I’m in my mid-40s. If I’m working in my garage, there’s a radio on, tuned to a local station that plays mostly classic rock from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Which is interesting, because a good bit of this music made its debut before I developed any musical interest at all - and some of it even came out before I was born.
Let’s back everything up about 45 years. Imagine it’s the late 1960s, and you’re in your garage, wrenching on your car, playing songs by people who were young adults when you were a little kid in the 1920s and 30s. What sorts of music from that time are most analogous to the classic rock of the 1960s and 70s? When kids in the 1920s and 30s rebelled against their parents and said “I’m gonna be in a band,” what sort of music did they play? What did kids listen to when they went to raucous parties?
Rebellious and raucous? Maybe what was then called “Negro music”?
The migration of African Americans to the urban industrial centers of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s created a new market for jazz, blues, and related genres of music, often performed by full-time musicians, either working alone or in small groups. The precursors of rhythm and blues came from jazz and blues, which overlapped in the late-1920s,1930s through the work of musicians such as the Harlem Hamfats, with their 1936 hit “Oh Red”, as well as Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and T-Bone Walker. There was also increasing emphasis on the electric guitar as a lead instrument, as well as the piano and saxophone.
The concept of “oldies” developed in the rock era. My parents listened to showtunes; my grandparents listened to classical. If the radio was on, they’d listen to the news and maybe a morning show, which was generally more talk like the Today Show is now (though more genial).
It would have been hard to find a station dedicated to songs of the 50s, let alone any time before that. Popular music was considered disposable.
In the 20s and 30s, teens would never think “I’m gonna join a band” as a sign of rebelliousness. They’d listen to jazz, but they wouldn’t think of getting a group together (partly because a jazz band of the time required more people than a rock band). Once jazz became mainstream in the 20s, teens and adults listened to the same music until rock came along.
People also did things without any musical background.
“Race music” and blues was not played in white households except by some teens. And you needed to be near an area with a large Black population to find a radio station playing it.
As an early Boomer, my parents were little kids in the 20’s; they were older kids & young adults in the 30’s & the Depression was going on. For them, there was no secure suburbia to rebel against.
My mother kept learning about new music as long as she lived. But her heyday was the Big Band era. And Western Swing–but back then Bob Wills had a very big band. Some of the “new” music she liked was by Asleep at the Wheel; she used to sing a few lines from “Across the Alley from the Alamo.”
My grandmother was musical & tried to teach Mom the mandolin. By the time I knew Grandma, she got her music from the Broadman Hymnal. But she was from Indiana & Mom was glad to find a CD by The Hoosier Hotshots.
Of course, we also had recordings of “standards” & show tunes.
My father was probably into the Big Bands as well–as an 8th Air Force vet, there was the Glenn Miller connection. I have two 45 “albums” of his–collections of Irish tunes & Stephen Foster songs by one of the more obscure Irish tenors. (His parents were immigrants.) If he’d lived into the era of LP’s, I bet he’d have loved the Clancy Brothers…
American Folk Music was huge in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez. Tom Paxton, the Chad Mitchell Trio and a host of others were around then. The Kingston Trio even had their own TV show.
It got over shadowed by what came later, but it’s still damn fine music.
Kids listened to people like Rudy Vallee, Frank Sinatra, and later in the 50s, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dean Martin, and other crooners began to thought of as the “oldies” when Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and other fathers of rock ‘n’ roll came on the scene.
The “rebel” mindset didn’t root until the postwar 50s, when baby boomers began being teenagers (Marlon Brando’s movie “The Wild One” is one example of how that started). It really began to flower though in the 60s with the counter culture.
Frank Sinatra generated exactly the same teen response in the 1940s as Elvis did in the 50s and the Beatles in the 60s. He was also mocked by adults in much the same way.
Hepcats didn’t last long. Jazz changed out from under them. By the 1960s, modern jazz was dominated by esoteric, difficult, atonal music. You couldn’t dance to it.
My parents listened to what today would be called smooth music. They liked Mitch Miller’s and Lawrence Welk’s shows. The radio station that was on all day had the same kind of music, with crooners, show tunes, and slow instrumentals. Jazz was unknown and invisible in our house. So were blues, country, folk, r&b, and rock ‘n’ roll. I started listening to our Top 40 station in 1963 but I built a crystal radio from a set and listened via an earbud. It didn’t get stereo, but no radio played stereo so it didn’t matter.
As for bands: people automatically think of kids starting bands because you can do rock with three chords and an attitude. Jazz always demanded superior skills and was out for nearly everyone. If you were that good you sat in with other peoples’ bands and worked your way up.
Our rock culture was a response to that. C&W (country and western), folk, doo wop, skiffle in the UK, allowed for mere proficiency to begin and needed few to no instruments or that expertise. Rock ‘n’ roll melded those pieces into a louder and more danceable music with amplifiers. It was something new, a communal form of music that didn’t quite exist in the 30s, with maybe country jamborees as an acoustic precursor.
So the answer really is that oldies culture is a brand new thing. Music had almost completely turned over every ten years or so before the 60s. Now it lasts forever. You can talk about folk or classical songs being ageless, but no culture like this ever existed before.
I remember reading in Nick Tosche’s biography of Dean Martin how depressing (and infuriating) it was for singers like those in the Rat Pack to go from being the ultimate in “cool” in the early '60s to dominating the “easy listening” charts in the '70s. By the time I finished high school (1973), even Dean’s NBC variety show (which I used to love watching) was under attack for all of its boozing humor and pretty girls.
My mom wasn’t exactly middle-aged in the 60s - she turned 30 in 1964. She used to listen to standards, folk music, big band music, and most of all, Ella Fitzgerald. She loved her some Ella. Needless to say, my attempts to share the Beatles with her were met with less than enthusiasm.
My parents were in their 50s during the 1960s. My father mostly listened to classical music, with an occasional crossover into big bands. My mother listened to standards, primarily performed by handsome baritones like Jack Jones.
Of course, I’d never describe either one as “rebellious.”
My dad (b. 1918) had terrible taste in music. He was an engineer and music just wasn’t his focus. My mom (b. 1923) liked stuff from the 1940s, Tony Bennett, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller. She had an oddly specific dislike for Sinatra. On TV, they both kind of liked Arthur Godfrey and Lawrence Welk.
Joseph Campbell wrote on myth & (mostly Jungian) psychology–his modern “followers” usually boil his stuff down to New Age glurge, rather than read his rather dense (in a good way) original books.
As a Columbia student, he played in a jazz band. His parents paid his way in school, so he socked away the cash. When he graduated, the Depression hit. But it wasn’t a bad time to be a young man with no responsibilities & a few bucks in savings. He embarked on the life of a bohemian scholar…
My parents usually listened to classical music in the 60’s. Although my dad did ask me to by “Green Onions” when I began collecting singles in the '70’s.
JFK, who was 46 when he died in 1963, liked some rock and roll (his friend Ben Bradlee wrote in Conversations with Kennedy of dancing the Twist at small White House parties) and Broadway show tunes. He also went to jazz clubs occasionally when in NYC. His fondness for the cast album of Camelot led his widow to suggest the name as shorthand for his brief but promising service as President.
Sorry to nitpick but the only baby boomers who began being teenagers during the 50s were the ones born in 1946 and they were only 13 when the decade ended. The ones who embraced the “rebel” mindset were born in the generation just before the boomers between the years of 1928 and 1945 (i.e., the “silent” generation). They experienced the first wave of rock n’ roll while most of the boomers were obsessed with Howdy Doody.
My parents were of the same generation. When I was a kid in the '50s, I remember my mother singing along with her AM radio in the kitchen. She listened to only one station, and it played standards, Broadway, big band, etc. Her favorite singer was Bing Crosby.
Meanwhile, my father played classical and Broadway. I still have his collection of classical 78s.
Decades later, post-2000, when my elderly mother was living with me, I came home one night to find her watching a concert on PBS of The Mamas and The Papas. She was totally into it, and asked me whether I’d ever heard of them.
