Let's look, take a look at who some of the first rock and rollers were in this

first
period of rock and roll 1955 through 1959 when these
first rock and rollers begin to cross over from R&B onto
the pop charts. The first one I think that we should talk
about is Bill Haley and the Comets. And we'll come back to him in just a
minute. But, we've talked a lot about how
important Rock Around the Clock was as a record. Shake, Rattle and Roll is
something that he had done the year before. and so we should really sort of tip our
hats at Bill Haley as as really being the first one to, to really to really sort of
get this, this rock and roll thing going
in 1955. But there are some other important early
entries here. let's turn our attention, for example, to
Fats Domino. Fats Domino coming out of New Orleans,
appearing on the Imperial label which was out of, the label in Los
Angeles but all the recording was done in New Orleans by a fellow by the
name of Dave Bartholomew. He's a famous New Orleans musician. Fats Domino was an
interesting kind of, a, of, of, a, of an entertainer for these
years. Fats Domino, an African American guy who
was maybe a little, overweight. you know, very, very friendly. sort of, cheerful
demeanor. And in no way would white audiences think
that, that Fats Domino was. Threatening or menacing in any kind of
way, and I'm not I'm not saying that would have any
reason for that. These are all kind of racial or racist
kind of views at the time, but for a black entertainer to to succeed in a
white audience with a white audience. There are, there are probably some
features there that can help that happen, and Fats Domino was
a very kind of friendly guy. His music had a kind of easy-going 12
eight compound time deebata, deebata, deebata, deebata,
deebata, deebata kind of feel. A kind of a laid-back New Orleans kind of
sound. he really had a lot of country influence. In fact, among the other musicians
that he
hung with in New Orleans, They all kind of thought of him as more of a kind
of a country country western artist. We don't think of him that way, but in his
crowd, that's the way he was thought of. So, maybe, if there's a bit of the sort of
country twang that that makes his music maybe even a
little bit more approachable. By a wide audience that's, that's not
particularly familiar with rhythm and blues, or rhythm and blues
culture. So if his early R&B hits that didn't cross
over, I mean, he was on the R&B charts way before rock
and roll 1955. his first big one was The Fat Man from
1950. And another one called Goin' Home from 1952, there are several more. But his
first big crossover is a tune
called Ain't It A Shame from 1955. We'll talk about that with regard to Pat
Boone in just a minute. And, maybe the most representative song of
of Fats Domino from this era is Blueberry Hill from 1956 a big hit for him.
Another one is I'm Walkin' from 1957. An interesting note about Blueberry Hill,
is it goes against a lot of what we talk about with regard to
crossovers and covers in that Blueberry Hill is a song that didn't
really arise out of the R&B tradition. Blueberry Hill is a song that had been a
hit in 1940 for the Glen Miller Orchestra. A big band. So in some ways, the biggest
hit for Fats Domino, one of the early African
American, first, early African American stars of rock and
roll, was a cover version of a tune that had
originally been done By Glen Miller. So, the minute we start to generalize too
much about cover and cross over, it's always possible to come
up with a counter example. and this is one of them. Moving on from Fat's Domino,
let's
concider Chuck Berry coming out of St. Louis. Via Chicago.
He recorded on Chess Records. Was introduced to the guys at Chess
Records by Muddy Waters. Chuck Berry was also a big fan of country
music. And in his autobiography, he talks about
how important it was in his live act before he started recording, to understand
different
dialects. He calls them with music and so he could
do country western tunes in the country western style with
his voice sounding very country western. Then he could do blues and R&B, and
[UNKNOWN] for instance. And these really understood different
kinds of styles. and in many ways I think he used an awful
lot of the country voice when he was recording
those first couple of tunes because most, well, many
listeners as the story goes had no idea that Chuck Berry was was a
black guy. They thought he was white. There's actually some television clips
from the day when you can see where he comes out and there's a
studio audience there and maybe I'm imagining it,
but they pan over to the studio audience and it seems like a lot of those
audiences are almost entirely white. It seems like a lot of those folks are
looking at Chuck Berry and they're going, God I
though he was white, right? And so, again, like Fats Domino, that country twang,
that country influence
maybe gives these first black artists, maybe more
approachability in the white market than they might have had
otherwise. In fact.
Chuck's first big hit is the song called Maybellene from 1955. And it's really kind
of an interesting
example because for one thing, if you look at the credit who it was written by, it
was clearly the words the music we'll talk about in a
minute. But the words were clearly written by
Chuck Berry, but it says words of music By Chuck Berry,
Leonard Chess and Alan Freed. Well, why should that be? What could Alan Freed have
possibly had to
do with the writing of Maybellene or even Leonard Chess for that matter? Well,
Leonard Chess owned publishing, and
Alan Freed was cut in on a piece of the publishing which
meant that every time Alan Freed played that record,
if it became a hit It would be money coming back to
Alan Freed. And so these kinds of publishing deals
were made all the time as a way of cutting somebody in on the
publishing of a tune. So that they would have an incentive to
play the tune, and make it into a hit. And that's exactly what happens with
Maybellene.
Interestingly, the song, Maybellene. Actually goes back to a fiddle tune called
Ida Red, that had been originally recorded by people like Roy
Acuff and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. In fact, he was going to do it as Ida
Red,
because he did it as part of his country western
kind of set. But they said, no, if you do Aside A Red
it's in the public domain. That's a traditional song. You won't get any publishing
on it. Let's just do the same, do the same tune, what you usually do it, but let's
just
change the lyrics. because if you change the lyrics, you can
call it a different song and we can cover it. Then, you get some publishing, and
I'll get some publishing, and we'll, and
Leonard Chess gets some publishing, and Allen
Freed gets some pub, so that's what they do. How did he come up with Maybellene,
well
Chuck Berry would never give you a straight
answer on that. And I think one of his, his funniest
responses to that was, it was the name of a cow. In a children's book he read when
he was a
kid. But the story goes, at least coming from Leonard Chess, that it came directly
from a makeup the box of a makeup kit there, because Chuck Berry
had been a cosmetician in St. Louis, and so Maybellene, of course, a
famous brand of cosmetics there. So right there, inside that tune You begin
to see an awful lot going on there. If you, if you listen to the lyrics, it, it,
and think about the metaphors very
closely. it's almost it's self kind of a hokum blue
so all the metaphors are so thickly veiled that you really
can't tell that there could be any kind of sexual content, but I'll
leave it to you. To check it out and see if you think that
that's an accurate description or not. One thing about Chuck Berry is, he saw
what was happening with these crossovers. And he decided his lyrics be, would be
written so that they didn't need to be
fixed. In other words, he would write them so they were directly appealing to a
teenage
audience. So nobody had to change anything. And maybe his records then.
British records to be covered by somebody else. And he could get the he could get
the money and the and the fame that came with
it. And, in fact, he did. School Day, 1957; Rock and Roll Music, 1957; Sweet Little
Sixteen, 1958; Johnny
B. Goode, 1958. All of those became big hits for Chuck
Berry, and a lot more. Is a very, very important song-writer,
Chuck Berry, writing all his own songs at a time when most performers didn't write
their own
songs, along with Buddy Holly, one of the most important
ones of this generation. Also his guitar style, that sort of, the
guitar licks that you hear like at the very beginning of
Johnny be Good. Are something that every kid learning rock
and roll guitar, up to a certain period maybe in the 80s or 90s,
maybe they still learn it. But everybody, sort of learned that, like
that Chuck Berry thing. And this other thing he does, this duck
walk thing where he gets down and puts the guitar between his
legs and does that. All these things Made Chuck Berry a
fantastic guitarist and showman, and a, and a
tremendous personality. Let's talk a little now about Little Richard, because now
we're getting farther
and farther away from the image that would be
most appealing to to white listeners. Little Richard was a flamboyant guy,
there's just No two ways about it. Chuck Berry might have been the first rock
and roller to write a song about makeup, but Little Richard was the
first rock and roller to wear makeup. I mean he was a sort of a crazy exciting,
energetic performer, playing on the piano,
singing, sometimes screaming, sometimes with his feet up on the keyboard, he was
fantastic. But all, in a very kind of charismatic Lovable, perhaps
nonthreatening kind of way. Always music, always filled with a certain
kind of excitement and joy. tunes like Tutti Frutti from 1955 which
was a number two hit on the R&B charts but only got to number 17
on the pop charts. The Pat Boon version got to number 12.
Long Tall Sally. 1956 was the number one hit, number six on
the pop charts. Good Golly Miss Molly, 1954, was number
four on the R&B charts, number ten on the pop
charts. Now if you paid attention to those numbers
that just went by, you'd notice that the R&B numbers are always closer to the top
of the charts, than the pop numbers were. but again, a flamboyant style may be a
little rawer and rougher than Fats
Domino's music or Chuck Barry's. But the, these three guys, Fats Domino,
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Along with Bill Haley right there at the very
beginning of Rock and Roll. Now, let's move on to this idea of the
whitening of rhythm and blues that we talked about in the last lecture, and,
and, and think a little bit about this. Bill Haley who recorded for Deca. Now we,
we, we've talked about his Shake,
Rattle and Roll from 1954, that was his cover version of
the Joe Turner tune. And so we all ready know something about
this whitening effect that goes on with the original, R&B
recordings and changing the lyrics. Sort of making them more, appealing
perhaps, or at least acceptable To a mainstream pop
audience. The guy who takes most of the heat for
this kind of this, however, is Pat Boone. Pat Boone is actually a descendant of the
the explorer Daniel Boone, and recorded for an
indie label in Gallatin, Tennessee called Dot. His version of the Fats Domino tune
Ain't
That a Shame, went to number one in the pop
charts in 1955. remembering that the, the Fats Domino's
did not do as well. And his version of Tutti Frutti, the
Little Richard tune in 1956, went to number 12, beating
out Richard's. And sort of passing it in the charts on
the way along. So, he usually takes the, the brunt of the
heat for doing. Cover versions that most fans would say they don't like
nearly as much as the originals. But what he does, by adding almost a kind
of a swing band kind of vocal approach to
those tunes. Really merging the mainstream pop kinds of
styles from before 1955 with R&B. In some ways what he does is more indicative of
the qualities of rock 'n
roll, separable From rhythm and blues than, than
the original R&B ones are in certain kinds of
ways. Pat Boone also had a whole ton hits that were not cover versions of somebody
else's tune. Don't Forbid Me, Love Letters In The Sand,
April Love, those were all number one hits in 1956 and 1957, some of them
even crossing over. People were surprised to find this. Pat Boone hits that aren't
cover versions
crossing over. On to the R&B charts we sometimes call
that reverse cross over where a song becomes a hit on
the mainstream chart and then becomes a hit on
the R&B chart. We come back again to the society of the
controversy over cover versions is the idea of these
white musicians. covering music that was originally done by
black musicians. And whether or not this is, this is right
or not. And I've offered in the, in the previous lecture, I I offered the, the
reasoning
there. I'll leave it to you to decide what you
think. But I would ask you to keep an open mind to the idea that It probably
matters whether, how close the
song hues to the original version. In the case of the Pat Boone versions of
both the Fats Domino version and the Little Richard
version, they are not dupliacates. If you don't like them, you don't like
them because, because of how much they don't sound like
the original, right? And in that way, even if you don't like
it, you have to acknowledge that in the, in terms of the pop and music
at that time it was perfectly alright to do a cover version of somebody elses tune,
if you made it your
own. The tops his of mainstream pop hits of
1955 there are three, of those top hits, I
don't know if it's the top 20, or 25 hits, there were three versions of the ballad
of
Davy Crockett. So, it was certainly possibly for that to
happen. The ones I think that really are subject
to a certain amount of Of negative criticism
are the ones that basically just duplicated somebody else's record. Where the only
reason why you did it was basically to put a white artist label,
name on the label, because you didn't think you
could sell it with a black artist name on it. And that's probably one of those
things in
history of rock that will, we, we, shouldn't be too
proud of. But that's, that's part of what happened
and it's part of the culture of the time. So now, having talked about this first
rush of Of, of, of a stars from 1955, we turn to the guy who
really sort of defines this first wave of Rock and Roll, and
that's Elvis Presley. We'll talk about him in the next lecture.