Rock, Roll, & Racism

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Cecil, as usual, gave out some facts in his column What songs beat out “Johnny B. Goode” (#8) on the Billboard charts? but failed to answer the real question.

Questioner Tim Ring seems to be under the impression that people in 1955 thought that seven songs were better than “Johnny B. Goode,” which is why it only got to number eight.

I suppose that’s possible. Lots of songs, as well as movies, books, and every other form of art, are thought much more highly of today than they were by their contemporaries.

That’s unlikely in Chuck Berry’s case. The bottom line is that this was 1958 and Berry was black. As a black performer he wouldn’t have been played on many radio stations, his records would only be found in black record shops, and covers of the song by white performers would have been favored over his. Since the Billboard charts were based on both sales and air play, he started out with a huge disadvantage that neither he nor any black rock performer could overcome.

According to Fred Bronson’s The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, the first black entertainers to have a #1 hit in the rock era were The Platters when “My Prayer” went to the top on August 4, 1956. They were an old-fashioned signing group and “My Prayer” was a slow romantic ballad, decidedly not rock. They would have another non-rock number one, “Twilight Time” on April 21, 1958.

That set the pattern for all black number ones of the era, most of which were remakes of non-rock-era songs and none of which were even written by black songwriters, with the exception of Sam Cooke’s lovely (but non-rock) “You Send Me,” #1 on December 2, 1957.

The biggest hit of them all was done by Tommy Edwards with the extremely non-rock “It’s All in the Game” on September 29, 1958. This was a hit in 1951 when Carl Sigman added lyrics to a little tune written by Chicago banker Charles Gates Dawes, who would become a trivia answer when he became Vice President under Calvin Coolidge. Edwards remade the song in 1958 and it became a bigger hit, with six weeks at the top. Nothing to do with the rock era, though.

The first song to hit #1 that can be called rock by a black entertainer is “Stagger Lee,” a remake of “Stack-o-Lee,” a traditional folk song, on February 9, 1959. The first rock song written in the modern age to hit #1 was Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City,” by Leiber & Stoller, and even that was a blues classic they had penned in 1952. The first black rock #1 to be written after 1955 was Hank Ballard’s “The Twist,” in the version done by Chubby Checker that hit the top on September 19, 1960.

That’s right. The entire 1950’s went by without a black rock song hitting number one on the charts.

No Chuck Berry. No Little Richard. No Ray Charles. Not because they didn’t write good songs. Because their songs didn’t get played on the radio. Rock was jungle music. Negros and colored boys weren’t acceptable for the ears of white teenagers. That’s why Johnny B. Goode only went to #8.

For completists and nitpickers, the artist who did song 6 on Cecil’s list, “He’s Got The Whole World (In His Hands),” was Laurie London. Somebody should edit the column to include his name. (He’s a trivia answer himself, as one of the handful of people to have their one charting song hit #1 and then never appear again.)

2

Exemplary.

So much so it merits at least one response even if it’s largely irrelevant. We can only go one better than the US in the 1950s with The Teenagers (featuring Frankie Lymon) and Why Do Fools Fall In Love which reached #1 on 20 July 1956 and stayed there for three weeks. The group’s personnel comprised three black and two Puerto Rican members. There’s some dispute as to the authorship of the song but it was almost certainly written contemporaneously by a pair of band members, one of each ethnic category.

As far as I’m aware the UK Chart(s) have always been based on sales alone.

3

This strikes me as massive hyperbolic exaggeration.

I suppose you could make a case for racism having a role in the lack of #1s by black artists, but certainly Chuck Berry and the others got a lot of radio airplay based on accounts of that era.

Bear in mind also that pop music was more than rock n’ roll. You had people like Patti Page, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin with big fan bases buying records and listening to the radio.

There are also legendary white rock n’ rollers who never had a Billboard #1 hit (Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran, for example). Even Buddy Holly had just one #1 song for his career. Rock in general was viewed with suspicion by the powers that be, and had to compete with an immense amount of schlock.

So it wasn’t just racism that was involved.

4

You’re conflating two issues, which overlap but are still distinct: the growth of rock 'n roll stations around the country in the 1950s and the playing of records by black entertainers on those stations. (And to a lesser extent, the growth of stores selling rock 'n roll and the lesser growth of stores that sold black rock 'n roll side by side to white.)

The first was slow, the second was even slower. Rock records did not dominate the top hit charts in the 1950s as they would later, but the simple fact is that it was possible to find number one rock records made by white entertainers from the very beginning - the first #1 in Bronson’s books is (We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets - and the explosion that was Elvis guaranteed that whatever type of music he sang went quickly to the top of charts.

I use charts plural because until 1958 Billboard published several charts every week, including Best Sellers in Stores, Most Played In Juke Boxes, Most Played by Jockeys and the Honor Roll of Hits which became the Top 100. The true test was the Best Sellers in Stores list, later renamed Best Selling Pop Singles in Stores. On August 4, 1958 Ricky Nelson’s Poor Little Fool was the first number one on the Hot 100 and the Hot 100 stayed as the definitive chart for 45 years, i.e. up to the time the book was written.

The point of this is that is was more difficult for black groups and entertainers to be sold outside of black record shops; more difficult for them to get placed in jukeboxes, more difficult for them to make the playlist of any but a few radical jocks. And the difficulty was caused by one and only one factor: race. Any discrimination of white rockers was far overshadowed by uglier, more widespread, and more efficient discrimination regarding black rockers.

Black rockers had two hurdles to overcome. White rockers only one. That black rockers came close to equity even with that handicap indicates how powerful they were as a draw. That despite the closeness they never closed the gap indicates how wide the gulf was or was intended to be.

I read a good history of the rise of the rock station that would also play black music. Probably found it in the library so I’ll have to look for a name. Outlaws and pirates they were, outsiders bucking trends and convention. But rarely could they land more than a single station in a market.

The coming of the almost all white British invasion coupled with the almost all white California sound created even fewer niches for black entertainers for a while, especially with dominant Motown sucking up all the space for black acts with a corporate interest in avoiding rock for soul and r&b and other variations they found easier to control. Gets complicated in the 60s.

No matter. Race colored everything from every direction. It can’t be eliminated from any aspect of the discussion. It just took much longer to achieve a modicum of equality. And then it was no longer the 50s.

5

I’m having a little trouble here. Now, I was just a kid in the 50s, so I can only speak to the music that my parents and their friends (all white – we lived in a small town in Central Maine where even the chef at the Chinese restaurant was white) listened to. But I know damn well that blacks were accepted in jazz and pop – Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Nat “King” Cole – these were all names I knew.

Not sayin’ there wasn’t racism. God knows there was! But there wasn’t a 360-degree Chinese wall between the races, either. It was more complicated than that (isn’t it always?).