This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
Crossovers and Covers
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Del curso dictado por University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part One
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The Birth and First Flourishing of Rock and Roll (1955-59)
Chart crossover and cover versions, the first hits of Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, the rise of Elvis Presley, the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, the rise of American Bandstand, the payola scandal and the "death of rock and roll."
Conoce a los instructores
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
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.
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