Volume Six: Don’t You Just Know It? – Soul, Blues, Instrumentals, Novelties, and Doo Wop

122. Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns: Don't You Just Know It
(Huey "Piano" Smith-Johnny Vincent) 1958

123. Little Willie John: Leave My Kitten Alone
(William E. John-Titus Turner-James McDougal) 1959

124. Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops
(Berry Gordy-Tyran Carlo) 1958

125. Clyde McPhatter: Without Love (There Is Nothing)
(Danny Small) 1956

126. Sam Cooke: Bring It on Home
(Sam Cooke) 1962

127. Brook Benton: Kiddio
(Brook Benton-Clyde Otis) 1960

128. Bobby Blue Bland: I Pity the Fool
(Deadric Malone) 1961

129. Sonny Boy Williamson II: Bring It on Home
(Willie Dixon) 1963

130. John Lee Hooker: Boom Boom
(John Lee Hooker) 1961

131. Bing Day: Mama's Place
(Murray Allen-Dan Belloc) 1959

132. Dion and the Belmonts: My Girl the Month of May
(Dion DiMucci) 1966

133. The Belmonts: Come On Little Angel
(Ernest Maresca-Thomas Bogdany) 1962

134. Ricky Nelson: Hello Mary Lou
(Gene Pitney) 1961

135. The Everly Brothers: Wake Up Little Susie
(Boudleaux Bryant-Felice Bryant) 1957

136. Ray Stevens: Ahab the Arab
(Ray Stevens) 1962

137. Chet Atkins: Windy and Warm
(John D. Loudermilk) 1961

138. Bill Justis: Raunchy
(Bill Justis-Sid Manker) 1957

139. Bill Doggett: Honky Tonk (Parts 1 & 2)
(Billy Butler-Bill Doggett-Clifford Scott-Shep Shepherd) 1956

140. Duane Eddy and his "Twangy" Guitar: Rebel Rouser
(Duane Eddy-Lee Hazlewood) 1958

141. The Champs: Tequila
(Daniel Flores) 1958

142. Little Anthony and the Imperials: Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop
(Bob Smith) 1960

143. The Teenagers featuring Frankie Lymon: Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
(Herman Santiago-Jimmy Merchant) 1955

144. The Five Satins: In the Still of the Night
(Fred Parris) 1956

145. The Platters: The Great Pretender
(Buck Ram) 1955

146. The Flamingos: I Only Have Eyes for You
(Harry Warren-Al Dubin) 1959

147. The Coasters: Poison Ivy
(Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller) 1959

148. Mel Torme: Comin' Home Baby
(Bob Dorough-Ben Tucker) 1962

149. Ray Charles: I Believe to My Soul
(Ray Charles) 1959

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“In the beginning, ‘The Big Bucks’ were made by low-life chisellers who screwed doo-wop groups out of their royalties. While the chiselers played golf, the singers vanished into the never-never land of needles and cookers.”

-- Frank Zappa



After the advent of Elvis Presley, rock and roll quickly became the biggest business in popular music; Elvis’s first producer, Sam Phillips, had said that he could make a billion dollars if he found a white man who could sing black. With Elvis’s multiple hit singles and albums and his burgeoning career in movies, producers and A&R men quickly followed Phillips’s plan, seeking out not only white singers who could sound black, but also black singers who could be packaged for white audiences. The eccentricities and general wildness of the early rockers, the untamed ‘authenticity’ that made early rock and roll so engaging, thus, was gradually packaged, blown dry, and exploited to a degree not previously seen in popular music.

The received history of rock and roll tells us that the period immediately following Elvis was a fallow land of empty teen idols, declawed covers of r&b classics (cf. Pat Boone’s covers of “Tutti Frutti” and “Ain’t That a Shame”), and string-laden “softened” rock. To some degree this is true. What is more true is that in the period immediately following the birth (or, more accurately, the arrival in mass culture) of rock and roll, more styles emerged and were marketed in more effective, but increasingly artistically corrosive ways. The recently-deceased rock scholar Charlie Gillette identified, in The Sounds of the City, five distinct genres that fell under the general rubric “rock and roll” during the 1954-1956 period: Northern rock (as exemplified by Bill Haley), Southern rock / rockabilly, New Orleans rhythm and blues, Chicago / electric blues, and vocal harmony groups (later, usually, termed “doo-wop”. To these genres, during the remaining years of the fifties can be added soul (essentially gospel-influenced r&b, often with strings joining a standard r&b line-up), instrumental rock, rock and roll novelty records, and teen idols. These genres proliferated after the advent of Top Forty radio, a new formatting approach to radio that involved playing the top selling and top-played jukebox singles, regardless of genre. The sheer amount of money available to producers and A&R representatives meant that all sorts of singles were released in an attempt to gain airplay and sales; there was money to be made if only one could find or create a new trend, a group of random teenagers who could harmonize, a guy with a guitar and some songs, or a guy who couldn’t sing, looked good on tv, and looked good in the suit. Rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, electric blues, instrumentals, novelty and comedy songs, traditional pop, and soul jostled one another on the charts in an enormous money-grab that profited few of the artists while gradually diluting the initial wallop of rock and roll as the soundtrack to teenage delinquency.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of corruption crept in as small independent labels’s discoveries were bought up by “the men in the shiny suits”, many of whom also owned interests in radio stations or simply paid disc jockeys to play their new discoveries. Some years ago, one of the cofounders of Bee Records, a tiny independent label based in Reading, Pennsylvania, told me his fascinating tale of attempting to discover and nurture acts in this climate [Bee was founded in 1957 and closed shop for good in 1966.] The two men who ran Bee recorded local Reading/Philadelphia-area doo-wop and rockabilly acts. The story goes that, whenever one of Bee’s releases would start to sell locally, “the men in shiny suits”, would come, make an offer that couldn’t be refused, and a larger label would buy up the recording, the publishing rights, and the act’s contract. In most cases, the still-essentially-unknown artists wound up with less money than they started with, off, as Zappa put it, to the “land of needles and cookers”.

All of the behind the scenes corruption, however, should not take away from the artistic innovations that were taking place during this period. The greatest of these surely was the blending of rhythm and blues with gospel-influenced vocals and “sophisticated” arrangements of strings and horns to create soul. Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Brook Benton, Clyde McPhatter, and, most importantly, Ray Charles, the “Genius of Soul”, created the standard definition of soulfulness – a fusion of gospel-derived emotion, prodigious vocal technique, and unabashed sexuality wrapped in arrangments that fused the best of rhythm and blues playing with jazz and Tin Pan Alley-influenced arranging. Not only did they set the standard for black singers to follow, but also for white rock and pop singers in the coming decades from John Lennon to Van Morrison to Bruce Springsteen and on to the melisma-strewn vocal acrobatics displayed weekly on American Idol, in grotesque unintended parody of the genuine article. These artists developed a uniquely American sound that managed to be of the street and of the supper-club – the fifties equivalent of Swing, in essence – a sound that took the best of black and white musical traditions and fused them into something organic and new.

The profusion of soul records in the Top Forty in the late fifties, along with the aforementioned corporate cum organized crime money-grab resulted in a number of unlikely artists recording in the genre; traditional pop singer Mel Torme (one of the last big band era singers to launch a successful solo career) was compelled to record the Bob Dorough-penned blues “Comin’ Home Baby”, backed by vocal group the Cookies (whose original members had morphed into the Raelettes) and scored a hit single; Torme professed to despise the record. The gulf between album-oriented traditional pop singers like Torme, album-oriented jazz artists, and the singles-oriented rockers grew greater, even as the soul singers who had recently crossed-over from gospel gradually crossed over into album success, again with Ray Charles leading the pack.

It is important to note, also, at this point how differently the crossover soul artists (and the Chicago blues artists, also reaching a high point commercially and artistically) construct their identities as artists. Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, and blues originals John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson II (despite his name), and Bobby Blue Bland stake a good deal of their ethos on their personalities as individuals, as creators, as charismatic stage performers, while the purveyors of doo-wop and instrumental rock are largely nameless and faceless assemblages without even nominal leaders to differentiate bands (as, for instance, during the swing era). George Harrison remarked of the Beatles’ first American tour in 1964 that everywhere the Beatles played, the same doo-wop and r&b groups were playing, different line-ups, but the exact same groups. In every city. Multiple touring line-ups of Coasters, Platters, Five Satins were to be found criss-crossing the US at any given time, their members considered interchangeable by the record business, like touring companies of Broadway shows.

Both in nomenclature and style, doo-wop gives us yet another highly-debated genre. The term doo-wop was seldom, if ever, used during the music’s heyday, and some sources claim it wasn’t used at all until the early sixties, or even the early seventies. Essentially, doo-wop is street-corner harmony, itself an outgrowth of urban black gospel music. Hundreds, if not thousands, of vocal groups, mostly black and urban, formed, disbanded, re-formed, often recording one or two flop singles for small labels, creating a stream of records that would, in their number and rarity, fuel the first stirrings of serious rock record collecting in the late nineteen-seventies, but leave behind a relatively paltry legacy of great music. Exceptions can be found in the Teenagers’ ebullient “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” and the Flamingos’ lovely “I Only Have Eyes for You”, among others. They would also inspire the early sixties girl-groups, legendary megalomaniacal producer Phil Spector, and the Beach Boys.

In the melting pot of Top Forty radio of the late fifties we find, along with soul, blues, and doo-wop a great number of “novelty” records – a catch-all term used to describe comedy, parody, and instrumental hits. The majority of these – the Chipmunks, Sheb Wooley, the “break-in” records of Dickie Goodman (in which a simulated news report would include questions “answered” by excerpts from hit songs) – do not particularly hold up to repeated or contemporary listening. Occasionally, however, the sheer force of joyful absurdity, reminiscent at times of the spirit of Dixieland jazz or early blues and country, overcomes any questions of taste or topicality, as in the case of Ray Stevens’s “Ahab the Arab”, a bizarre distillation of pseudo-Lord Buckley hipster patois and comic book orientalism, or the Champs’ deathless “Tequila” or any of the comic-tragic playlets of the Coasters.

By the early sixties, rock and roll, which Charlie Gillette identified as five separate genres, consisted of easily double that number of recognizable stylistic variants, all of which the Great Voices of Marketing would eventually (as early as 1960) lump together as “Golden Oldies.” Without a single rallying point, with Elvis in the Army, Chuck Berry in jail, Buddy Holly dead, and Little Richard off saving souls, the previous media portrayals of rock and roll as a serious threat to culture had largely dissipated, and pop music seemed to return to business as usual. The notion of “rock and roll” writ large as cultural force had been replaced by the notion of “the single” as the greatest expression of individual freedom, as Pete Townshend would later claim, or, at least, as one of the most reliable profit making entertainment-based disposable goods. Sources vary.



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Volume Five: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On - Honky-Tonk, Rockabilly, Rhythm and Blues

92. Hank Williams: Ramblin’ Man
(Hank Williams) 1951

93. Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys: Blue Moon of Kentucky
(Bill Monroe) 1947

94. Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys: Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms
(Charlie Monroe) 1951

95. Red Foley: Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy
(Harry Stone-Jack Stapp) 1950

96. Kitty Wells: It Wasn’t Got That Made Honky Tonk Angels
(J. D. Miller) 1952

97. Lonnie Donegan: Rock Island Line
(Huddie Ledbetter) 1954

98. Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons
(Merle Travis) 1955

99. Roy Hall: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
(Dave Williams-Sunny David) 1954

100. Bill Haley and his Comets: (We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock
(Jimmy DeKnight-Max Freedman) 1954

101. Elvis Presley: Reconsider Baby
(Lowell Fulsom) 1960

102. Buddy Holly: Rave On
(Sonny West-Bill Tilghman-Norman Petty) 1958

103. Chuck Berry: Sweet Little Sixteen
(Chuck Berry) 1958

104. Bo Diddley: Hey! Bo Diddley
(Ellas McDaniel) 1957

105. The Johnny Burnette Trio: Honey Hush
(Big Joe Turner) 1956

106. The Johnny Otis Show: Willie and the Hand Jive
(Johnny Otis) 1958

107. Carl Perkins: Blue Suede Shoes
(Carl Perkins) 1955

108. Jerry Lee Lewis: High School Confidential
(Jerry Lee Lewis-Ron Hargrave) 1958

109. Little Richard: Tutti Frutti
(Richard Penniman-Dorothy LaBostrie) 1955

110. Paul Peek, featuring Esquerita: Sweet Skinny Jenny
(Paul Peek) 1958

111. Larry Williams: Bony Moronie
(Larry Williams) 1957

112. Hasil Adkins: Chicken Walk
(Hasil Adkins) 1962

113. Eddie Cochran: Summertime Blues
(Eddie Cochran-Jerry Capehart) 1958

114. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps: Be-Bop-a-Lula
(Gene Vincent-Donald Graves-Bill Davis) 1956

115. Screamin' Jay Hawkins: I Put a Spell on You
(Screamin' Jay Hawkins) 1956

116. Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks: Southern Love
(Ronnie Hawkins-Jacqueline Magill-Levon Helm) 1960

117. Ruth Brown: Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean
(Johnny Wallace-Herbert J. Lance) 1953

118. Chuck Willis: C.C. Rider
(Traditional, Arr. Chuck Willis) 1957

119. Lloyd Price: Stagger Lee
(Traditional-Harold Logan-Lloyd Price) 1959

120. Fats Domino: Blue Monday
(Fats Domino-Dave Bartholomew) 1956

121. Clarence 'Frogman' Henry: Ain’t Got No Home
(Clarence "Frogman" Henry) 1956

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“Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. And, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd and in plain fact, dirty lyrics ... it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.”

--- Frank Sinatra

The music of the nineteen fifties looms large in our popular imagination: the clips of Elvis on camera and his pelvis slightly off camera and Buddy Holly and the Crickets bounding through “Peggy Sue” on that slightly distorted Ed Sullivan kinescope, the candied silliness of American Graffiti and original Happy Days jukebox playing “Rock Around the Clock.” The effect of such pop-cultural oversaturation has been to launch fifties rock and roll into the no man’s land of free-floating-signifiers, memories of a past constructed by film and television, divorced from their original cultural significance. That is to say: to contemporary ears, it’s often difficult to hear what’s so great about Elvis.

The crossovers taking place in post-war popular music, between rhythm and blues, gospel, country, and swing, and the pop charts gave birth, so the story goes, inevitably, to rock and roll. The hegemonic narrative of “rock” has so permeated our contemporary understanding of popular music and, particularly, of rock’s relationship to American identity, that it becomes, after a certain point, difficult to separate “rock” from “popular music.” Indeed, during my mis-spent youth of the eighties, I’m not sure I (and millions like me) could have adequately separated the two. From this point on, rock becomes the focal point of popular music and we follow the ways in which it became that focal point.

Along with the increasing popularity of black musics, especially rhythm and blues, one of the key factors in that development was the splintering, commercialization, and general “toughening-up” of country and western music. Hank Williams became a model of self-contained singer-songwriter-guitarist, who scored country chart hits that became, when slightly urbanized by producers such as Mitch Miller, pop hits for Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Jo Stafford, and other pop singers in the early fifties. His influence both as songwriter and as ur-rock cultural icon (living recklessly, dying young, balancing the spiritual and the carnal) is still pervasive; indeed, it is somewhat difficult to imagine Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, much less entire schools of country music, without him.

The toughened-up jukebox country music termed ‘honky tonk’ of Williams, Kitty Wells, and Red Foley provided a nice counter-part to the rapidly developing form of bluegrass. Bluegrass, as practiced by Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs was more rural, more communal, and more focused on instrumental virtuosity than honky tonk. And, like honky tonk, proved invaluable as an influence on what became rock and roll: lengthy, showboating solos, and double-time instrumental passages between vocal passages would eventually become a major feature of big-time rock and roll. When Dolly Parton, in 2002, recorded a bluegrass version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, she underlined this connection that too few performers or listeners make.

While r&b and country were becoming increasingly popular (and those genre’s biggest hits were being covered by more sedate, more white performers on the pop charts), the tradition of jazz singing and the Great American Songbook were suffering on the pop charts. Without demonizing Mitch (“Sing Along with Mitch”) Miller too much, it should be noted that Miller, as producer and A&R man, aggressively encouraged his roster at Columbia Records to record repetitive, simplistic, and, often soulless, novelty records in pursuit of the pop charts. Sinatra recorded, under duress, “Mama Will Bark”, a duet (trio?) with Scandinavian actress Dagmar and a barking dog, and superlative jazz interpreter Rosemary Clooney recorded playwright William Saroyan and Ross (The Chipmunks) Bagdasarian’s “Come-on-a-My House”, a pop hit she despised. The gradual dumbing down of the American pop charts with novelties and watered-down versions of rhythm-and-blues and country records drew attention to the growing gulf between the worlds of pop and the semi-popular created by swing’s mutation into bop.

From this void comes the popular explosion of rock and roll. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 “Sixteen Tons” anticipated this explosion, with its catchy blues-based melody and crisp production, while Scottish Lonnie Donegan’s fusion of traditional jazz and Lead Belly-inspired folk on his cover of the latter’s “Rock Island Line” inspired the Beatles and their (English) generation to start playing rhythmic folk music.

Despite its continued overusage to signify the nineteen fifties, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” still sounds startlingly modern and exciting while less-well-remembered tracks like Roy Hall’s original version of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (later, of course, covered by Jerry Lee Lewis) and Johnny Burnette’s cataclysmic “Honey Hush” anticipated the loud and loose rock of the Yardbirds, the Kinks, and the Animals ten years later. Elvis Presley, still recognizable to nearly all Americans more than thirty years after his death by the two syllables Evv-Iss was, in addition to an overexposed icon, an affecting blues singer (as heard on “Reconsider Baby”, backed by an all-star Nashville band including Hank Garland, Boots Randolph, and Floyd Cramer).

What is perhaps most striking about the major figures of the early period of rock and roll is their eccentricity; the press of the time perceived many of them as actually dangerous and much of the scholarship written about the era suggests that this fear is rooted in racism, trepidation at the undeniably black influences of the music. Racism certainly played some part in this trepidation, but it could be argued that a fear of the “Old Weird America” was also in play. In an era in which the Weavers became subject to blacklisting following the McCarthy witchhunts, the socialist and progressive histories of folk music, and the self-identification of r&b and country as the music of the rural, the uneducated, and the disenfranchised (both black and white), it’s not difficult to see how Elvis’s blatant sexuality, Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano bashing, Chuck Berry’s exuberant celebrations of teenage nirvana, and Little Richard’s cross-racial-cross-sexual musical calls-to-arms would be seen as unnerving and, perhaps, threatening. This is not even to address more marginal figures like Esquerita, something of a more chaotic, more gender-bending version of Richard, or Hasil Adkins, with his overdriven, frantic odes to chickens and hot dogs, or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, whose stage coffin and snakes predate Alice Cooper by at least fifteen years and Ozzy Osbourne by still more. Uniquely American eccentricities reminiscent of the Harry Smith Anthology, heard in twenties recordings of Blind Willie Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke were making it, sometimes surreptitiously, onto the pop charts. And the guardians of American virtue were actually scared.

The eccentricity and the joyfulness of the music of the period harkens back to the music of the twenties; there is an unpretentious soulfulness to the best of it that prompted a revolution as r&b and country became, when cross-pollinated into rock and roll, the predominant musics of America. Frank Sinatra called the early rock and rollers “goons” and Nat King Cole sang “Mr. Cole Won’t Rock & Roll”, but the proverbial seeds had been proverbially sewn. As the unlamented Danny and the Juniors once said, roughly, “Rock and roll [was] here to stay.”


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Volume One: Tiger Rag - Dixieland and Country Blues

1. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band: Tiger Rag
(Eddie Edwards-Nick La Rocca-Henry Ragas-Tony Sbarbaro-Larry Shields-Harry Da Costa) 1917

2. James P. Johnson: Keep Off the Grass
(James P. Johnson) 1921

3. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band: Snake Rag
(King Oliver) 1923

4. Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke: Lonely Melody
(Sam Coslow-Benny Meroff-Hal Dyson) 1928

5. Frankie Trumbauer and his Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke: Clarinet Marmalade
(Henry Ragas-Larry Shields) 1927

6. Louis Armstrong: Dinah
(Harry Akst- Sam M. Lewis-Joe Young) 1930

7. Sidney Bechet: Summertime
(George Gershwin-Ira Gershwin-DuBose Hayward) 1939

8. Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers: Dead Man Blues
(Ferdinand Morton-Anita Gonzales) 1926

9. Walter Page's Blue Devils featuring Jimmy Rushing: Blue Devil Blues
(Don Stoval) 1929

10. Ma Rainey and her Georgia Jazz Band: Jealous Hearted Blues
(Lovie Austin) 1925

11. Charlie Poole with the North Carolina Ramblers: White House Blues
(Traditional, Arr. Charlie Poole) 1926

12. Clarence Ashley: The Coo Coo Bird
(Traditional, Arr. Clarence Ashley) 1929

13. Dock Boggs: Country Blues
(Traditional, Arr. Dock Boggs) 1928

14. The Carter Family: Wildwood Flower
(Traditional-A.P. Carter) 1928

15. Jimmie Rodgers: Blue Yodel #10
(Jimmie Rodgers) 1932

16. Charley Patton: High Water Everywhere Part 1
(Charley Patton) 1929

17. Blind Willie McTell: Statesboro Blues
(Blind Willie McTell) 1928

18. Blind Lemon Jefferson: See That My Grave Is Kept Clean
(Blind Lemon Jefferson) 1927

19. Blind Willie Johnson: John the Revelator
(Traditional, Arr. Blind Willie Johnson) 1930

20. Skip James: Devil Got My Woman
(Skip James) 1931

21. Son House: My Black Mama (Part 1)
(Son House) 1930

22. Ishman Bracey featuring Rosie Mae Moore: Stranger Blues
(Rosie Mae Moore) 1928

23. Tommy Johnson: Cool Drink of Water Blues
(Tommy Johnson) 1928

24. Bukka White: Shake ‘Em on Down
(Bukka White) 1937
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“Anyone can learn what Louis Armstrong knows about music in a few weeks. Nobody could learn to play like him in a thousand years.”

—Benny Green


The music of the first two decades of recorded jazz and blues is today sorely neglected; what is revealed in these twenty-four songs recorded between 1917 (“Tiger Rag” by the Original Jazz (or “Jass”) Band) and 1939 (“Summertime" by Sidney Bechet, the pioneering saxophonist of the Dixieland era rediscovered at the dawn of the Swing era) is a time brimming with creative energy that both looks back on the America of the nineteenth century and anticipates the full-blown dominance of a uniquely American identity in music in the latter half of the twentieth century.

“Dixieland”, itself a term of controversy, or, “traditional jazz”, now seems to be seen, at best, as the scratchy soundtrack of dimmed and out-of-synch early nineteen-thirties cartoons or, at worst, as the last refuge of aging misanthropes from their tired (and tiring) visions of irredeemable humanity (think Woody Allen or R. Crumb).

This association with the comic and the misanthropic is not accidental, however; the break-neck doubled lines of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong on the former’s “Snake Rag” or of the other great trumpeter of the period, Bix Beiderbecke’s ebullient soloing on tracks with both Frankie Trumbauer and Paul Whiteman (the oft-disputed “King of Jazz”) create comedy out of the chaos of the period. In the urban melting pots of New Orleans, New York, and Chicago, traditional jazz gave voice to the collision of European and African traditions playing out in every big city neighborhood and in every juke joint, vaudeville show, and silent film - emotions and attitudes hustle one another for dominance and all exist simultaneously in uneasy alliance in this world. In his brilliant study Hip: A History, John Leland sees the “hipness” of the burgeoning American hipster (Armstrong and Bugs Bunny are given roughly equal play as trickster figures) as performative representation of the similarly elastic, liminal American identity of the period: comedy and tragedy exist side-by-side and the audience is never entirely sure which is which.

As the twenties drew to a close, jazz transitioned from a form of group improvisation to a soloist’s art. In Ken Burns’ Jazz, Stanley Crouch convincingly argues that Louis Armstrong is the single figure most responsible for this change: his version of “Dinah”, with Armstrong contorting the melody both vocally and instrumentally to shade increments of emotion and meaning shows clearly Armstrong’s singularity in the realm of jazz. What Crouch doesn’t point out, however, is how much Armstrong echoes the flipside of the urban jazz that now signifies the “Roaring Twenties” – the “Old Weird America” as Greil Marcus terms it, the America heard on the rural folk-blues and country records of the period.

On Harry Smith’s landmark 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, scholar, “magus”, and all-around beatific crank Smith gathered together pre-War folk, blues, gospel, and country records that shared a singular vision of an America that didn’t need the Depression to make it collapse: it had already collapsed – under the weight of poverty, racism, the still-present aftermath of the Civil War, but its artists exhibited the sort of rugged individuality Armstrong had to bring to jazz - a strength in their otherness that is startling in its intensity. The artists who follow Armstrong, whether black or white, ostensibly ‘country’ or ostensibly ‘blues’ sound simultaneously ancient and very modern. Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator” is terrifying, hopeful and vindictive and holy, mapping a stylistic locale populated not only by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf , but by Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits. The songs of the Mississippi Delta and the songs of the Appalachians encompass black and white traditions side-by-side: to listen to the blues inflections in Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #10” and the Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower” and the proto-bluegrass strumming in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s stark “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” is to hear the whole of rock and roll tradition in miniature. And that is, in its way, majestically comic.


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