Fuck you, man…here comes an enraged Pete Seeger to chop your power cord with his ax!
– Old urban legend about Dylan’s first electric show at the Newport folk festival NOT FACTUAL but fun
Thank you to each and every one of you, it all adds up to an interesting survey of what was going on at the time.
Good lord above, I was listening to this song last night! It evoked the strangest reaction. “I’m so happy to have my guts flensed! This’ll take my goddam wife down a peg or two, she’s so goddam happy all the time, I’ll show her! And I’ll rope in my son too, just to really fuck over her entire life!”
This is interesting, sounds like the sort of thing that you might hear coming out of houses if you walked around on a nice summer evening perhaps. I’ll have a listen when I get home.
I don’t know much about Sinatra and Co, were they coasting by this point? Wiki says Sinatra had his first success in the war years, did he ever do anything that pushed the envelope?
What was the attitude towards country music at the time? What was the stereotypical listener like?
Not really coasting; Sinatra did some good work in the early 60s, but it wasn’t quite as innovative as it was in the 50s. Part of it was that the top songwriters were squeezed out by rock in the 50s, and the newer non-rock songwriters were just not as talented.
Country was a niche and most popular in the South, but not nationwide. A few country artists did break through (Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jimmy Dean*), but they were outliers. Rock acts were far more likely to steal from blues performers than country ones.
*Now best known for his sausage. :eek:
60s country was patsy cline …jim reeves roger miller and has a “more commercial studio” and the like its what johnny willie and Waylon and co rebelled against with the “outlaw” movement … its also when country divorced western…
Syd Dale is totally Bachelor Pad Music; you can hear the Esquivel influences even with the volume turned down to 1.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Errol Garner, perhaps best known for the song Misty and the classic Concert By The Sea album (1955), he was still very popular throughout the 1960s.
I a not a big fan of pianists in general, but Garner’s sweeping and fluid technique transcends the instrument; he was truly a master.
As someone who is a flower child of the ‘60s, I can tell you that my contemporaries had little interest in those songs. Our music was more Rock N Roll, black-oriented, counter-culture stuff, culminating in the bands at Woodstock. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mitch Miller were all from our parents’ generation. Ours was more CCNY, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner, Motown, with a little Hootenanny mixed in. Lawrence Welk? I is to laff! That’s grandpa’s generation!
Here are some that the cool kids probably didn’t listen to:
[ul]
[li]El Paso - Marty Robbins[/li][li]Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool - Connie Francis[/li][li]Volare - Bobby Rydell[/li][li]Theme from The Apartment - Ferrante & Teicher[/li][li]Calcutta - Lawrence Welk[/li][li]Crazy - Patsy Cline[/li][li]Midnight in Moscow - Kenny Ball[/li][li]Stranger on the Shore - Acker Bilk[/li][li]Alley Cat - Bent Fabric[/li][li]The Lonely Bull - Herb Alpert[/li][li]Sukiyaki - Kyu Sakamoto[/li][li]More - Kai Winding[/li][li]Washington Square - Village Stompers[/li][li]Java - Al Hirt[/li][li]Hello, Dolly! - Louis Armstrong[/li][li]Everybody Loves Somebody - Dean Martin[/li][li]Ringo - Lorne Greene[/li][li]A Walk in the Black Forest - Horst Jankowski[/li][/ul]
Actually, Herb Alpert was very popular with youth, and his contribution to rock music (through his record company, A&M Records) was immense.
Some of the cool kids must have been listening to it, as it became a regular part of the Grateful Dead’s repertoire.
As has been said, country was dominant in the South (I grew up in the south, not the South), and watched Porter Wagoner in the 60s to the early 70s. “Hee Haw” was also fantastically popular.
The stereotypical listener would’ve been white, working class, probably not college educated. (People who went to college would listen to jazz, classical, or other “egghead” music. Country music was for the workin’ man.) Another popular song that describes the time is “Red Necks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.” Archie Bunker would’ve listened to country music had he lived in Georgia or Alabama.
Johnny Cash added horns to “Ring of Fire” (written by June Carter) & made it a hit; those horns were inspired by Herb Alpert. Cash was certainly country–although he’d started out at Sun Records with the early rockers. And he worked the border between country & folk–playing the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 & giving Dylan a guitar.
In the early 60’s, the hippie thing hadn’t begun. The younger folks liked folk (even the jokers in madras shirts) plus surf music, girl groups, Motown, etc. Some instrumentals (like “Midnight in Moscow”) were fun & “Theme From A Summer Place” was popular for The Slow Dance. I graduated high school in 1966–when things had gotten “hipper.” One wag suggested “Eve of Destruction” for Class Song. The winner? “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks.
There was still some stone Country produced in those days, but it was mostly “non-hip.” (Cash was always a pioneer.) Except the Beatles did “Act Naturally” by Buck Owens & the Buckaroos. A bit later, country-rock started out in LA. Eventually, Willie Nelson returned to Texas & rednecks stopped beating up every longhair they saw…
Fully half of these I loved, and I still love today! Let’s add ‘Cast Your Fate To the Wind’! by Sounds Orchestral. And ‘Exodus’ by Ferrante and Teicher - I still find that one a bit thrilling.
The epitome of uncool songs from the '60s: Walk Right In. God, I hated that song. To torture myself, I looked it up. Seems it was written eons ago by an old black blues guy, Gus Cannon, and the royalties from it revitalized his career. Good for him.
Hah! I own about half of those through inheriting the record collection of my sometimes-cool, mostly nerdy-cool at best, parents.
Thanks mom and dad!
Remember that cool, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. At best, it has sandy foundations.
And to everyone that is asserting that this era wasn’t a wasteland: I wholeheartedly agree. Pop is usually a wasteland of sameness. This era had no obvious dominant force, so people experimented, and some rose to the top. IMHO, Instrumental Surf music is the fifth style of music that was developed by Americans, and it’s still not quite as respected as Blues, Jazz, Country and Rock n’ Roll. That may be because it’s a syncretic combination of most of those, but that’s no excuse, they were syncretic themselves.
Woah, that’s an aircraft carrier of a haircut. Either way, I’ve always liked the twelve string riff and the nonsense lyrics.
Maybe Wanda Jackson’s version is cooler?
I thought I knew about music–Ralph Peer was that RCA guy who “discovered” country music stars Jimmie Rodgers & the Carter Family in Bristol Tennessee. Reading Barry Mazor’s Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music, I learned he was much more. Before RCA, he worked for OKeh Records–pioneering the recording of jazz, blues, gospel & hillbilly music.
Peer’s career continued & evolved as technology evolved; he traveled the world, signing artists & getting their music out. Early on, he recorded Gus Cannon & one of his jug bands. (Peer* liked* jug band music.) Peer’s deals made money for everybody–including the original artists. I esteem the Lomaxes, but most of their discoveries just got recorded.
So when “Walk Right In” became a folk-pop hit, Gus Cannon actually made some more money. And resumed a long-moribund performing career. I didn’t mind hearing that single on the radio, but I preferred the jug band stylings of Jim Kweskin’s various crews. (Lots of Cannon’s stuff is streaming on Amazon Prime.)
Oh, speaking of “El Paso”–fiddler Alvin Crow sang the song when his Pleaseant Valley Boys were part of the Cosmic Cowboy thang. His band is still playing honky tonks like Austin’s Broken Spoke–& he probably still sings “El Paso.”
I’ve always had a soft spot for that song since the time–I must have been in my 20s–I wandered into this dark, dingy little guitar shop I used to frequent (“Jim’s House of Guitars”), and there were a bunch of *old *guys with fiddles and mandolins sitting in the front room wailing on “El Paso.”
Let’s see… my parents were pretty relentlessly un-hip in the 1960s. Mom was pretty much a churchy girl, and Dad was attending a full-time ROTC program in the latter half of the decade.
Dad’s musical tastes, while not exactly “hip”, were kind of eclectic, being a combination of country, serious jazz, and a bit of rock, while Mom’s were straight-up 1950s-1960s pop- Ricky Nelson, Carole King, Roy Orbison, etc…
My mom had a standard-issue early 60’s college girl LP collection. Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba were a big part of it, as well as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and the inimitable Bill Black and his Combo. Oh yeah, heavy on the Mario Lanza for some reason. I’m sure I’m missing some.
I know you’re joking here, but let’s really try to avoid saying this to anyone even jokingly, please.