Unearthing the uncharted prehistory of pop
An anxious BBC memo of 1933 advocated ‘a general policy of the elimination of crooning’
★★★★☆
There is an origin myth of pop in which Elvis Presley’s explosive arrival as the first rock ’n’ roll idol in 1956 represents the Big Bang, the cosmic birth of a brand new music, fixated on youth culture. Then, with the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, the parameters of popular music became superheated, expanding in all possible directions at a phenomenal rate, establishing pop as perhaps the most pervasive and significant art form of our times. Bob Stanley, co-founder of alt-pop outfit Saint Etienne, has already taken issue with that narrative in his hefty 2013 Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop, which starts earlier – in 1952. Now, he has followed it with something even more dauntingly ambitious: a prehistory of pop.
His 656-page Let’s Do It delights in demonstrating the profound grip popular song and dance music have exercised on Western culture since becoming a mass-market business in the late Victorian age. “Popular music wasn’t invented with the gramophone,” he notes, evoking a time when songs were disseminated by sheet music and pianos, which were once ubiquitous.
In 1900, popular music meant anything from hymns and folk songs to music hall, vaudeville, minstrelsy, parlour music, operetta and marching bands. But the development of musical trends with a rapid turnover was accelerated when Emil Berliner’s 78-revolutions-per-minute flat 10in discs supplanted Thomas Edison’s cumbersome wax cylinders on the newfangled recording machines in 1901, the same year the first use of the word “pop” appeared, in an advert in the British theatrical paper The Stage.
Stanley guides us through the transference of musical power from Britain to America, via ragtime, Dixieland, blues, jazz, barbershop quartets, and the ultramodern syncopated sounds of swing, the brilliant songcraft of Broadway and Hollywood musicals, and the rise of solo superstars, culminating in the post-war sophistication of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, set against the more raw and energetic black grooves of rhythm and blues.
Stanley crams his enormously entertaining tale with anecdotes and lost stars, such as Whispering Jack Smith, whose lungs had been damaged by a German gas attack in the First World War, but who found his limited five-note range was perfect for the new medium of radio, introducing an intimacy at odds with the stentorian delivery of Al Jolson and singers of the pre-microphone era. Fellow crooner Rudy Vallée effectively invented the public-address system in 1929, hooking up a home-made amplifier with a stack of radios and calling it an “electronic megaphone”. His soft and sensual singing style inspired a wave of sexual hysteria and official opprobrium that should be familiar to any fan of contemporary pop. Older music fans considered it “girlish” for grown men to sing tender words of love. The Atlantic Monthly drily commented that “jazz is vastly more calamitous than was the material havoc wrought by the World War”. Congress was badgered about censoring music on radio and record, while a BBC memo of 1933 decried this “particularly odious form of singing” and advocated “a general policy of the elimination of crooning”, which “should be obliterated straight away”.
Without belabouring comparisons, Stanley has fun spotting the early appearances of supposedly modern pop trends – new dance crazes, fresh outrages – in perky footnotes. In 1917, as America joined the First World War, the brashly patriotic Tin Pan Alley song Over There became the number one sheet music hit, popularised by light-opera singer Enrico Caruso. “Almost a century later,” Stanley notes, “it would become as ubiquitous in Britain as the jingle for the GoCompare ad.”
His passion for the great composers of what came to be known as the American Songbook shines through, as he explains how “the most significant song in the development of American pop” was Alexander’s Ragtime Band, written by a scrawny 22-year-old Irving Berlin. More than a quarter of a century later, Berlin would write White Christmas, still the bestselling record of all time.
Time zones overlap as pop plays a constant game of push-and-pull with its own past. There are chapters on pivotal figures, including Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Glenn Miller,
Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra, who Stanley describes as “the fulcrum” of his book, who “understood and assimilated the past” and “dictated the immediate future”, while “the various phases of his career – pin-up boy vocalist, album-oriented adult singer, late-period duets – are still a blueprint for artists in the 21st century”. More problematic is Al Jolson, the first superstar of 20th century pop, whose blackface minstrelsy feels difficult to assimilate into the story, or forgive.
Blatant racism is a constant nagging subtext. Black artists were segregated and patronised, their innovations mercilessly exploited by white musicians. Benny Goodman built his orchestral swing on arrangements by pioneering black pianist Fletcher Henderson, who had simply not been able to get enough work to keep his own orchestra together. As Stanley’s prehistory ends, Elvis Presley emerges as the symbolic godhead of a new pop order, but the reader now sees that his thrilling sound had been prefigured in the 1930s and 1940s by black artists, from Count Basie to Muddy Waters.
Let’s Do It is an essential book for lovers of popular music, an erudite, funny account of how something so ephemeral has had such a lasting impact. Since delving into its pages, I keep seeing reminders of the past in pop’s present, where the two biggestselling British stars of today – Ed Sheeran and Adele – trade in the same essentials of singalong melodies, big voices and bundles of charisma that drove the music business at the turn of the last century. The song that gives this book its title was composed by Cole Porter in 1928. Nearly 100 years on, he would have surely been delighted to know we are still doing it, still falling in love to the sound of pop.