a group of boys for their anti-Semitism. Later that year he authored an article for Scholastic, a magazine for schoolchildren, in which he advocated abandonment of discrimination not just toward Jews but also toward Italian and African Americans, Catholics, Asians, and representatives of any other non-WASP minority. Over the course of the Fifties Sinatra would gain notoriety aplenty for, among other things, his temper, his sexual proclivities, and his alleged involvement with underworld characters. But at the dawn of the postwar period his musical popularity was enhanced primarily by his swaggering stance as an outspoken individual who defied prevailing norms.
* * *
By the end of 1945 Sinatra was much more than a singer. He was a personality, and like Bing Crosby he was marketed as such. The public images of Sinatra and Crosby had little in common; whereas the forty-two-year-old Crosby was being presented as a suave yet desexualized avuncular character, the thirty-year-old Sinatra was still "a skinny kid with big ears" who served as a "softly crooning, teen-female-identified heartthrob" while perhaps appealing as well to young women's "maternal urge." Other singers of the time were arguably less charismatic than Sinatra and Crosby, but they were nonetheless individualistic in what they projected to their audiences, and they, too, were emerging as personalities.
The postwar displacement of bandleaders by singers (or groups of singers who, like the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, and the Ink Spots, had strong collective identities) can be attributed at least in part to the American Federation of Musicians' (AFM) 1942–1944 ban on recordings. It is likely, however, that the shift would have occurred even without the ban. Doubtless inspired by Sinatra's 1942 decision to pursue a career as a soloist, in that same year band singers Dinah Shore, Jo Stafford, and Perry Como also decided to set out on their own. Although hardly stars, these singers nevertheless ambitiously detached themselves from the successful bands for which previously they had been mere employees. In order to survive as soloists, of course, they needed to call attention to themselves. Thus their interpretations, regardless of how their performances on recordings or radio might have been accompanied, of commercial necessity grew more and more individualistic.
Audiences at the end of World War II had not lost their taste for swing rhythm or for the big band sound. But with solo singers competing for their attention, and with country-western music steadily making inroads into the marketplace via both radio and films, audiences were acquiring new tastes as well. Once Sinatra and other vocal soloists had endeared themselves with the public, what mattered to fans was not so much the type of music that these singers delivered as the fact that music of whatever sort was being delivered by these particular singers. While some of what the soloists offered was bouncy and in other ways comparable with what they had done with the swing bands, much of it was relatively subdued. Reminded by press agents and the record labels' artist-and-repertoire (A & R) men that their most valuable assets were not so much their voices as their personalities, the solo singers naturally gravitated toward material that allowed them to highlight their interpretative idiosyncrasies. In most cases, this meant songs whose lyrics were somehow more "intimate" than those that typified the big band hits of the late 1930s and early '40s.
Like the ascendance of the solo singer, American popular music's move toward more "heartfelt" songs likely would have happened with or without the AFM's ban on recordings. Certainly not everything served up by the big bands during the war years had the powerful rhythmic energy that, back in the mid-1930s, prompted concertgoers to break into spontaneous dancing. According to one bandleader who reflected bitterly on the end of swing era, the big bands brought about their own demise because during the war years they "neglected the dancers" who had fueled their initial success and concentrated instead on "flag-wavers and slow smoochers." Some of the big band appeals to "flag-wavers," of course, had as much rhythmic energy as anything served up earlier. But other patriotic offerings by the big bands were indeed appropriate accompaniments for slow smooching. As victory for the Allies seemed more and more inevitable, and as the solo singers endeavored to stake their claims on listeners' affections, songs of this same basic type (more relaxed in rhythm, and with lyrics clearly focused on one-to-one romance) came increasingly to the fore.
Pop Music's "Sentimental" Journey
The flow of America's pop music mainstream in the immediate aftermath of World War II is conveniently summarized by the title of the recording that just before V-J Day for nine weeks held the number one position on Billboard's Top 100 chart: from the end of the war until rock 'n' roll exploded in the middle of the 1950s, the course of American popular music would indeed for the most part be a "Sentimental Journey."
This is not to suggest that all of the music was in the same style. Early in the period such postwar technologies as the magnetic tape recorder, more sensitive microphones, and vinyl discs made it easier than ever before for small record companies to make and distribute commercially viable products. At the same time, the massive expansion of radio outlets that began in 1947 made it at least possible to bring new products — some of them in quite atypical musical styles — quickly to the attention of potential buyers.
The decentralization of the music industry coincided not just with the growth of audiences whose musical tastes, for reasons of social class and ethnicity, were narrowly focused but also with an obvious broadening of tastes within the "general" audience. Whereas just five years earlier the Billboard Top 100 chart had been inundated by big band swing, the number one hits of 1947 included such items as Tex Williams's country-flavored "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)," two versions (by the Count Basie band and by a vocal group called the Three Flames) of the boisterous "Open the Door, Richard!" and no less than three versions (by Buddy Clark, the Three Suns, and the Harmonicats) of the 1913 song "Peg o' My Heart." Among the more outré chart-toppers from 1948 were a bit of vintage ragtime (Pee Wee Hunt's "Twelfth Street Rag"), the theme music for a popular animated cartoon series (Kay Kyser's big band treatment of "The Woody Woodpecker Song"), and a boldly comic novelty number (Spike Jones's "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth"). And 1949, with Vaughn Monroe's "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and two offerings from Frankie Laine ("That Lucky Old Sun" and "Mule Train") leading the pack of top-ranked hits, seemed to be the year of the cowboy song.
Notwithstanding this diversity, it remains that between 1946 and 1954 the American pop music mainstream was dominated by recordings that featured solo vocalists who had already achieved or were in the process of achieving (by means of exposure first on radio and then, after 1948, on television) some measure of stardom. It remains, too, that most of the material with which these singers came to be identified was of the sort that is easily described as "sentimental."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music in the Age of Anxiety by James Wierzbicki. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue 1
1 The Pop Music Mainstream 11
2 Rock 'n' Roll 32
3 Jazz 54
4 Hollywood 75
5 Broadway 95
6 Opera 114
7 The Classical Music Mainstream 134
8 Modernists 156
9 Mavericks 177
Epilogue 199
Notes 205
Bibliography 255
Index 273