Let's talk now about crossover, chart

crossover, and cover versions. As I said last week, the charts that
we're talking about are record industry charts, and the two organizations that
get the most consideration from scholars are a magazine called Cashbox and
especially the magazine called Billboard. There magazines were designed, not for
fans to read, they weren't like fan magazines like Rolling Stone, or Mojo, or
something like that that you would pick up in order to find out what, for a fan
to find out what was happening, or interviews with their favorite artist,
something like this. These were magazines that were put
together to help advise people, who were in the business of providing music retail
or music services, what music was popular and what music was not popular.
So if you were somebody who, who serviced, who had a jukebox business.
What you wanted in, you, when you put your records in that jukebox is you want
to get people to put as many dimes or nickels or whatever they're putting in
that thing, as possible. And so you want to maximize the number of
plays per record you can possibly get. So, what you want to know is, what do
people like? What are they playing?
You know, what, what seems like it's getting hot?
What starting to cool off? You put as many of the hot records or
getting hot records into your jukebox as you can and pull the ones, pull the
records that are starting to cool out and that way you can maximize your process,
your profit from each of these each of these jukeboxes that you have in various
sort of lounges and bars and this kind of thing.
If you're somebody who's running a radio station, you want to play the music that
everybody seems to be wanting to listen to, right, because the more listeners you
get, the more advertising you get, the more you can charge for advertising.
So, you want to know what's hot on the radio and having a, a magazine tell you
what the national trends are and regional trends are is very, very valuable.
and if you're somebody who's in record retail, you don't want to have a whole
bunch of records sitting on the shelf that nobody wants anymore.
You want to have records on the shelf that people are likely to buy, and so you
want to sort of time your buying to what seem like the trend, what's happening
with the trends. So if you know what the trends are, if
you have some suspicion you can guess, you have a much better idea of maximizing
your profit and your business in the music retailing and service than you
might if you didn't. And so that's what these things were
meant to do. And because of that they were divided up
into markets. And as we said before, the markets were
thought of as fairly distinct and almost exclusive, not entirely, but almost
exclusive of each other. So pop as we said before, mainstream pop
was considered a middle class, white audience.
R and B was an urban, black audience. Country and western was a rural, white
audience, farming communities, or those who were displaced from such communities
into urban environments. And the charts were also divided up by
use. So there was a separate chart for radio,
a separate chart for retail, a separate chart for jukebox, and each of these
designations. You kind of look up whatever your
particular concern was and see what seems to be happening week by week in popular
music. Now at this point, I should say a word,
at least a sort of sound of warning about using chart numbers too much.
I will talk to you about chart numbers as an indication of popularity of records.
And, in the book, in the text book, if you're following along in the text book,
you'll see a lot of chart numbers. But you should know that chart numbers
are, are a fairly coarse instrument for trying to figure out the popularity of a
particular record. I mean if a record goes to number one, or
number two, or number three, or number four, it's probably not a big distinction
there. There are kind of, could be all kinds of
things that account for that. But a number 20 record really is a
different kind of thing than a number 1, 2, 3 or 4, 4 or 5 record, right, so, at
that level, when you're, when you're looking at where they, where they place
generally in the chart, it makes a lot of difference.
It helps, also, charts to, they, they help, they help keep us from getting into
the fan mentality. Which is this idea that we're always
rooting for the artist that we like the most, and maybe neglecting those that we
don't like as much. When you see the chart statistics there,
sometimes it causes you to admit that some of the artists you like maybe didn't
sell as many records or weren't as popular as maybe you thought they were.
And it makes, also forces you to admit that artists you don't like so much
actually had a fair amount of success. Their chart numbers are useful that way,
but we shouldn't be too literal about them and use them to do sort of fine,
make fine distinctions that they were never designed to be able to make.
Let's talk now about crossover records. And crossover songs.
There are really two, when we talk about crossover, that is when a tune is
originally on the country chart and somehow makes it onto the pop chart or a
tune that starts on the rhythm and blues chart and makes it onto the pop chart.
And that's mostly what were talking about.
I mean when you think about it, by definition, crossover could mean
anything. It could be going from country to rhythm
and blues, rhythm and blues to country, or, or from mainstream pop back to
country or whatever. But, mostly it's about records from one
of those two other smaller charts making it into the, into the pop chart.
When we're talking about crossover that's what we mean.
And there's two ways that can happen. Either the record itself can actually
cross over. So, Little Richard Does Tudy Fruity, it's
originally on the R&B charts, then after place for a while and it's a hit there,
it shows up on the main street pop charts, done by Little Richard.
That's a cross over record, same song, same artist.
On the other hand, a song itself, but not the same record, can cross over.
So it could be a song, Tutti Frutti by Little Richard, that appears on the
rhythm and blues charts. That is then covered or done in a
different version by Pat Boone. And the Pat Boone record, on the
mainstream pop charts, goes up the pop charts but doesn't chart on the R&B
chart. There you see the song moves.
From, in the case of Tutti Frutti, both the record and the song, crossed over.
But there's a distinction there. so we want to keep that that straight.
Now, when a song crosses over like that, and it's done in a different version we
often use the term cover version. And as I mentioned last week, I'm not
really quite sure cover version is, is exactly the right term here because
people were already doing lots of different versions of songs.
There are, there are, those kinds of versions usually involve putting your own
personal stamp on a record. It turned out though during this period
that there were actually cover versions that were more like duplicates.
In other words you are making a record that sounded exactly like the other
record. The only difference was that you change
the lyrics so that there were no kind of sexual connotations that anybody could
pick up on. And the artist was white.
Sometimes even like marketly white, I mean you call a group The Crew Cuts and
you know it's probably you know a vocal group of white guys, right.
And so, this kind of thing, this is the part where we start to go into the area
of controversy in certain kinds of disputes that have broken out over this,
in the record business. They come down to this controversy about
whether or not, there's, how much racism is involved in the idea that white
artists would cover the music of black artists and do better on the main stream
pop charts than the black artists themselves did.
Let me tell you a little bit about the statistics and why they should be so,
such an important consideration. In the period between 1950 and 1953,
about 10% of the songs that were hits on the R & B chart crossed over to the pop
charts. So, one in ten R&B hits could cross over
to the pop chart. So you would say that between the R&B
chart and the pop chart, that's a pretty fair amount of isolation between the two.
It's not exclusive in an absolute sense, but there's a lot of isolation there.
In 1954, you could see the trend. Already 25% of R&B hits are crossing over
from the R&B chart to the pop charts. But by 1958, 94% of the songs that were
R&B hits appeared on the mainstream pop charts.
Well, if you were one of those black artists that had the original R&B record
and it was a hit, boy, it would have been great if then it would've crossed the
actual record with your name on it, would've gone over to the mainstream pop
chart. And you would be able to have all the
success, financial and otherwise, that goes with that.
And to have that success taken away because somebody covers it in a version
that sounds almost exactly like yours. But they get all the success, you got the
thing started on the R&B chart, and they take it over.
Well that was a pretty bitter pill for a lot of African American musician to
swallow. and there were all kinds of ways in which
musicians were ripped off in that era as well.
A lot of times those musicians didn't even own the rights to those particular
songs, the publishing rights they signed that away when they recorded.
I mean record company people, they did this to both black and white musicians.
They would say, well what would you rather have?
I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session. I don't know what the amount was, let's
say it's 50 bucks. I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session
now, or I'll give you a certain percentage of the earnings over time.
Most musicians will take their money now. They don't know whether they're ever
going to see that guy in the future. And so when they took their money now,
they signed away their publishing. So if that R&B hit crossed over, the
publishers who, who own that music, they still made all kind of money for it, no
matter who sang it, right. But the original artist only go the money
they got the first time when they recorded it.
And so they, they, they felt very ripped off.
Now, there is there is a kind of a controversy surrounding this.
And the, the biggest part of the controversy is whether or not this really
is a kind of a, a ripping off or not. Now, the, you, you've heard the argument
that comes from people like Little Richard and and, and others who, who, who
felt like they didn't get the money they should have got and they were ripped off
by these white covers. The white artists have, have often argued
that because these songs would not have been playable on radio the way they were.
Because they the lyrics might of been a little bit too adult themed, lets say,
for main stream pop radio. They weren't really taking it away from
these from, from, from, these people in that, in that way.
They were really sort of adapting them and, and that, that they weren't taking
something with them they would of otherwise got.
Or you can, you can decide what you think about that.
But what I can tell you here is that because of the success, the crossover
success of tunes like Rock Around the Clock in 1955 and Maybelline from Chuck
Berry and these kinds of things, we can start to look at 1955 as really kind of
being a tipping point. That's the point where all of a sudden
something that had been kind of a once in a while kind of thing, this cross over
thing, really starts to happen in a, in a very big way.
And so, 1955, that's one of the reasons why we can look at that as the beginning
of rock and roll. So, let's have a look a who some of the
first rock and rollers were. who they were, and what they were up to.