Week Two: The Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll

DECEMBER 28, 1947: As events go, it was modest, unimpressive, and, at the time, all but ignored. The site was a nondescript record­ing studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. The occasion was a recording session for a company unknown to most Americans, King. The agent of change was a singer named Wynonie Harris, thirty-two years old, also practically unknown. In most respects, there was nothing note­worthy about the setting, the singer, or his songs. But one of the songs Harris sang on December 28, 1947, "Good Rockin' Tonight," would become a best-selling hit, played on jukeboxes and aired on radio stations across black America. And by popularizing the word "rock," Harris' recording would herald a new era in American popu­lar culture.

Nobody noticed. In December of 1947, the music we now call "rock and roll" hadn't yet been named, much less invented. When Harris sang his path breaking song, he was simply doing what he had done for years, practicing a time-honored craft he had mastered in an old-fashioned way, through trial and error, learning how to make music that would lift listeners up, put people into motion, and let them dance the night away.

"Hence the dance hall as temple," the novelist and critic Albert Murray has written: "Hence all the ceremonially deliberate drag steps and shaking and grinding movements during, say, the old down home Saturday Night Function, and all the sacramental strut­ting and swinging along with all the elegant stomping. . . . And hence in consequence the fundamental function of the blues musician (also known as the jazz musician), the most obvious as well as the most pragmatic mission of whose performance is not only to drive the blues away and hold them at bay at least for the time being, but also to evoke an ambiance of Dionysian revelry."

In the way that Wynonie Harris had lived his life, and made his music, his objective was plain and simple: it was revelry, the more "Dionysian" the better. At the time he recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight," he was already a minor legend. Renowned for his fast liv­ing and hard drinking, he'd been playing Saturday Night Functions from coast to coast since the mid-Forties, building up a reputation as one of the wildest black showmen of his day. Photographs show a coffee-colored Clark Gable, debonair, cocky, a gleam in his eyes, the promise of pleasure on his lips.

A generation later, Harris would have become a pinup for kids, a pop culture icon, just like Michael Jackson or Prince, two of his spir­itual heirs. But in 1947, he was, by comparison, a nobody—an anonymous journeyman. In those days, there were few magazines de­voted to pop music, no TV shows about it (television was still in its infancy), and little mainstream media coverage of Negro stars like Wynonie Harris. Despite the widespread popularity in America of black dance music and of certain black entertainers, such as Louis Armstrong, the Mills Brothers, and the Ink Spots, patterns of social segregation cut deep. Inhabiting a common culture, whites and blacks still lived largely in worlds apart.

Harris had first achieved fame in the world of black music with Lucky Millinder, who led one of Harlem's hottest dance bands. After scoring a vocal hit with the Millinder band in 1945—it was a good-natured blues novelty, "Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?"— Harris went solo, recording for several different small labels, and selling just enough copies to sustain his career.

His session for King after Christmas in 1947 hardly promised any­thing out of the ordinary. As was customary in those days, the ses­sion was scheduled to last three hours and produce three or four usable takes of three or four new songs. The band consisted of sea­soned musicians, most of them jazzmen like Oran "Hot Lips" Page, an alumnus of Count Basic's renowned Kansas City band. As usual, the label's A&R man (for "artists and repertoire") had selected the songs for the band to play. The tunes ran the gamut. One was a risque novelty, long since forgotten, called "Lollipop Mama." An­other tune, "I Believe I'll Fall in Love," was even less distinguished. Songs like this—and the fare was typical—did not give a singer much to work with. Still, if luck was with him—if Harris caught the right

I should explain the racial terms "Colored" and "Negro" were terms in common usage in America well into the Sixties, when "black" became pre­ferred in many contexts, just as "African-American" or “People of Color” are often preferred today. All of these terms appear at various points, as the historical context dictates feeling.

If the Harris band hit a relaxed rhythmic groove—even the most hackneyed of songs might let a blues musician fulfill his fundamental function, making music of sufficient energy and earthiness to pro­voke an outburst of emotion that carried listeners away.

The composer of "Good Rockin' Tonight" was a young singer named Roy Brown, a native of New Orleans and a fan of Wynonie Harris. Legend has it that Brown, inspired by hearing Harris in per­son, wrote the song on a paper bag and offered it to "Mister Blues" (his nickname) backstage. When Harris refused the gift, Brown sang the song himself at his first recording session. Brown's version was selling well in the South, and so came to the attention of Harris' new A&R man at King, Henry Glover, a big band veteran charged with finding fresh "repertoire" for his "artists."

The song's rhythmic style was apt. This was the heyday, in black popular music, of a relaxed kind of boogie-woogie—the musical backbone of "Good Rockin' Tonight." Almost offhandedly, Harris and his combo transformed the song into a celebration of everything dance music can be: an incantation, an escape, an irrepressibly joy­ous expression of sheer physical existence.

They took Brown's song at an easy lope. The band was loose, Harris in rare form. A sax riffed, a piano pumped, and Harris shouted: "Have you heard the news? There's good rockin' tonight!"

Five months later, the news was out. By June of 1948, Harris' record was spinning on jukeboxes from coast to coast. The era of "good rockin' " had arrived.

Or so it would later seem. To chronicle the past is to search for some place to start, some more or less arbitrary moment to begin: and more than one historian of rock has thought to open his story with "Good Rockin' Tonight." Not that experts can agree. In 1992, an account of fifty pioneering rock and roll recordings demonstrated the intractability of the question posed by the book's title, What Was the First Rock }n Roll Record?

Questions of historical priority scarcely preoccupied Wynonie Harris. Born in 1915 in Omaha, Nebraska, he had honed his talents in the Midwest, performing as a buck dancer, a drummer, a singer, touring with carnivals, doing vaudeville, entertaining at minstrel shows, covering a territory that ran from the Dakotas in the north to Oklahoma in the south.

The undisputed cultural capital of this territory was Kansas City. And it was in Kansas City that Wynonie Harris first heard Joe Turner—and first found his true calling. "He went crazy over the big blues shouter," Preston Love, one of Harris' lifelong friends later re­called. "He thought the blues was a way of life—an only life, and he patterned himself as a singer after Joe Turner."

In the 1930s, when Harris first visited Kansas City, Joe Turner was tending bar, bouncing bums, and singing the blues at a club called the Sunset—the kind of place that later rock and roll stars could only dream about. Located at Twelfth and Woodlawn, the club was surrounded by dozens of other saloons, promising an endless supply of whiskey, women, and song. Tricks were two dollars an or­gasm, marijuana three sticks for a quarter. In these days, Kansas City was a mecca for white revelers and black musicians, attracting one of the greatest concentrations of jazz talent in history: Count Basie, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Buck Clayton, Andy Kirk, Mary Lou Williams, Jay McShann, Charlie Parker—the list goes on. Every night after hours, musicians like this converged on the Sunset to blow the blues away, in the process refining the jazz form called swing—dance music with a sleek pulse, bursting with energy and brimming with riffs: short fusillades of melodic ostinato, repeated, developed, elabo­rated, repeated again, reinforcing the music's rhythmic thrust, cutting through the air like the night train to Memphis.

The Sunset was a tiny place, roughly twelve feet wide and sixty feet deep, a "black and tan" with a bandstand at one end and a rope down the middle to separate the black patrons from the whites (or "tans"), who in the Thirties were numerous—this, after all, was the heyday of swing, the style of popular music preferred by most Ameri­cans, white and black. The Sunset's house pianist in these years was Pete Johnson, the best in the city, a boogie-woogie virtuoso with a rock-steady sense of time that sent patrons flocking to the dance floor. A primitive amplification system piped the music into the dark­ened streets, allowing Johnson's partner, Big Joe, to "call his children home," summoning customers inside. Turner served drinks and sang at the same time. He handed down the bleakest of lyrics—"you may be beautiful, but you gonna die some day"—with unswerving au­thority and infectious good humor. Sometimes, as Turner later re­called, "we'd start playing around three in the morning. The bossman would set up pitchers of corn-likker, and we'd rock"— which gives an idea of one thing that Wynonie Harris may have had in mind when he sang about "good rockin' " ten years later.

The world had changed in the interim. Kansas City's wonder years were over. But the city's riffing style of swing lived on, not least in the music of Wynonie Harris.

A tall, handsome man from a racially mixed background (one of his wives would later claim that his father had been an American In­dian by the name of Blue Jay), Harris was dapper and slim, with striking eyes of bluish green and a pencil-thin mustache—a far cry from Joe Turner, who was a blues version of Paul Bunyan. During World War II, Harris, like Turner, had joined the great black migra­tion of these years to the West Coast, where work could be found in wartime factories running round the clock. Both men ended up in Los Angeles, where they regularly performed together, sometimes staging a friendly "cutting" session, as if to summon the memory of times past at the Sunset.

In 1947, Harris and Turner recorded a series of duets, including a boisterous "Battle of the Blues" that nicely illustrates the difference in their styles. Swapping boasts about their sexual prowess, Turner as usual sounds earthy, offhand, almost absentmindedly lustful—a force of nature, untamed and sublime. Harris by contrast is dogged, strident, strenuously energetic.

He made a career out of bellowing off-color novelties, drinking songs, and raucous blues. "I Want My Fanny Brown" was one juke­box favorite, "I Like My Baby's Pudding" another. Dumb double entendres didn't faze him. A prototypical "rock" singer, he attacked the most inane of lyrics with melodramatic gusto.

The 1940s was a time of change in the music that most Americans listened to. In mainstream pop, the big bands were being replaced by crooners like Vaughn Monroe and Perry Como. In the world of jazz, dance music was out, bebop was in, turning the art of improvisation into a form as demanding as anything heard in European concert halls. As jazz ceased to be a truly popular music, even among blacks, the so-called race charts published by the music trade magazine Bill­board—charts meant to document the recorded music black Ameri­cans preferred to hear—registered a historic shift: the hot new style was jump, a simplified and superheated version of old-fashioned swing, often boogie-woogie based, usually played by a small combo of piano, bass, and drums, with saxophone and trumpet.

From its streamlined riffs to the genre's very name, jump owed a large debt to the Kansas City scene of the 1930s. Count Basic had shown the way with "One O' Clock Jump." But the genre's greatest postwar exponent was the singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan, a native of Arkansas later based in New York City and Los Angeles. In a string of popular recordings that began in 1942, and included four million-sellers ("G.I. Jive," "Caldonia," "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie," and "Saturday Night Fish Fry"), Jordan perfected a propulsive, boo­gie-woogie-based style of swing, animated by a clownish stage man­ner he had inherited from Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Cab Galloway. At the height of Jordan's career, between 1944 and 1946, his recordings were as popular with whites as with blacks. One of his biggest hits, "G.I. Jive," actually topped the normally lily-white "folk" (or country-western) chart in 1944, becoming the first record­ing in history to top simultaneously all three Billboard charts (pop, race, and folk). Despite his huge white following, Jordan was unapologetically black. Before him, the black stars most popular with white listeners, such as Louis Armstrong, the Mills Brothers, and the Ink Spots, had hurdled America's racial divide by singing Tin Pan Al­ley material. Jordan took a different tack, singing songs filled with images from ghetto life "Saturday Night Fish Fry," for example, re­counts a police raid on a block party). And though his flair for com­edy took the sting out of his lyrics, and sometimes brought Jordan to the brink of self-parody, he was a committed entertainer, a peerless bandleader—and for any up-and-coming jump blues star, the man to beat.

For one striking moment—in the studio that December day in 1947—Wynonie Harris did just that. Like Jordan's classic hits, “Good Rockin' Tonight" swings effortlessly. An epitome of the jump genre, the record opens with a growling trumpet fanfare. The bass player doubles the pianist's pumping left hand, and hand-clap­ping reinforces the drummer's backbeat. Knocking out a perfect boo­gie beat, the group hews to a formula, but the formula is tried and true: ten years later, it would be all but impossible to locate five musicians able to animate the same simple riffs with such style. Harris himself was in rare form. Uncommonly subdued, he sings with blithe artistry. Apart from a feverish sax solo, the song glides by.

Harris' recording turned into one of the biggest race hits of 1948: in June, it topped Billboard magazine's weekly lists of both Most-Played Juke Box Race Records and Best Selling Retail Race Records. Its popularity triggered a small boom in race records that highlighted the word "rock." In the months that followed, there was Joe Lutcher's "Rockin' Boogie," the tenor saxophonist Wild Bill Moore's "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll," vocalist Roy Brown's "Rockin' at Midnight," Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint," and yet another Wild Bill Moore disc, this one with the pithy and prophetic title "Rock and Roll."

Prophetic or not, these records at first changed little in the music most Americans listened to, or in the culture that most Americans in­habited. Distributed primarily on jukeboxes located in Negro clubs and bars, none of these pioneering "rock" records reached the larger white audience—not even Wynonie Harris' exuberant version of "Good Rockin' Tonight."

The primary problem was not the color of the musicians' skins— Louis Jordan after all played a virtually identical brand of music. The problem was the word "rock." As the record's A&R man, Henry Glover, later explained, "we were restricted with our possibilities of promoting this song because it was considered filth"—and though "filth" was acceptable on a ghetto jukebox, it was not acceptable on most radio shows: "They had a definition in those days of the word 'rock,' meaning the sex act, rather than having it known as 'a good time,' as they did later."

In the late 1940s, Glover was a talent and song scout for King. A label founded in 1943, King was owned and operated by Syd Nathan, a Cincinnati record retailer. Priding himself on his prowess as a salesman, Nathan had made a small fortune by "selling records in a location that nobody could sell a record in," as he told his sales staff in 1951—"it was like trying to sell a grand piano out in the desert. But we done business because we knew how to do business."

Nathan had started up King by recording hillbilly artists, and quickly made his mark in the folk field. Branching into race music, Nathan in 1946 hired Glover, a former trumpeter and arranger in Lucky Millinder's big band, and one of the first black men in the postwar record business to be given any creative clout. It was Glover's job to help his label's artists by finding songs, booking stu­dios, hiring musicians, and supervising the recording sessions. Like Nathan, Glover "knew how to do business." One of the first artists he signed and supervised for Nathan was Bullmoose Jackson, a pop­ular baritone who would produce naughty novelties and lugubrious ballads for King starting in 1946.

The commercial success of labels like King in these years was symptomatic of a number of concurrent changes in the American music industry. As cheap and improved record players came on the market after World War II, retail sales of recordings grew rapidly, particularly in the areas of country music and rhythm and blues. Registering the change, Billboard in May 1948 augmented its old charts listing jukebox favorites with two new charts listing the week's best-selling retail recordings of race and folk music. The new popular interest in both black and country music grew out of the wartime experience of a large number of Americans: thanks to the regional and racial mixing that had occurred in the armed forces, and also thanks to the heterogeneous musical fare piped round the world on armed forces radio programs and V-Discs, a generation had been exposed to a range of musical styles far wider than anything heard on the live variety shows broadcast by America's national ra­dio networks in the 1930s. At the same time, the country's estab­lished labels, faced with a shortage of shellac during the war, had sharply cut back their involvement in musical genres they deemed marginal. The reluctance of the major labels to meet a growing de­mand left the field wide open for independent entrepreneurs like Syd Nathan.

The postwar independent record business was risky and brawl­ing—but Syd Nathan was a pugnacious entrepreneur. As an associate later recalled, he was a "short, round, rough, gruff man with a nose like Porky Pig and two Coca-Cola bottles for eyeglasses." He smoked cigars, growled hoarsely, and governed his record label like a modern-day fiefdom, barking out orders to underlings. He turned King into one of the few vertically integrated operations in the music business. He owned his own studio, he owned the plant that stamped his records, and he owned the press that printed King's record jack­ets. He also drove hard bargains, offering his race and folk artists a flat fee to record, and taking care to purchase the copyright on virtu­ally every song that his label issued. The most lucrative aspect of the music business is song publishing: whoever owns the publishing rights to a piece of music is in a position to make money every time the sheet music or a recording of the song is sold, and virtually every time the music is performed live, or a recording of it is broadcast. Trying to maximize his profits, Nathan became a virtuoso at imagi­natively exploiting his catalogue of songs, having his folk acts record race songs that he owned, and vice versa: one of Wynonie Harris' biggest hits was a remake of an earlier country hit for King, Hank Penny's "Bloodshot Eyes." Cheerfully philistine by temperament, Nathan took special pride in making money from smutty songs no other label would touch, churning out off-color records with titles like "I Want a Bowlegged Woman," the notorious "Work With Me Annie," and its equally notorious sequel, "Annie Had a Baby."

"The first thing you learn is that everyone is a liar," Syd Nathan once snapped to an inquiring reporter: "The only thing that matters is the song. Buy the song, own the song, but remember, no matter what anyone tells you, they are liars until they have convinced you they are telling the truth."

Nathan's vulgarity was legendary—but in Wynonie Harris, he met his match. In 1947, Nathan and an associate journeyed to New York City to talk Harris into signing with King. As Nathan told the story a few years later, they found Mister Blues "in a backstreet dingy hotel in Harlem. . . . And when we knocked on the door, he says 'come in,' and there were three gals in the room with him. All naked. So one of them opened her mouth, and he threw her out in the hall without any clothes on. ... So we sat there talking to this drunk, stupid indi­vidual—and if he were here I'd tell it to him (he's got a little more sense since then)—till six o'clock in the morning." As the sun rose in the east, Harris signed with King.

"Good Rockin' Tonight" was the first in a series of best-sellers that Harris recorded for Nathan's label. The consistent popularity of his recordings for King over the next five years made him wealthy and famous.

"As a statement of fact, clean of any attempt to brag about it, I'm the highest-paid blues singer in the business," Harris boasted in 1954 (just as his star was starting to fade). "I'm a $1,500 a week man. Most of the other fellows sing for $50 to $75 a night. I don't. That is why I'm no Broadway star. The crooners star on the Great White Way and get swamped with Coca-Cola-drinking bobby-soxers and other 'jail bait.' I star in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri and get those who have money to buy stronger stuff and my records to play while they drink it. I like to sing to women with meat on their bones and that long, green stuff in their pockets. You find them mostly down south. As a matter of fact, I like all kinds of women, regardless of what color they are or what size and shape they may have. Just so long as they're breathing, that's me!"

Such vainglory was a sign of "good rockin' " to come. For Wynonie Harris and those who would follow in his footsteps, from Chuck Berry to Mick Jagger to Prince, the new music would, in time, become what Big Joe Turner's blues had been at the Sunset in Kansas City—"a way of life," a free life, an "only life." Organized, like jump, around the single-minded pursuit of simple musical pleasures, rock, too, would hold out the promise of wealth, of fame, of physical gratification without measure or limit.

-end