The streaming of music gives us a two-dimensional view of pop. Stars that peaked many years aside appear shut to 1 one other, just like the constellations within the night time sky. A younger fan of guitar rock, coming throughout “My Technology” and “Fairly Vacant” for the primary time on a playlist, may think they got here from the identical interval. That would by no means have occurred throughout the vinyl age, when one take a look at the haircuts on the file sleeve would instantly inform you that the Who and the Intercourse Pistols got here from totally different eras of pop. With nothing however the capacious however disordered useful resource of the web to assist us make sense of the huge array of music at our fingertips, what we’d like is a complete handbook, a textual content that gives contextual depth to 120 years of recorded sound.
Step ahead Bob Stanley, the author and musician whose 2014 guide, Yeah Yeah Yeah, achieved the seemingly not possible activity of assembling an accessible historical past of pop music from 1950 to the 2010s. If something could possibly be stated to carry that mammoth 800-page narrative collectively, it’s youngsters: their tradition is Stanley’s main theme. In his new guide, Let’s Do It, he turns his consideration to the primary half of the twentieth century, a time when data had been largely purchased by adults and fashionable music meant ragtime, jazz, blues or swing.
Stanley begins his story in 1901, when Columbia Data switched from utilizing wax cylinders to ten-inch shellac discs which span at 78 revolutions per minute, a format that may survive into the rock’n’roll period. When, three years later, The Billboard, a month-to-month journal that had initially been “dedicated to the pursuits of advertisers, poster printers, invoice posters… and secretaries of festivals”, started writing about fashionable music, the file business started to realize momentum.
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I used to be shocked to study that among the songs that my grandmother would play on the piano at household singalongs within the Nineteen Sixties truly dated from earlier than she was born. When she performed “Lily of Laguna” or “Don’t Dilly Dally on the Approach”, she was reminiscent of the music of her mother and father’ technology, suggesting that nostalgia for the previous days was already a potent pressure at the start of fashionable music. Stanley additionally reveals that one other of the songs we sang, the cockney traditional “Down on the Outdated Bull and Bush”, started life in the United States as an advert for Budweiser, with a refrain that includes the title of the brewer, Anheuser-Busch.
Probably the most dynamic music within the US within the first decade of the twentieth century was ragtime, which Stanley claims “set the template for each successive pop growth”. Not like the music corridor songs that my nan was introduced up on, ragtime made you need to dance. It hit Britain simply earlier than the First World Battle, upsetting an 18-year-old JB Priestley into one thing of an epiphany: “I went over to Leeds to a range present on the Empire and heard ragtime. Abruptly I found the twentieth century, obtrusive and screaming at me.” In comparison with the English tea dance, this was dynamite.
The craze had begun in 1911, when the tune “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” offered over 1,000,000 sheet-music copies and launched the world to Irving Berlin, an immigrant from the Russian empire, who, if he didn’t invent the idea of Tin Pan Alley, actually got here to embody it. The names of his contemporaries might be acquainted to anybody with a passing curiosity in fashionable music: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael.
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Astonishingly, Stanley finds PG Wodehouse amongst them. The creator of Jeeves and Wooster crossed the Atlantic within the first decade of the brand new century, a time when Broadway producers wished music with an English accent. After teaming up with Jerome Kern he grew to become, in Stanley’s opinion, “the primary nice lyricist of American musical theatre” – a view shared by Richard Rodgers who, as songwriting accomplice of each Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein, knew a factor or two about writing musicals.
Because the First World Battle drew to a detailed, jazz exploded out of New Orleans. Stanley argues that the brand new music didn’t evolve out of ragtime – though lots of the early jazz gamers thought they had been enjoying a souped-up model of that syncopated type, till the Authentic Dixieland Jazz Band had successful with the primary jazz recording, “Livery Steady Blues” in 1917. Abruptly, the music they had been enjoying was fashionable – who cared what it was referred to as?
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Whereas jazz supplied the power for the Roaring Twenties, blues emerged from the shadows in the identical decade, pioneered by feminine singers who usually wrote their very own materials. Ma Rainey, whose gold enamel would sparkle when she sang, was the primary to realize fame, and Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and Memphis Minnie adopted in her wake, taking the blues from hire events and juke joints into 500-seat theatres on Chicago’s South Facet.
Duke Ellington is quoted as saying, “Jazz is music, swing is enterprise,” a remark that sums up the event of American fashionable music within the Thirties. Swing is the mountain vary that separates trendy pop from what went earlier than. The mainstreaming of this orchestral type of jazz outraged the purists, who, within the late Forties, cut up into rival camps of trad and trendy in an effort to reinvigorate a musical kind they felt had change into staid.
Though the topic requires a concentrate on American artists, Stanley frequently turns his consideration to the UK, exploring how British artists contributed to the method, shining a lightweight on home pop pioneers whom historical past has forgotten. Black, British and homosexual, Reginald Foresythe was a pianist and composer who went to California in 1930, performed within the Earl Hines band, was a home visitor of Duke Ellington and got here house to make music that he likened to a better type of arithmetic. Twenty years forward of their time, his tone poems had been swept apart by the tsunami of swing.
Stanley proposes Frank Sinatra as “the fulcrum” of his guide, however I’d argue that Glenn Miller is a greater candidate for that function. Not like Sinatra, Miller has no post-war presence, but, greater than another band chief from that period, his tunes are nonetheless acquainted to us at the moment. Miller’s disappearance in 1944, flying over the Channel in a lightweight plane on a foggy day, not solely prefigures the later lack of Buddy Holly – who was killed alongside Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson, aka the Massive Bopper, in a airplane crash in 1959 – however may be argued to represent an earlier “day the music died”.
After the Second World Battle, solo singers got here to the fore and with them rose the thought of the Nice American Songbook. That nostalgia – for tunes from a golden age of musicals, Tin Pan Alley and the silver display screen – is with us nonetheless. It’s the rationale this guide, virtually 600 pages lengthy however neatly divided into 52 chapters, will usually offer you an ear-worm while you learn the title of a tune, even when it dates from over 100 years in the past.
In his penultimate paragraph, Bob Stanley declares that he wrote the guide “to make sense of the totally different instances, eras and genres… to kind out the chronology for myself and for anybody else who was ”. By taking us with him on that journey, he has supplied one thing invaluable to the rising numbers who get their music through streaming providers: a information to pop’s again pages, the place artists principally remembered in sepia tones are introduced into vivid color by the writer’s enthusiastic sense of discovery.
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Let’s Do It: The Delivery of Pop
Bob Stanley
Faber & Faber, 656pp, £25
