Chapter Eight
My mother had exposed me to music while I was still in her womb. After I arrived she played Carmen and other operas while my father was on duty at the firehouse. Her record collection included show tunes, pop songs, and works by such composers as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, and Schubert. I loved “Papa” Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, and my repeated, delighted exposure to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf taught me the sounds and personality characteristics of various orchestral instruments. But the music that set me on fire when I was thirteen resembled classical music about as much as a pride of lions resembles a sailboat.
As my generation entered adolescence in a decade largely run by uninspiring men, the music Alan Freed brought to us seemed heaven-sent. To many of our parents—thankfully not mine—that music came from the cauldrons of hell. The predictors of doom said, “If Alan Freed is allowed to stay on the air, his ‘race music’ will lead to miscegenation, free love, drugs, and anarchy!” They may have been on to something. There was no doubt that the records Alan played aroused a sexual awareness previously unacknowledged among my age group. His revues were a welcome wagon of freedoms of style, expression, dress, message, and sex. References to sex didn’t need to be explicit. Sexuality was implicit in both music and lyrics. To begin with, “rock and roll” was a euphemism in black slang for sexual intercourse. Parse the lyric “Roll me all night long” from “Let the Good Times Roll” and you won’t find a single objectionable word, but the meaning was unmistakable. And then there was that pulsing bass that drove the Big Beat.
Before adolescence I had been naïve about sex. Suddenly I was feeling the pounding bass notes and the throbbing drumbeats viscerally in ways and places I’d never felt before. My discovery of rock and roll coincided with my increasing awareness of the lower half of my body. No wonder I couldn’t wait to stay up late and listen to Alan’s presentation of the original rhythm and blues recordings. Some of those songs were introduced to Middle America by white artists. The Moonglows’ version of “Sincerely” topped the R&B charts before the song became a pop hit by the McGuire Sisters. After Pat Boone’s recording of “Ain’t That a Shame” made it to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, Alan’s repeated spins sent Fats Domino’s version to #16.
In the parlance of the period, records were called platters. The platters Alan played fed every cell of my body, mind, heart, and soul. The songs were simply written and simply recorded. The lyrics and the beat moved me. Though melody was present, it wasn’t as important as the beat. The fact that a lot of the songs sounded as if they could have been written by a kid—as indeed many were—inspired me to think, If they can do it, maybe I can.
It wouldn’t be easy. The music that had informed the songwriters on the records Alan played was a lot more gritty and diverse than the simple pop ditties, show tunes, and classical music to which I had been listening for most of my life. But I was determined to learn, and the timing in popular music and political history was favorable.
In the fifties, folk songs by the Weavers, Mitch Miller, and the Kingston Trio appeared on the pop charts, but folk would not become mainstream until the sixties when possession of a guitar, a pair of vocal cords, endless verses railing against the system, and a guitar case in which to receive spare change would be all a young man from as far from the pop scene as, say, Hibbing, Minnesota, would need to qualify as a folksinger.
Following its relatively strong influence on popular music in the thirties and forties, jazz became marginalized in the early fifties. Jazz musicians were mostly black men whose music was appreciated by a relatively small audience compared to pop. Some were lucky enough to dip into the more lucrative world of studio pop and earn extra “bread” during the day as sidemen, but they couldn’t wait to jam with other musicians in a club until the wee hours. Jazz was a very different world from pop. Among other things, it was separate and unequal. With few exceptions, jazz players struggled economically, and marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were part of the culture. Sentences spoken in after-hours clubs were often as strung out as the speaker.
“Coooool, man. Reeeeeal cool.”
As with jazz, the world of rhythm and blues was inhabited mostly by blacks at the low end of the national economic scale. In the late 1940s, names such as “race music” and “race records” were used in Billboard magazine to categorize the music emanating from black communities. Jerry Wexler, a journalist with Billboard, came up with “rhythm and blues” to replace the “race” tags. Wexler later explained that although the word “race” was commonly used by blacks to describe themselves as a “race man” or a “race woman,” the appellation didn’t feel right to him. He viewed the term “rhythm and blues” as more appropriate for enlightened times.
“Blues” referred to the traditional twelve-bar form with a I-IV-V chord progression. “Rhythm” derived from the strong 4/4 or 6/8 beat that drove most of the songs. With lyrics mostly about the lack of love, sex, cars, liquor, or money, it wasn’t surprising that R&B’s messages of adversity and alienation resonated with white teenagers.
Higher up on the economic scale, white artists dominated the popular music charts. There were some black pop artists, notably Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and Harry Belafonte, but songs like Perry Como’s “No Other Love” and Patti Page’s “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window?”(“arf, arf”) were typical of what I heard on pop radio. Though other genres existed, pop had the widest and whitest audience. But popular music was only one facet of the social context that informed my generation.
A strong undercurrent that would lead to the civil rights movement was already gathering momentum in the mid-fifties. At twelve and thirteen, I wasn’t paying close attention because I was white and my preadolescent concerns had little to do with racial injustice. But glimpses of the news on television kept me aware of such things as the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, which struck down the policy of “separate but equal” and required schools to integrate racially. And when newscasters reported the refusal in 1955 of a black woman named Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama so a white man could sit in it, after which they reported the white authorities’ reaction, I couldn’t help but sympathize with the blacks’ boycott of Montgomery buses.
Film was another field in which an early call to racial integration was being sounded. Sidney Poitier’s performance as a student accused of threatening his teacher’s wife in The Blackboard Jungle awakened moviegoers to the fact that a black actor could do more than sing, dance, roll his eyes, and serve white people. Notwithstanding, or possibly because of, the presence of Mr. Poitier, the film’s appeal to white teenagers was tremendous. The Blackboard Jungle was such a convincing portrayal of juvenile delinquency that it frightened complacent adults who thought such things couldn’t happen in their neighborhood.
My friends and I danced the Lindy (in boy-girl couples) to “Rock Around the Clock” in newly finished basements lined with knotty pine in the homes of kids whose parents could afford such improvements. (Knowing what teenagers typically did in basements, initially I thought the spelling was “naughty pine.”) Lindy stood for Lindy Hop, a joyous, bouncy dance that turned excessive adolescent energy into exhilaration. When we weren’t doing the Lindy, we were holding each other (in boy-girl couples) and slow-dancing to “Earth Angel” by the Penguins or “Pledging My Love” by the late, great Johnny Ace, who of course wasn’t late when he made the record.
I was fourteen when Elvis Presley burst into national prominence from rockabilly in 1956. I didn’t realize then that Elvis was himself a form of racial integration. He was a white boy singing country music with an R&B influence and performing it with the visceral abandon of the blacks he’d observed around Memphis after his family moved there from Tupelo, Mississippi. With all the censors and sponsors controlling television in the fifties, I was glad it took the producers of The Ed Sullivan Show three appearances to decide to show Elvis only from the waist up. No one with eyes and ears, and certainly not this teenage girl, was unaware of Elvis’s effect on popular culture. I liked his music, and he was undeniably teen-idol gorgeous, but I must confess that Elvis’s music didn’t influence me as strongly as the pop hits that preceded his breakthrough, or the R&B hits that followed.
I observed all these events from a place of self-centered adolescence. I didn’t listen to the news or read a newspaper unless a teacher made me do it. I liked English and math but had no interest in social studies. Later in life, when I realized that we live social studies every day, I would find history, geography, politics, and current events fascinating. But in the mid-fifties, I was a Brooklyn teenager who liked to read, sing, play the piano, go to movies, whisper in class, dance the Lindy, and cuddle with boys.
Oh, and one more thing. I hadn’t given up on acting.