The radio stations didn’t have any problem playing music by black singers. Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard, on and on were played frequently. White artists did cover black songs. Black artists covered white songs. Pop artists covered country songs. Country artists covered pop and rock songs. Pat Boone and Little Richard both had versions of “Tutti Frutti” in the top 10 at the same time, and the same radio stations were playing both. Many songs had two versions by different bands, one on the east coast and one on the west coast. An example would be, The Slades (Texas) and The Shields (California) both had hit releases of “You Cheated” in 1958.
I don’t know anything about the music business, but this practice of covering that was so common in the 1950’s no longer exists. Copyright laws probably have been perfected since then.
To answer the OP, I never knew anybody that thought Buddy Holly was black, and I never heard of anybody’s parents refusing to let them listen to black music. The most common parental reaction was: “I wish this crazy rock ‘n’ roll fad would hurry up and go away.” It didn’t!
Gotta go with the Martian. These “horror” stories about the early days of rock and roll are really exaggerations. I wonder where they come from. Racism was indeed much more blatant in the 1950s, but as John Carter says, we got to hear both Pat Boone and Little Richard sing the songs.
And thinking that Buddy Holly was black–??? Criminy.
A quick Google search came up with a synopsis of Queen career in 1980:
Interestingly, I can’t find any reliable corroboration. John Deacon is quoted saying they were surprised to find out that “black radio stations” were playing it, but I see nothing to suggest that they thought Queen was a black band.
Hmm. I’ll have to hunt for my old cassettes. I’m fairly certain that I read it in liner notes. I must concede, that perhaps it is indeed an urban legend based on an embellishment of Deacon’s remarks.
I was in my teens when Buddy Holly was popular. We lived in a small town one hundred miles from the nearest city, but we knew that Buddy Holly was white.
Until the early to mid-fifties, I heard a lot of music recorded by white singers – Rosemary Clooney, Patti Page, Kay Starr, Teresa Brewer, Perry Como and the country music singers. Then there was Bill Haley and then after Elvis and Carl Perkins, we began to hear more black musicians and rock and roll.
We didn’t know who was black and who was white and we didn’t care. We just kept listening to a very young Wink Martindale spinning those platters at WHBQ in Memphis.
When I was 12, I remember a friend making a reference to Elvis. I asked who Elvis was. “That guy that was dating Betty Sue C. He’s made a record.”
Yes, but aside from the spelling error, I’ve seen that same paragraph elsewhere – it seems to be copied almost verbatim from the source I remember reading (about ten years ago).
I still think it’s an exaggeration of Deacon’s comments.
If I feel motivated enough, I’ll see if I can find my old cassette. I’m 90% sure that’s where I read it. On some “Classic Queen” liner notes or something. It’s just bugging me that I can’t find the original source.
I’m still confused on this one. I always assumed he was a whiny white South African guy but I was talking to a friend whose son does events with the DMB and my friend was mentioning the mixed race nature of the band: the black violin player, “and of course, Dave…”
That quote about Queen is factually incorrect, so I’d take it with a grain of salt–there have been other foreign artists apart from the Stones, the Beatles and Queen who have had the #1 hit of the year in the US, including Lulu and Andy Gibb. (Maybe it means foreign group… even so, there’s the Bee Gees and Wings … but in any case, it’s not accurate.)
The faulty assumption behind a lot of this is that you had to be black, or thought to be black, to appear on the R&B charts. That’s just not so: R&B stations back in the day would play anything their audiences wanted to hear if it was popular enough. For example, Elton John had hits on the R&B charts with “Bennie and the Jets” and “Philadelphia Freedom” and certainly no one at the time was under the impression he was black.
On another front, the first cite I can find for a white artist appearing at the Apollo (since it became a predominantly black theatre in 1914) is bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1933.
Yeah, but so would Italians and Spaniards. I’d like to thank cranky old English guys, and their impersonators, for so muddying the racial definition of “black” as to make it completely unusable.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of Great Balls of Fire, the movie about Jerry Lee Lewis? That one started out the way you describe, but the opening scene of The Buddy Holly Story showed Holly in his late teens/early twenties, setting up with his band at a roller rink.
And if you are thinking of the Buddy Holly movie, no, it was hardly accurate. He wasn’t condemned by his community or his record label; the scene where the preacher condemned him from the pulpit was a complete fabrication. For that matter, the Jerry Lee Lewis movie wasn’t accurate either. All that noise about his being more popular than Elvis, and Elvis seething with resentment—bull. If Jerry Lee was ever more popular than Elvis, it was for maybe two weeks, when Jerry Lee had a single on the charts and Elvis didn’t. And Elvis didn’t hate him; they even got along well enough to jam together once at Sun Studios with Carl Perkins.
