Early Days of Rock 'n' Roll (Archve Film Productions, RCA Columbia Home Video, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I an hour-long documentary on YouTube, Rock and Roll: The Early Days (1984), written and directed by Patrick Montgomery and Pamela Page and narrated by John Heard. It’s basically a print-the-legend version of the history, though I give Montgomery and Page a lot of credit for acknowledging that rock ‘n’ roll was just Black rhythm-and-blues repackaged for white audiences and performed by white people.; (Louis Jordan, curiously not mentioned in this documentary even though he was one of the first R&B performers to cross over to a white audience, understandably was bitter about how the rise of rock killed his career and said, “Rock ‘n’ roll is just rhythm-and-blues played by white people.”) The documentary opens with a thoroughly bland song being performed by a woman singer – neither the singer nor the song are identified (and curiously the imdb.com page for this film does not have a “soundtracks” list) – as an illustration of the doldrums pop music had fallen into in the early 1950’s after the demise of the big bands and their replacement by solo singers.

Actually, some of the singers were pretty good and a few of them – notably Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray – had drawn on Black models in developing their styles the way the later white rockers did, but for the most part white pop music in the early 1950’s was largely the artistic wasteland it’s depicted as here. Then there’s a bizarre clip from the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showing the two sons of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard having a musical battle: David wants to listen to Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s scorching 1952 version of “Hound Dog” while brother Ricky wants to listen to annoying pseudo-symphonic pop pap. (Ironically, Ricky Nelson would go on to a career as a rock ‘n’ roll singer himself, making records like “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello, Mary Lou” that were much better than most of what was heard on the radio in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. His guitar player, James Burton, would later join Elvis Presley’s touring band.) This is supposed to dramatize how teenagers – a relatively new demographic category in the early 1950’s as post-World War II America’s relative affluence led to a new group of people in a sort of holding pattern between childhood and adulthood, with spending money of their own – were getting bored with the songs on the traditional pop charts.

They looked for livelier music, and they found it in the records entrepreneurs like Sam C. Phillips, Art Rupe, the Bihari, Chess and Ertegun brothers and others were made for the African-American market. In an interview with Arnold Shaw for his seminal history of R&B, Honkers and Shouters, Rupe recalled a lot of white people buying his company’s record of Lloyd Price singing “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” and telling the clerks at the store it was a present for their Black chauffeurs or maids when “they were really buying it for themselves.” A few white disc jockeys, notably Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, started to pick up on what was happening and how white listeners were starting to embrace Black music (as their forebears had in the 1920’s and 1930’s when they similarly embraced jazz). Freed even coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll” – which he derived from a turn-of-the-century blues song called “My Daddy Rocks Me with One Steady Roll,” and which had also been used in 1930’s songs like the Boswell Sisters’ “Rock and Roll,” Bunny Berigan’s “Rockin’ Rollers’ Jubilee” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Rock It for Me” – as a euphemism to conceal the fact that what he was programming on his show was Black R&B. Freed would eventually move on to New York City and start organizing package tours of his artists, and in a rare display of racial justice he insisted that the Blacks on his bills get exactly the same treatment as the whites, but he fell from grace in the late 1950’s when he acknowledged publicly that he had accepted bribes from record companies to play certain records on his shows. (Freed would also take so-called “cut-in credits” on songs, agreeing to promote them in exchange for a credit on the label as co-composer, thus earning songwriters’ royalties for records on which his contribution was, as Arnold Shaw politely put it in his book, “more promotional than creative.”)

The show deals with how white performers started playing the new music – many of them came from backgrounds in country music, which had also drawn heavily on the blues and other Black traditions, fusing it with traditional British and Irish folk songs with admixtures of Mexican and Hawai’ian music. Bill Haley, the first white rock star (who’s treated here with more respect than he usually gets from early-rock tributes in which he’s largely depicted as the John the Baptist of white rock, heralding the coming of Elvis), had two bands: the Saddlemen, who played country, and the Comets, who played rock … but they were exactly the same people. The show also depicts the music scene in Memphis, Tennessee (who by rights should be the site of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, since it occupied the same seminal position in the history of rock that New Orleans had in the history of jazz; but it ended up in Cleveland instead because that was the city where rock ‘n’ roll was first promoted) and the rise of Sam C. Phillips. He build a small recording studio on Union Avenue and opened something called the Memphis Recording Service, which would record people who were willing to pay to hear their voice on a professionally made record. Phillips also recorded Black blues artists and originally licensed his records to other companies – among them Chess in Chicago and the Bihari brothers’ Modern in Los Angeles – and in at least one case, the Memphis blues star Howlin’ Wolf (real name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, which makes one wonder what his parents were thinking in naming him after one of America’s least distinguished Presidents), he sold different recordings of the same songs under different titles to both Chess and Modern. (This led to a lawsuit between the Chess and Bihari brothers that got settled when the Biharis agreed to relinquish Wolf’s contract to Chess in exchange for Rosco Gordon’s services on Modern.)

In 1953, fed up with the money he was losing by selling his masters to other companies, Phillips started a record label of his own, Sun, and though he had a local graphic artist design an iconic label design – a rooster on a field of sunbeams – and continued to release records by Black artists, he told his cousin and business partner Dewey Phillips, “If I could find a white kid who could sing like a [N-word], I’d make a million dollars.” Said white kid walked into the Memphis Recording Service one day in early 1954 on a break from his job as a truck driver; his name was Elvis Presley and he said he wanted to make a record as a souvenir present for his mother. Actually the Presleys didn’t own a record player and Elvis probably just wanted to hear how his own voice would sound on disc, but he recorded two songs – a cover of “My Happiness” by the Black vocal group The Ink Spots and a traditional country song called “That’s Where Your Heartaches Begin.” Sam Phillips wasn’t there that day – his secretary Marion Keisker was running the place in his absence – and she heard something potentially commercial in the 19-year-old kid’s voice. In addition to sending Elvis home on a directly recorded acetate disc, as the Memphis Recording Service usually did, she also turned on the studio tape recorder so Phillips could hear the voice later. When Elvis returned for another al fresco session shortly afterwards, Phillips recorded him and on the studio’s tape machine he marked the tape, “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

When he booked Elvis for his first commercial recording session – for which Elvis would be paid instead of having to pay – he couldn’t get anything out of him that sounded like it would sell until Elvis and the accompanists Phillips had booked for him, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, started jamming on songs by Black blues musician Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Though the legend has it that Elvis totally recomposed the song, the version of Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama” that became Elvis’s first record release (backed by Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” because Phillips wanted to market Elvis to both the blues and country audiences; Elvis’s first promotional moniker was “The Hillbilly Cat”), was almost identical to Crudup's. This documentary includes a bit of “That’s All Right, Mama” and Elvis’s fifth and final Sun single, “Mystery Train,” along with a bit of a famous outtake of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” at Monroe’s tempo (later Elvis speeded it up for the released version, and Monroe played the song a decade later at a Newport Folk Festival in which he did the first chorus at his original tempo and the second at Elvis’s), in which you can hear the voice of Sam Phillips saying, “That’s a pop song now, Little Vi! That’s good!”

Phillips only made $35,000 off Elvis – his price for selling the singer’s contract and all rights to his Sun recordings to RCA Victor – but he figured there was more talent where that came from and he landed several other white singers who could sound Black, including Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Unfortunately, they were both victims of a curse that seemingly hung over the original generation of rock ‘n’ rollers: Perkins crashed his car on his way to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show (which enabled Elvis to take away Perkins’ biggest hit, “Blue Suede Shoes”), and Lewis married Myra Gale, 13-year-old cousin and daughter of his bass player J. T. Brown. The scandal of Lewis’s marriage broke in the British tabloids just as he arrived there for a tour in 1958, and he got catcalls and boos from the audience (one heckler said, “Go wheel your wife out in a pram!”), and this film juxtaposes footage of a press conference Lewis and his wife gave on their return to the U.S. in which he said his tour went wonderfully with real clippings of how badly it had gone (he was canceled after just three shows). It also shows Myra Lewis looking all of her actual age and helplessly trying to impersonate an adult woman.

The curse of the early rockers struck down Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, who died in a chartered plane crash in 1959 (this film includes a marvelous clip of Buddy Holly performing on the Ed Sullivan Show, sitting through an attempt by Sullivan to interview him and then playing Holly’s heaviest record, “Peggy Sue”); Eddie Cochran (who isn’t shown in this movie but is represented by a sound clip of his greatest song, “Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash a year later (just before launching the career of a little-known band from Liverpool called The Beatles, who were hurriedly added to a concert bill Cochran was supposed to play with Gene Vincent; it was their first performance in an actual theatre instead of a club); Elvis got drafted and sent to a U.S. military base in Germany; Little Richard abruptly quit rock to study for the ministry (he spent the rest of his long life torn between music and God); and even Chuck Berry, oddly presented in this film as the one rocker who survived the 1950’s with his career intact, got caught in 1961 with a 14-year-old Mexican prostitute and served two years in prison for violating the Mann Act, originally passed as a law against human trafficking but regularly abused to prosecute people the authorities didn’t like. (Berry’s first conviction was reversed on appeal because the judge had made openly racist statements on the bench, but he was re-convicted on his retrial.)

The film also delves into the contentious topic of the so-called “cover versions,” which now means any re-recording of a hit song by someone other than the original artist but in the 1950’s came to mean a white artist’s version of a song originated by a Black act. The film contained an interview with Pat Boone in which he admits that he didn’t want to record Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” or Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” at first, but his managers talked him into doing those songs and assured him they would sell. They did: this film includes a mid-song cut from Boone’s hilariously misguided version of “Ain’t That a Shame” to Domino’s original (the 1978 NBC documentary Heroes of Rock ‘n’ Roll did a reverse of that cut, from Domino to Boone, but it made the same point), and the limp white covers usually sold 10 times as many copies as the gritty Black originals. (Art Rupe of Specialty Records, Little Richard’s label, was especially proud that Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” sold one-third as many copies as Boone’s anemic cover – 3 to 1 was a lot better than 10 to 1.) When Pat Boone emerged in 2008 and proclaimed the Queer community enemies of democracy for attacking California voters who had passed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, I wrote an editorial in my newsmagazine, Zenger’s, saying, “One of the ironies behind Pat Boone’s bizarre emergence as an impassioned spokesperson against the Queer community is that his open embrace of bigotry and prejudice is all too appropriate for a man who owes his entire career to bigotry and prejudice.”

I also quoted Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, who told Arnold Shaw in an interview for Honkers and Shouters that “we had a real tough time getting our records played. All the jocks had to see was the Atlantic label and the name of the artist — and we were dead. We’d say, ‘Just listen and give your listeners a chance to listen.’ But they had a set of stock excuses: ‘Too loud.’ ‘Too rough.’ ‘Doesn’t fit our format.’ They’d never say, ‘We don’t play Black artists.’ But then they’d turn around and play a record of the very same song that was a copy of our record, only it was by a white artist.” This film argues that between the self-destruction of many of the original rock stars and the public opposition rock ‘n’ roll engendered (among the enemies of rock shown in this film is the head of the Alabama White Citizens’ Council, essentially the above-ground political arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and not surprisingly his main beef against rock is it was leading young white people to look, sound and act Black), by the end of the 1950’s music was once again as bland and boring as it had been at the beginning. The clips shown of pseudo-rockers like Paul Anka and Fabian aren’t too bad, actually – Fabian’s “Turn Me Loose” sounded like it could have been a credible rock song with either a Black singer or a better white one, like Elvis (whom he was obviously imitating) – but they are hardly at the same energy level as the music we’ve seen and heard earlier.

The film makes the claim that pop music had lost its edge in 1959 and didn’t regain it until the Beatles arrived in the U.S. five years later – but as my husband Charles pointed out, there was quite a lot of good music being made between those years, including the early Motown records, the girl groups, the elaborate productions of Phil Spector and even records by some grittier white artists like Ricky Nelson and Del Shannon. (I remember Nelson’s “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello, Mary Lou” and Shannon’s “Runaway” leaping out of the sludge clogging up the radio in the early 1960’s – and also loving Chuck Berry’s comeback record, “No Particular Place to Go,” made in 1964 after he was finally released from prison.) Finally, the show touches on how rock ‘n’ roll would eventually get revived when it migrated across the Atlantic: it shows how, with his U.S. record sales declining, Bill Haley salvaged his future and crossed the English Channel, re-establishing his career in Germany and causing literal riots when he appeared there. Though it isn’t mentioned here, Buddy Holly’s records sold considerably more in Europe – especially in Britain – than they did here, and that was of huge importance to the future of rock. Unlike most white rockers of the 1950’s, Holly and Carl Perkins had written most of their own songs, and that set an example for three lads from Liverpool named John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison who figured they could write their own songs, too, and build a career on them.