In the years after WWII, popular music, by far, was dominated by white artists. When it came to mass exposure, promotions and sales, it was with white performers who got preference. Artists such as Bing Crosby, Perry Como, the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kay and Dinah Shore plus the popular swing bands like Glen Miller’s & Tommy Dorsey’s big bands dominated the charts. They were all in the top ten pop charts, had the most public exposure, sold the most records in the late forties and they were all white.

There was only Nat “King” Cole, the Inks Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on the mainstream popular charts early on in the 1940s along with later artists Billy Eckstein and Sarah Vaughan in the very early 1950s. The only other black acts to make it big on the charts in the 1940’s were early R&B bands headed by Count Basie & his Orchestra, Cab Calloway and his band and Louis Jordan & his Tympani Five.

Many talented black artists and performers were shut out of this exposure unless there turned out to be a lot of interest in sales but these same black artists would be exploited and underpaid anyway. In the 1940s, black jazz artists still had to enter a venue from the side or back alley and were denied the dignity of being able to just walk through “the front door” of a venue, under a marquee with their name on it!.

Much of showbiz in the standards era and the jazz era (1920-1960) was of a very rigid, restricted and regulated nature. Rules where written as well as unwritten in both music and musical arrangement, lyrical content and themes as well as what was perceived to be acceptable in “civilized” society. The sensors were hyper-sensitive and ruled with an iron fist.

Many of the unwritten rules regarded race and gender, such as the rule to exclude blacks from speaking parts and leading roles; no mixing of the races;  the exclusion and/or exploitation of woman; the unequal pay for women and minorities and other shameful acts of prejudice were rampant in the show business of the forties and the fifties.

R&B Crossover of 1955 and 1956

The dominance of popular music in the 1950s started to lose it’s popularity to the new genre of rock & roll first in 1955. In that year, Fats Domino would be the first R&B act to get a top ten hit with “Ain’t It A Shame” (the Dominoes were the first vocal R&B act to break into the mainstream charts in 1951 with “Sixty Minute Man”) , and then later in February of 1956, the Platters would be the first R&B act to get a number one hit on the on the Billboard mainstream pop charts with “The Great Pretender”.