I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America

by Albin Zak

"In Albin J. Zak III's highly original study, phonograph records are not just the medium for disseminating songs but musical works unto themselves. Fashioned from a mix of copyright law, recording studios and techniques, the talent of musicians and disc jockeys, the ingenuity and avarice of producers, and the appetites of record buyers, the all-powerful marketplace Zak describes is an unruly zone where music of, by, and for the people is made and anointed."
---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: A History

"Wrestling clarity from the exuberant chaos of early rock 'n' roll, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody redefines our understanding of the record in the shaping of the post–World War II soundscape. Zak tracks the story which extends from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra through Elvis and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and Bob Dylan with excursions into dozens of lesser known, but crucial, players in a game with few established rules. A crucial addition to the bookshelf."
---Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America

"I Don't Sound Like Nobody is a superb account of the transformation of American popular music in the 1950s. Albin Zak insightfully explores what recording actually means in terms of the process of making and consuming music. His discussion of the legal, aesthetic, and industrial ramifications of changes in the recording process over the course of the 1950s will make popular music scholars and record collectors reconsider what they think they know about the period."
---Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records

"Informative, original, and entertaining. Through a narrative that is not only enlightening but also compelling, I Don't Sound Like Nobody probes the sources and mechanisms of change within post-war American popular music, shedding a cultural and historical light on the convergence of musical idioms that created '50s rock and roll."
---Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop Score

"From the birth of the record industry through the legacy of Presley, the development of rock and roll, and the Beatles 'stunning arrival on the world's stage,' Albin Zak takes us on a journey of exceptional scholarship. The breadth of coverage and deep examination of recordings and repertoire reveal the author's reverence and sensitivity to the many dimensions and origins of this complex musical soundscape."
---William Moylan, author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording

The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.

The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.

The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans---all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.

Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.





Albin J. Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist.

Jacket design by Paula Newcomb

Jacket photograph © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Genres: Music, History

328 pages, Hardcover

First published August 26, 2010

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE 1950s

What a mad whirligig farrago of ghastly ballads, piano medleys, novelties, Italian supper club, trad jazz, skiffle, rockabilly, music hall, swing, standards, comedy sketches, incidental music, moody instrumentals, revolting children, slurpy strings, very high ladies' voices, polite intonation, voices you never ever hear the like of today, expressing sentiments no one has actually felt, ever, a huge trawl through memories I myself never had but yes, it still sounds like nostalgia to me, it's all part of our weird reverberating echoing fantasy lives, twangling and twingling in our unconscious mind until Freud himself jumps from his chair and tangos fiercely about the consulting room, singing loudly, in a German accent :

Just like a torch you set my soul within me burning
I must go on along the road, no returning
And though it burns me, it turns me into ashes
My whole world crashes, without your kiss of fire!


Having listened to a lot of this stuff recently, here's an original observation :

Those 1950s musicians and composers were all a pack of thieves!

But wait, I can refine that further :

All musicians are a pack of thieves!

No, let's get it right :

All musicians are a pack of thieves but it’s okay!

When I was listening to all this 50s stuff I started by noticing that there were a great number of Elvis clones. I also noticed that there were also a fair number of Bing Crosby clones, and later on, Buddy Holly clones (Bobby Vee and Adam Faith to name but two). So someone comes along with an original sound and oh boy, they get ripped off mercilessly. Then – of course – there were cover records by the ton, which is where a British artist (usually) makes an identical copy of an American record to steal as many sales as possible before the (always superior) original gets released. In America there were famously white covers of black hits, like Sh-Boom and anything by Little Richard. Then – there were artists and composers who stole from themselves. This is where the follow up record is as similar as possible to the previous hit without actually being the previous hit. Elvis himself copied All Shook Up, he wasn’t immune to this disease. Then – there were a multitude of arrangers and musicians who stole blatantly riffs and string parts and backup singer parts and drum sounds, anything stealable, for their own records. Then, of course, the composers stole from classical music, but that’s more like a noble tradition. So you get an Elvis clone singing a close copy of a Ricky Nelson song with an arrangement copped from a Fats Domino record.
Then I thought – hold on. What about a) sampling, and b) folk music. Sampling is now its own noble tradition, and given that Dub Be Good To me by Beats International is one of my all time favourite records, I can’t complain. Also Portishead’s first album – which probably wouldn’t exist without samples. And then, before all this Thomas Edison malarkey, when music was passed on from gob to ear, what you got was that bright bold patchwork thing called folk music – in which we find a set of words here given three different melodies there and variations by the hundred, and misrememberings, and making up bits that you’d forgotten, and copying this bit from that song and that bit from the other one, and so on. And that’s all good. It’s the oral tradition. There’s no copyright in the 18th century.

So, the moral, as I say, is that all musicians steal, but that’s okay! Of course they don’t steal all the time, they chuck in glittering lumps of major originality all the time, and they mix the original stuff and the stolen stuff up into a delicious gumbo.
Stealing is good. That is the text for this evening. Thank you. Goodnight.




THREE REVOLUTIONS (and a dog with a waggly tail)


I think there have been three pop revolutions in the last century. The first was when jazz emerged in the 1910s, madly deliriously deliciously steamrollered everything before it in the 1920s and was turned into swing in the 1930s. Swing died in the mid 40s and there was general confusion until the second revolution which was of course rock & roll in the mid 50s. That lasted with many modifications until around the late 80s when hip hop, the third revolution, smashed it to bits and took over. These are generalisations, everything you say about popular culture has to be as there are always a trillion cross-currents and paradoxes and exceptions to the rule happening.

This book is about the delirious period between the death of swing and the takeover of rock, which is, roughly, the 50s, that Janus-faced trembling fearful conforming and yet musically wild & crazy decade. It took only ten years for American to get from The Yellow Rose of Texas by Mitch Miller and his God-fearing chorus and little drummer boys in 1955

She's the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew,
You may talk about your Clementine and sing of Rosalee,
But The Yellow Rose of Texas is the only girl for me!

To Dylan’s amphetamine sneers in 1965

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels
He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice he asks you how it feels
And he says, “Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan

Both very American, but clearly, something changed.


RECORDS (better than most sex)

This book is about records, and how it was only in the 50s when it gradually became clear that records were a thing in themselves, and not merely an advert for a song or a singer. To begin with, the music biz wasn’t really convinced records were a good thing. Because well, if you play a record on the radio, the people hear it for free, so why should they buy it? This reminds me of Spotify and Last FM and all those. So radio was the Spotify of the 40s and 50s. Hah!! However radio stations were often owned by the same companies which made the records so they got themselves in a real tiswas, they didn't know whether they were coming or going.

And the music biz has been paranoid ever since then – Home Taping is Killing Music! Napster is Killing Music! Phil Collins is Killing Music! (Only one of those statements is true.)

HEARTRENDING ANGST OF THE PURISTS

We can imagine easily enough that there were popular song purists with pictures of Gershwin, Kern and Cole Porter in their wallets instead of their children who would swoon over lines like

Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert serenades, little things of jade
And traffic jams and anagrams and bills you never paid
How lovely it was

(Tres tres sophisticated, no?) These people might become homicidal and/or weepy when hearing stuff in the 50s like

I’m so young and you’re so old
This my darling I’ve been told

Or

Well I got a girl who's six feet tall
Sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall

Or

How much is that doggy in the window
The one with the waggly tail?

If these purists worked in the biz they were permanently trying to push the flood waters back down the drain where they were seeping up from. The flood was coming from the ghetto and from those hillbillys in those places between New York and Los Angeles. R&B and C&W – awful stuff. It was banal beyone belief, it was crude, it was shouty and just so so lowbrow. Dropped g’s, blatant innuendo and a complete lack of irony! Those guys lost the argument in the 50s. You couldn’t keep the streams of music from spilling out of their designated riverbeds. Everything began to flow together into a rainbow whirlpool of dreams… one of which was named Elvis Presley.

As the 50s dawned it was standard for an R&B hit to be covered by a pop act and a country act, and a country hit to be covered by an R&B act and a pop act, and so forth. But eventually the damned kids began buying the original record whether it was black or white or city or country – there was no stopping them! Nightmare!

NEW WORD

New word I learned from this book : HETEROGLOT

HETEROGLOTTISM

Musical snobbery was also rampant amongs the singers. There’s a very amusing essay to be written about all the artists who were forced to record songs they absolutely detested,sometimes as straightforwardly as “If I you don’t get your ass back in that studio and sing Come On A My House right now your ass is fired!” You can see why Rosemary (aunt of George) Clooney hated that one though – it’s horrible! (Number One for umpteen weeks though.) Tony Bennett also hated being handed a damn country song to song but he was really wrong – it was Cold Cold Heart and it was another number one. How country was condescended to by those who knew what real music was! Here’s Goddard Lieberson, prez of Colombia Records, telling us that sometimes the country singer’s

vowels are incomprehensibly attenuated, his roulades piercingly nasal, sometimes he strays off pitch, but always his singing is intense and pervaded with compelling emotion

I could imagine Hank Snow barely knew what a roulade was.

SONGS AND RECORDS

Before the 50s, the song was the star, followed by the singer, who may or may not be the star. During the 50s, the record became the star, and who cared who was on it. For instance - The Weavers sang Goodnight Irene, an old folk song with orchestral accompaniment and intrusive background chorus, it was an outre blend, okay it was complete kitsch, but it was the biggest hit of 1950. Novelty was the thing – the people wanted something new. And although part of the biz was turning out these weird rampantly eclectic novelties the other half couldn’t understand what was happening. Records were supplanting songs.

Copyright law reflected the primacy of written texts, which, for music, accorded with the established principle that a work’s enduring identity was preserved in its written form…. But as records formed a newly independent category of musical culture, they stipulated an obvious truth that was slow to be acknowledged. In preserving song, arrangement and performance in a web of fixed relationships, they represented a new kind of work.

So the record had become the irreplaceable thing and the song was the canvas over which the various artists involved painted the grooves. The record was no longer the transparent window through which you aurally received the untransubstantiated song and the singer. But as Patti Page and Les Paul worked their doubletracked magic and as doowop low-fi madness began to overtake the airwaves, transubstantiation was the thing that was happening, every evening. So records were like that other American phenomenon of the 50s, Abstract Expressionism, which insisted that it was not a depiction of anything else, not a window onto anything, it was the thing iself, it was a painting, not a painting OF something.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM 1, CILLA BLACK 0

Zak could have, but doesn’t, refer to the extraordinary case of You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’. When Cilla Black covered Dionne warwick’s original Anyone who had a Heart, she got the No 1 hit in the UK in Feb 64. No one batted an eyelid about it. Well done Cilla, former Cavern cloakroom attendant. When one year later she covered You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, thinking nothing of it, none other than Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Stones, took out full page ads in the UK music press telling pop fans not to buy her version but only the ORIGINAL by the Righteous Brothers. His words:

This advert is not for commercial gain, it is taken as something that must be said about the great new PHIL SPECTOR record, THE RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS singing 'YOU'VE LOST THAT LOVIN' FEELIN''. Already in the American top ten, this is Spector's greatest production, the last word in tomorrow's sound, today, exposing the overall mediocrity of the music industry.


ROCK AND ROLL

Was of course the thing which eventually took over from swing as the dominant form of pop; but as it is a hydraheaded beast and always had a male and female and a mod and rocker side, rock & roll just stirred the cauldron of confusion with a larger ladle. Zak puts it excellently like this:

The confusion over just what rock & roll was stemmed from something no one could know at the time : throughout the early years, rock & roll was more a process transforming the pop mainstream than a musical type. It was part crossover, part appropriation, part revision, part accident and part market dynamics.

DEATH OF ROCK & ROLL 1959

Those that erected the myth of the Death of Rock & Roll, 1959, with Buddy and Eddie dead, Elvis in the army, Little Richard a preacher, Jerry lee shut down and Chuck in jail, were crudely reducing the beautiful surging complexity of American and British music into an endless guerilla war between the indies and the corporations, the rebels and the suits, the visionaries and the accountants, the rockapsychobillies and the teen idols, Sun records and RCA, Memphis and NYC, Little Richard and Pat Boone, grass roots and head office, electric guitar and string section, with good on one side and bad on the other. In perfectly symmetrical fashion this gets focussed down to the 50s-bestriding Elvis. We see him enter the army with A Mess of Blues and One Night in the charts – two authentic rock & blues tracks. When he comes out in 1960, what’s the first thing he records? A version of O Solo Mio. Elvis goes mainstream, rock is co-opted, and dies until kissed back into life by the Beatles 4 years later.
It’s an oft-repeated myth that Zak in his sturdy, unflamboyant and it has to be said rather repetitive manner attempts to demolish in the last chapter of this book.

I would love to dive in and grapple with the stuff that was going in in the period 1960 to 1963, one of my all time favourite periods, but I’m conscious of having rambled on quite a bit already. Anyone who isn’t a diehard fan of popular music will have long since fled this review. If anyone is still reading, then I think this book is for you. It’s pretty good.