Posted on 03/30/2012 9:02:11 PM PDT by nickcarraway
And that’s a fact. He made Elvis millions too.
Rock history as told by wishful thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum 2012.
The fact is that radio was highly segregated in the early 1960s (isn’t it now still?) If the white stations played Chubby Checker and Dee Dee Sharpe out of the Philly Cameo-Parker hit factory of white owners, they didn’t play James Brown, Salomon Burke or Major Lance (who?), and the black stations (however they were called then escapes me for the moment, but that was before the ‘soul’ monicker), and those black stations might have played Del Shannon’s Runaway, ‘coz the DJs and the audience thought he was black.
In the UK there was one station that played everything and that was Radio Luxembourg, which is how the Stones caught up to it (besides the lively club blues scene, Alexis Korner, etc.)
No one on the radio played the Delta blues until Al Gore invented the FM channel, and what the general audience took as the blues were the minstrelized duo Sonny Brownie and Terry McGee, an early example of white guilt rewarding questionable performances (those two were authentic and good early on before becoming commercialized.)
No one sang or was allowed to sing “I Just Wanna Make Love to You) on white bread with mayo TV shows like Dean Martin’s before the Stones. Muddy Waters was widely unknown.
They didn’t exactly sound black. As kids from a different musical culture, they absorbed what they could from black music and made their own sound. Music being music, it doesn’t fit into the descriptions and neat categories we try to make for it. It just flows along.
Re the “stealing” issue: I do remember really hating the white covers of black songs in the fifties that took a song with an exciting spirit to it and made it into a white piece of junk. “Dance with Me Henry,” “Tweedly Dee,” etc. The names Georgia Gibbs and Pat Boone come to mind. Happily, that trend was short-lived.
Then of course there was the other kind of stealing, “with a fountain pen,” as Bob Dylan says in “Talking New York Blues.”
I see Motown still doesn’t exist and Berry Gordy has been whitewashed.
Since Shannon's picture is on the cover of the 45, it's amazing they never figured out he was white.
Early Motown, before the Supremes, was played on black stations in the US and Radio Luxembourg in the UK.
Forget Motown, what about Stax/Volt.
For the record, I liked Big Mama Thornton’s version of Hound Dog a lot more than Elvis’s. A lot of selling the music comes down to who looks or sounds better. I’m not a Pat Boone fan, but nobody had their arms twisted to buy his records. You might as well indict the whole record buying public for preferring bland fifties pap for earthier blues and r and b music. Whites as well as black musicians were cheated in a way by the preferences of millions of Americans who preferred very bland, innocuous music. That ‘s life.
For the record, I liked Big Mama Thornton’s version of Hound Dog a lot more than Elvis’s. A lot of selling the music comes down to who looks or sounds better. I’m not a Pat Boone fan, but nobody had their arms twisted to buy his records. You might as well indict the whole record buying public for preferring bland fifties pap for earthier blues and r and b music. Whites as well as black musicians were cheated in a way by the preferences of millions of Americans who preferred very bland, innocuous music. That ‘s life.
Baloney. In 1965 and 66, all across this country, north, south, east, and west kids were rocking out in their dads' garages, school gyms, and teen clubs. The better ones wrote their own material, made a few records, and hoped for a piece of the pie. Only a very few made it big. But it wasn't the Beatles that they were imitating, it was the STONES.
I agree.
I used to hate those white covers when I was a kid, and it wasn’t political. I just thought they ruined the music. But from my current perspective, I don’t indict anyone for buying them. You can only absorb what you can absorb, coming from the culture you come from.
There’s an old saying in the garment industry that you can only introduce one new idea in a dress at a time.
Even on this thread, we see people coming from different parts of the US, listening to different music when they were growing up and having a different take on the subject.
Look up parlor guitar...that will explain slide guitar..little dainty white women were slide players back in the 1800’s...Chuck Berry copied Bob Wills (Texas Playboys) style of playing almost note for note..with a little bluesier sound and rhythm...music has been added to and subtracted forever..no one has a patent on it....just thought i’d drop you a line.
I grew up in the upper Midwest during the fifties and sixties, and had to endure polka music on tv during the weekends in the winter when it was too cold to go outside. Talk about torture. I doubt a lot of white Americans of my parents generation who grew up during the Great Depression knew diddley squat about blues and funkier r and b or even folk music. I’m quite sure my father never heard of Woody Guthrie or B.B King. He and my mother certainly never evinced any interest in anything but the mostly watery pop music of the fifties and early sixties. We didn’t even have a cheap hifi console until I was in my mid-teens, and I bought Tijuana Brass records for my parents. That they liked.
There was a polka station on our dial too, but only on Sundays I believe. I would love the first one, get a little bored with the second one, and then during the third one I’d have to switch.
***Charley, Son, Robert and Blind***
These guys were born about fifty years after slavery, of course they didn’t sing about it. The blues is much older that we have recordings of, Alan notwithstanding.
I should restate my earlier premise in that it was not so much about “massa”, but about long days and hard work as well as all the usual things people deal with.
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