All posts by Pulse Ruiz

The Boogie Woogie Revival

The Boogie Woogie Revival

Boogie Woogie would experience a revival in 1938-39, culminating in Columbia Records, John Hammond produced popular records “From Spirituals to Swing” concerts which were recorded on two occasions in Carnegie Hall. This propelled a renewed Boogie Woogie craze that would last well into the 1940s.

“From Spirituals to Swing” recordings featured Jimmy Yancey, Albert Ammons and the song “Swanee River Boogie”, Meade Lux Lewis and his hit song “Freight Train Blues” and of course Pete Johnson’s and Big Joe Turner’s “Roll ‘Em Pete” made the concerts and accompanying records very successful. The night clubs in New York City, especially on 52nd Street, gave way to the Boogie Woogie craze in the 40s.

This had a big influential effect on Swing Jazz, as many big bands started incorporating Boogie Woogie tunes into their sets. The Will Bradley Orchestra had a string of hits with the original version of “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar” hitting #2, and also another #2 hit with “Scrub Me Mama, With A Boogie Beat” and the #10 “Down the Road A Piece”, all with Ray McKinley singing and all in 1940 spilling into 1941.

Glenn Miller had a hit in 1940 with the #7 hit “Boog It”. The Andrews Sisters had several Boogie Woogie hits like the late 1940 #2 hit “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar” and the famous pre-World War II hit “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” in 1941. The Boogie Woogie craze was fueled by the fact that the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug dances were very compatible with the boogie “beat”.

Lionel Hampton, one of the three “Fathers” of Jump Blues and R&B (as well as Count Basie and Louis Jordan) had a string of boogie hits, including the 1944, #23 hit “Hamp’s Boogie Woogie” and the 1946, #9 hit “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop”, which became very popular. Louis Jordan, had a string of boogie hits starting with the #6 “Caldonia Boogie” in 1945, the #7 hit “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie” just to name a few. Count Basie also had several boogie hits such as the b-side, #10 hit “Mad Boogie” in 1946.

At the same time, many C&W (Country & Western) artists had hits in the boogie styled derivative genres called Country Boogie, Hillbilly Boogie or Western Boogie. Remember boogie started in Texas. These were precursors to Rockabilly. Johnny Barfield had a hit record with a “Boogie Woogie” in 1939. Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack had a million plus seller with the Benny Carter/Gene DePaul/Don Raye penned #9 hit “Cow Cow Boogie” in 1942.

The Delmore Brothers had a boogie hit with “Freight Train Boogie” which was also very influential to Rock & Roll and Rockabilly. Arthur Smith & His Cracker Jacks had several Country Boogie hits, such as the #25 crossover electric guitar hit “Guitar Boogie” in 1948 as well as the C&W hit “Banjo Boogie”. Tennessee Ernie Ford had a boogie hit with the #15 crossover hit “Shot Gun Boogie” in 1951.

And also, we can’t forget that Bill Haley started out his career as a C&W artist as “Bill Haley and The Saddlemen” before going Rock & Roll with “The Comets”. He recorded several Country Boogies like “Green Tree Boogie” in 1951, as well as the C&W (Rockabilly) version of Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” (a couple of months after the original R&B release). Bill Haley & the Saddlemen then released “Sundown Boogie” in 1952 as well as a cover of Jimmy Preston’s “Rock This Joint” which was considered to be the first Rockabilly song.

 

C – Gospel Music

Gospel Music

 

Gospel music or rather African American gospel music was an outgrowth of Christian hymnal music that was forced upon the African American community of the 17th & 18th centuries. The gospel church brought forth a certain kind of hymn called “the spiritual”, a form of African American music that was key in the development of polyphonic gospel music.

 

The Vocals

The lyrics are words of love, hope, salvation, words to uplift relying heavily on the Christian Bible. Contemporary gospel, urban contemporary gospel (black gospel), southern gospel and, modern contemporary Christian music all share sacred lyric. Later on, some gospel music especially after Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman”, became less sacred in lyrics department and featured more of the music of gospel which went on to influence R&B and soul.

Gospel music utilizes the “call & response” vocal techniques used most often by the preacher and the choir, usually with a band accompaniment. Along with call & response, gospel shares many characteristics with the blues as with R&B and soul. Although gospel shares characteristics with the blues, many gospel music purists consider the two forms of music on opposite poles.

The music is a powerful force of vocals usually featuring several talented vocalists who can use advanced vocal techniques. The choir and the separation of polyphony or rather harmony among the voices (usually soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) is crucial to the overall sounds of gospel music.

The lead vocals or the preacher in gospel music utilize vocal techniques that can consist of vibrato (a regular pulsating change of pitch); coloratura (or the coloring of a melody with runs, trills, leaps and other voice projection techniques); sostenuto (the sustaining of a note over a long period); singing in legato, subtly connecting notes and phrases in a smooth manner; and melismas (the singing of one syllable while moving between different notes in succession).

 

Gospel’s Development

Gospel music started to change or cleave off of the older hymnal and spiritual music by becoming more rhythmic and dependent on the foundation of a sizable band. Many of the worshippers could now join in with the music by singing and clapping along and using any kind of percussion instrument.

A lot of gospel music features a band (organ, guitar, bass, drums), sometimes with horns (sax, cornets, trombones) and strings. The tempo is very fast starting around 120 beats per minute to 150 beats per minute or higher, which can induce many interesting effects on one’s person.

Gospel music especially of the 20th century becomes very transcendental in nature by using a very fast pulse and rhythm in order to induce a trance-like state of euphoria and connectedness. Many would look forward to Sunday morning for the release of energy and expression of religious love in the music.

 

The Popularity of Gospel

Along with any other kind of music, there are always complaints of commercialization. With the modernization of the recording music industry, gospel music has become a very commercially successful genre in its own right in the later-half of the 20th century and early 21st.

Gospel music gives you an uplifting feeling you get when the lead singer is giving the final crescendo at the apex of an old modernized spiritual. It’s electrifying, the thrill of pins & needles when it truly feels like a spiritual “phenomenon”.

The nature of gospel music can conjure up strong emotional feelings that reflect an expression of the human state, unlike other genres. The trance-like state of euphoria that music, in particularly gospel and dance music, can induce is central to the development of human spiritualism and expression going back to the hunter-gatherer campfires.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing Gospel music in several groups and I can’t deny the feeling that overcomes you when playing Gospel or soul music. The only way to describe it is as spiritual. Gospel is a lot of fun to play, especially with a great choir, the music goes by so fast and then after, you realize how much fun it was and that you received a good workout physically, mentally and of course spiritually.

 

 

Jump Blues #1

Jump Blues

Jump Blues evolved out of the up-tempo blues or “stomp blues”, influenced by the big band sounds of Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, Lucky Millinder and Count Basie (just to name a few). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the sounds were tied to the big band versions of styles in Jazz, the Boogie Woogie revival and Urban Blues (updated and related to the country acoustic blues from the south). Jump Blues is now considered part of the 40s/50s R&B label, as is the Boogie Woogie revival, Urban Blues, Gospel and folk Blues (which was previously labeled “Race Records”.

The Jump Blues style relies upon the brass and rhythm sections, that were experimenting with a newer shuffle or “8 to the bar” style rhythms which goes hand in hand with Boogie Woogie. In Jump Blues, the drums and rhythm sections were changing the beat up drastically, as opposed to the older (1920s & 1930s) swing rhythms or the contemporary swinging rhythms of the Big Bands and Sweet Bands of the and 1940s. The brass phrases were becoming more rhythmic and acted more as an accompaniment to the beat (which had hints of the back-beat, so defining of the 1950s R&B and Rock & Roll genres to come later).

This new style was very danceable and caught on quickly after its incubation period during World War II. New bands started having success with the genre headed by Louis Jordan, Jack McVea, Earl Bostic and Arnett Cob and their respective bands, especially in the late 1940s. The music was hot, fast, and humorous and made you “jump”, hence the name – Jump Blues.

 

The Pioneers of Jump Blues and R&B

It is generally accepted (with varying opinions), that the first Jump Blues, and for that matter, the first R&B record was recorded by Lionel Hampton’s big band song “Flying Home (No. 1)”, featuring tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet’s hot raunchy solo. The music was popular amongst the “Hep Cats” or “Hepsters”, who were young and energetic dancers. Lionel Hampton had further success in the new genre with tunes like “Hey Bop a Re-Bop” and “Hamp’s Boogie”.

Cab Calloway (the Hi-De-Ho Man) was a big influence on Jump Blues and the Hepsters, as far back as the early 1930s, with songs like, the famous “Minnie the Moocher”, “St. James Infirmary” and “The Reefer Man”. He was influential in the Hepster culture as being the jive talking Hep-Cat who showed off his gliding back step Hepster dance moves (which predated Michael Jackson’s “moon walking” by 40 years).

Count Basie was another major influence to Jump Blues with “One O’clock Jump”, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside”, “Going To Chicago”, “Sent For You Yesterday” (the last two songs, featuring Jimmy Rushing’s “blues shouting” vocals), and you can hear humorous Jump Blues elements the Count’s version of “Open the Door Richard!”

Other Jump Blues influencers were Jack McVea’s All Stars featuring T-Bone Walker on “Bobby Sox Blues” and McVea’s version of “Open the Door Richard!”; Earl Bostic had an R&B #6 hit with “Sleep” and also an R&B #1 hit with “Flamingo”; and the wild man of the tenor sax, himself, Arnett Cobb blasted a scorching solo on Lionel Hamptons “Flying Home (No. 2)”.

Please see the next post for the Jump Blues as popular music.

 

Jump Blues #2

Jump Blues as Popular Music in the Late 1940s-Early 1950s

Louis Jordan

By far, the “king” of Jump Blues, was Louis Jordan who had so many hits in the 1940s that he was dubbed “the King of the Jukebox”. Jordan started out in swing but soon went to Jump Blues and R&B with his Tympani Five groups. They sold millions of records and made him one of the top R&B artists of all time, as well as crossing over to mainstream popularity, alongside such greats as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie.

Some of Jordan’s biggest #1 hits were “Caldonia”, “Buzz Me Blues”, the comic classic “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time)”, the multi-million seller “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”, “Beans & Cornbread”, “Saturday Night Fish Fry” (a contender for one of the first Rock & Roll records) and “Blue Light Boogie” just to name a very few. All in all, Jordan scored 18 number one R&B hits and 11 mainstream crossovers, top 40 hits. This was a great feat by an African American performer/writer in his day.

He had a great voice and rhythm for using many verbal techniques like heavy syncopation, jive styled, story-telling, verbal asides, with narrative humorous lyrics. He was also very notable for using a prominent, amplified (sometimes distorted), electric guitar on most of his hits. The band was versatile, switching between hot “8 to the bar” jumpers to occasional slow blues songs and for incorporating the “back-beat” in his later songs. He wrote in a very humorous manner that would often make one laugh, with funny imagery and comedic rhythm. His bands emphasized rhythm and would use smaller brass combos (as opposed to the “Big Bands” of the day that were still in vogue). His music would be very influential to the upcoming genres of Rock & Roll and 50s R&B.

 

Big Joe Turner

Another great Jump Blues artist was “blues shouter” Big Joe Turner, who started out in both Boogie Woogie and Jump Blues but went on to be one of Rock & Roll’s greatest pioneers who scored hits well into the late 1950s. Dubbed “The Boss of The Blues”, Kansas City’s Joe Turner first became famous by teaming up with Boogie Woogie pianist Pete Johnson and their hit song “Roll ‘Em Pete”. The song was featured in the John Hammond produced Carnegie Hall presentation “From Spirituals to Swing” in 1938. This song catapulted Pete Johnson’s career in Boogie Woogie and Jump Blues in the late 1940s.

His Jump Blues contribution started out with songs from the late 1940s like “S.K. Blues” with Pete Johnson and the humorous “My Gal’s A Jockey”. In the early 1950s he had the million selling R&B #2 hit “Chains of Love” and his first R&B #1 hit “Honey Rush” just to name a few.

Then he helped turn R&B into popular music with the Rock & Roll hit and original version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, (later covered by Bill Haley & the Comets). The popular hits just kept coming with “Flip, Flop & Fly”, “Hide & Seek” and “Corinne Corrina” which was also a mainstream crossover hit. Big Joe Turner would be named as one of Rock & Roll’s architects by many of the great Rock & Roll artists during the late 1950s. He then returned to the blues after the fifties to perform and record with many of the pioneering blues artists. He continued up until his death in 1985. Big Joe Turner truly had a long, enduring and remarkable career.

 

Other Great Jump Blues Artists

Other great notable Jump Blues artists and their respective songs, are New Orleans own Roy Brown with his first R&B #1 hit “‘Long About Midnight”, the popular “Rockin’ At Midnight” and his other R&B #1 hit “Hard Luck Blues”; Charles Brown had 2 R&B #1 hits with “Trouble Blues” and the 1951 hit “Black Night”; Wynonie Harris had many Jump Blues hits including his 2 R&B #1 hits, “Good Rocking Tonight” and “All She Wants To Do Is Rock”; the great electric blues guitarist T -Bone Walker brought us many ground breaking top ten R&B hits like “Bobby Sox Blues”, “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)” and the “T-Bone Shuffle”.

Then there was Roy Milton and His Solid Senders who had a string of 19 top ten R&B hits including “RM Blues” which was a R&B #2 hit and a crossover hit reaching #20 in the mainstream chart in 1946; the popular hits “Hop, Skip & Jump”, ” Information Blues” as well as the Helen Humes recording and R&B #6 hit “Million Dollar Secret”; and also Billy Wright with “Blues For My Baby” who was very influential on a young Little Richard, who would become one of Rock & Rolls biggest stars.

Another notable song was the extremely popular Paul Williams 1949 R&B #1 hit “The Huckle-Buck”. The song was credited to Andy Gibson, who originally wrote the song for Lucky Millinder’s band as “D Natural Blues”. Millinder would later take Gibson to court over the songs title, but it was later dropped. Also, the song was originally inspired by Charlie Parker’s BeBop Jazz hit “Now’s The Time” (notice Parkers sax phrasing and “The Huckle-Bucks” chorus melody). The lyrics were later added by Roy Alfred and the song became a favorite of many vocal artists. The song was not only a big crossover hit for both Frank Sinatra & Tommy Dorsey (and other covers by Roy Milton, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong among others), but also a nationwide dance craze. The song was also hilariously featured by Art Carney (as Ed Norton) in the Jackie Gleason hit comedy TV show of the early 50s, “The Honeymooners”.

R&B 1: America and music at the end of World War II

America and music at the end of World War II

America had just won World War II in 1945 after the dropping of two atom bombs on Japan and thereby starting the American world military supremacy. America, before entering the war was just recovering from a deep, long and protracted depression that lasted for a little more than a decade. Americans had learned to survive an economic depression, prohibition and won a very decisive war.

Memories of the ‘Roaring Twenties” kept “Swing Jazz” alive throughout the depression and WWII but after the war was won, the music began to change because of shifts in marketing and technology. There were many other reasons for these “shifts”.

First, the music “industry” began to track and classify popular songs. Next, the bands started to break down and began to play and record in smaller combos, rather than having a “Big Band”.  Thirdly, the role of the drummer became more active and central in the new music. Also, the electric guitar, as well, became a lead as well as rhythm instrument due to new technological amplification.

Songs started being marketed on a national level due to mass distribution through radio and jukeboxes. There were new portable record players that came out, as the technology advanced thereby increasing the demand for records. The fidelity of the new equipment gave a more detailed and richer sound.

 

 

R&B 2: The New Genres

The new genres of the 1940s

During and after WWII,  three new styles of music popped up starting in early 1940’s that were made up of small combos of five to eight musicians in response to the need to cut costs. These three were “be bop jazz”, “country & western (C&W)” and “rhythm and blues (R&B). Music was now becoming more and more urban in nature, it was amplified and electrified. The role of the rhythm section changed to a back-beat way (of life) which inherently fueled the dance.

In jazz, most of the big bands of the swing era became too “big” to maintain economically and financially and gave way to smaller combo groups of five or six performers in the new Jazz genre of “Be-Bop”. This pairing down of the band technique would allow for a rhythm section (piano, bass, drums) and maybe two horns (sax or trumpet) who then, went well beyond the average parameters of musical expression. Be bop was a very esoteric form of jazz, starting a new divergent stream of jazz within jazz (and may have helped accelerate swing jazz’s demise), but the music of be bop was music made to listen to, not necessarily to dance to.

The next genre was combined from several genres from the south and from the west of the United States, several styles of music were combined and were re-marketed as “Country and Western” or (C&W). A catch all phrase, it was used to describe the many divergent and similar styles of indigenous American folk music like “hillbilly”, “honky-tonk”, “blue grass”, “Delta Blues” “Western Swing” and “Western Boogie”, music from the Appalachain down to Georgia; and the swamp; the deep south; all the way to Texas and beyond to southern California; from cities like Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, just to name a few.

The third new major genre, like it’s white cousin C&W, was also made up of several merging genres, combining a mixing of “boogie woogie” jazz, “jump blues”, “gospel” and “electric blues” style, coming out of Chicago and other mid-western cities like Memphis and St. Louis. All of this predominantly black music was then marketed for black people, it was all combined under the heading of “Rhythm & Blues” music or R&B for short. The music was very danceable, up-beat and good humored and would start an almost revolution for the next two decades.

Initially, there were many great R&B bands supporting the great jump blues shouters of the late Forties like Big Joe Turner, and bands headed by Count Basie and Louis Jordan. But then, later, the birth of a vocal R&B genre later to be known as “doo-wop”, would come of age and would go on to be one of the most successful forms of the R&B category and be a vital and essential component of rock & roll.

Race Records

Before the 1940s, throughout the heydays of the 1920s and into the 1930s “race records” were available from many ethnic groups. Anything from Pop Tunes & Vaudeville, to comedy routines, Blue Grass (“hillbilly”), The Blues along with Inner City ethnic recordings from cultures as diverse as “Indian”, “Klezmer”, “Polish”, “Irish”, “Congo”, “Caribbean”, “Spanish Tinge” and even “Chinese”, were available on record. You name it, they had it.

Many of the recordings in the race records category between the two world wars (1920-1941) were filled with dialogue and comedy in one way or another that was blatantly racist, demeaning, and insulting to many of the ethnic groups living in America, hence the name “race records”. Unlike the “politically correct” 21st century, these kinds of records were acceptable in the backward and bigoted under currents of social mores pre-1940s white American society, where racism was a mater of course. Gradually, by the end of WWII, race records were becoming records of the new musical genres of Bop, C&W and R&B, rather than comedic dialogue recordings.

 

R&B 3: From Race Records to R&B

Race Records

Before the 1940s, throughout the heydays of the 1920s and into the 1930s “race records” were available from many ethnic groups. Anything from Pop Tunes & Vaudeville, to comedy routines, Blue Grass (“hillbilly”), The Blues along with Inner City ethnic recordings from cultures as diverse as “Indian”, “Klezmer”, “Polish”, “Irish”, “Congo”, “Caribbean”, “Spanish Tinge” and even “Chinese”, were available on record. You name it, they had it.

Many of the recordings in the race records category between the two world wars (1920-1941) were filled with dialogue and comedy in one way or another that was blatantly racist, demeaning, and insulting to many of the ethnic groups living in America, hence the name “race records”. Unlike the “politically correct” 21st century, these kinds of records were acceptable in the backward and bigoted under currents of social mores pre-1940s white American society, where racism was a mater of course. Gradually, by the end of WWII, race records were becoming records of the new musical genres of Bop, C&W and R&B, rather than comedic dialogue recordings.

 

The label “Rhythm and Blues”

Clever marketers started keeping charts like Billboard magazine’s “Harlem Hit Parade” in 1942 to keep track of black records marketed to black buyers. What was previously called “race records”, after WWII, were now called R&B records that were considered to be objectionable in part, R-rated or too “racey” for regular pop mainstream.

The term Rhythm & Blues or R&B for short, was coined by Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine in 1948. The term was used as a catch all phrase for the kind of black music that had a more street or “ghetto” feel to it and made up predominantly by “rural blues”, “gospel”, “jazz – boogie woogie style”, and the new urban blues like “Chicago blues” and “jump blues” and even some “western swing” which all utilize that strong “Back-Beat”.

The Change in the Rhythm – Back Beat Defined

The Change in the Rhythm: Back Beat Defined

R&B #4

The “back-beat” is a rhythm that has an emphasis on the two and four counts of a four-beat measure (one, two, three, four). Four-four, 4/4 time or “common time” is a time signature that is easily danceable. Most of modern day dance music is in the “four-four” time with some exceptions as with six-eight or three-four (6/8 or 3/4) popular in waltz and some blues.

The notation in the figure below for drums shows a 4/4 “common time” beat with the lower line of notes as the bass drum part, hitting the “downbeats” one and three; the middle line, a snare drum part, hitting the “upbeats”, all of this can be easily transcribed into dance steps of left, right, left, right; and all the while, the hi hat on the top line keeps the time using eighth notes counted as “one, and, two, and, three, and, four, and” sometimes written as “1+2+3+4+”, or “1&2&3&4&”.  

350px-Characteristic_rock_drum_pattern (1)

 

 

 

Basically, the ‘back-beat” in rock & roll is the snare drum accented on the two and four counts instead of the older jazz “swing” beat that would have the dance pulse equally on all four beats in a 4/4 measure of time.

In contrast to rock & roll’s back-beat is jazz music’s “swing” beat. The “swing beat” would often incorporate a rapid downbeat pulse (one, two, three, four accents on each number) with a “swinging” time keeping rhythm played on the ride cymbal, a sort of skipping or bouncing of the sticks bead/head against the cymbal, as in “ah-one, ah-two, ah-three, ah-four, ah-one, etc.” (see swing beat below).

Shuffle_feel_simple

 

 

 

With the “swing beat”, the hi-hat keeps the time as a “quiet” back- beat using the foot trigger of the hi-hat, that gentle clicks on the “twos” and “fours” of the measure very much different to R&B’s accented beats and even loud rim shots of the snare drum driving the music on the “twos” and “fours”. The bass drum, snare drum, and other tom-toms, in jazz, for the most part, were used very sparingly.

The reason for this is that before the 1940s, the technology used for recording music was so sensitive that the bass and snare drums would be too loud that would make the recording equipment malfunction and/or skip when played. That is why many swing beats rely on the ride cymbal and Hi-Hat to keep the time while the piano and upright bass would provide the downbeats to all four beats of the measure in 4/4 time. You can hear it on many 1920s & 1930s original recordings, where the drummer has to use cymbals, woodblocks, cowbells and/or brushes on the snare drum.

The drums acquired a stronger and more central role in rhythm sections in a post-WWII era and due to the technology could be used more progressively in a recording. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s, you would need a piano, bass, guitar and/or banjo, all to be the “rhythm section”, now, in the 1940s, you could have just a bass and a drum set player to be the rhythm section.

 

 

R&B 5: The new technology

The new technology

The Electric Guitar

Just as had been throughout the jazz age, there was a lot of shifting of the sands early on in the new genres. The music industry and the technology made some adjustments. A good example is the new use of the “electric guitar”, made popular and recorded by Charlie Christian starting in 1938. Before that time, you could hardly hear an acoustic guitar in recordings because they were out-blasted by the horns. In the 1940s the electric guitar began to be a “lead” instrument like a trumpet or saxophone. T-Bone Walker influenced a young generation of Chicago electrified blues guitarists on the usage of this new electrified “blues” genre who in turn would influence a generation of rock & roll guitarists in the fifties.

The Jukebox

After the war, the jukebox industry was re-instated which energized the record buying industry. Jukeboxes were responsible for a spike in record buying in the post WWII years and began replacing live music and the “player pianos” (self playing mechanized pianos) first in “juke-joints” or bars and clubs, and then eventually in diners.

The late 1940s saw the technology begin to advance enough to allow for better recordings that could now capture the exhilarating sounds of a live performance with all its volume levels. Also, audio fidelity and authenticity and timbre of the sound characteristics all had improved in the years following the war.

R&B 6: Marketing and Promotion: the Music Industry in the 40s

Marketing and Promotion: the Music Industry in the 40s

R&B came into America’s consciousness because of this new, fresh, strong sounding back-beat that made one want to get up and dance. Many of Louis Jordan’s hits had very catchy, dance-able back-beats peppered with lyrics, themes and topics that were considered R rated at the time in the forties.

Because of the times and because of the attitude towards race records, Louis Jordan, like Cab Calloway before him, was able to escape great controversy over the lyrical topics then they would today. This was all good for a time after the war, that is until the good old, all-American white kids started listening to these “objectionable” race records of R&B and/or Be-Bop jazz in the early 1950s.

America was changing rapidly in the years of post WWII, the lifestyles of middle-class America had more leisure time and more spending money than their parents, who were used to a more conservative lifestyle. Because of this “new way of life”, the youth had more time to explore more creative and alternative lifestyles. This led to the rise of the creative and philosophical “Beatnicks” in the late 1940s and the “rebels without a cause” in the 1950s,

The music industry also started to become a big money-making industry with more investment in promotion and marketing. in the early 50s, as time went on, more and more black artists were getting hits on popular radio and jukeboxes record sales.

It’s funny how quickly the color green (money) would be a catalyst to change corporate America’s practice of excluding artists because of race, starting in the 1950s the record industry would exploit black artists. The record companies would make these new black artists household names while ripping them off out of contractual, publishing and royalty rights.