Overview
In the 1950s, disc jockey Alan Freed was an important figure in the promotion of African American popular music, and he began calling it “rock and roll.” Soon, white artists such as Bill Haley and His Comets and Pat Boone began recording cover versions of black artists’ songs, most of which were more commercially successful than their black counterparts. The most successful of all the early rock and rollers, of course, was Elvis Presley. Presley’s ascent to stardom in the 1950s secured the popularity and commercial viability of the genre of rock and roll.
Objectives
- Recall the technological changes and its impact in the music industry
- Examine the influence of disc jockey Alan Freed
- Identify various rhythm and blues artists
- Examine some of the ways that white artists modified the music of black artists in their cover versions
- Recall the music that Elvis Presley recorded during the 1950s
New Technologies and Means of Consumption
The magnetic recording process changed how music was recorded and distributed. Developed by the Germans to guide radio-controlled V-2 bombs, the magnetic tape recorderrecording on magnetic tape allowed for sound to be recorded, erased, and re-recorded on the same tape many times, allowed for recordings to be duplicated from tape to tape, allowed for recordings to be edited, and made recording much cheaper revolutionized the music industry. Recording was no longer confined to gigantic and elaborate studios owned by the major companies in a few big cities. Tolerably decent recordings could now be made anywhere by untrained personnel who knew very little about engineering or acoustics.
Around the same time, high fidelity 45 RPMa record that plays at 45 revolutions per minute; had a limit of around three to
four minutes per side (45 revolutions per minute) technology exploded onto the scene. Peter Goldmark, the head of CBS labs for many years, invented high fidelity ("hi-fi") and the 33-1/3 RPM process in the 1930s.
After the war, when CBS made its move to 33-1/3 RPMs, RCA countered with a 45 RPM record, and it immediately invented a little economical 45 RPM playback unit. CBS then caught up by making a three-speed turntable with an adapter for the 45 RPM option. The result of this corporate warfare was a huge jump in pop singles. 45 RPMs were inexpensive to produce and to purchase. It was in the world of 45 RPM singles (two sides, the favored one called the A side, and the throwaway gesture called the B side) that rhythm and blues had its first great moment in pop music history.
Music listening and consumption was also affected by the radio. The transistor radio, developed by Bell Laboratory in 1947, appeared on the market in the early 1950s. About the same time, the car radio became an affordable option in the automobile industry, and people began listening to the radio in their cars as well as in their homes. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, many popular talk, drama, and comedy radio programs had moved from radio to television, and radio programmers needed to find new material to fill the airtime. Several innovations in radio programming arose, the most important of which was the development of the Top 40 radio format.
Top 40a radio format where the same forty tunes were repeated every 24-hour radio cycle, and the top ten singles received the most airplay became the new radio format. The same forty songs would be repeated every 24-hour radio cycle, and the top ten songs would receive more frequent play than the bottom thirty. In addition, Top 40 radio integrated short new spots, contests, promotional gimmicks, and frequent station identification spots by talkative disc jockeys speaking the language of the teenage listening market. Why forty tunes? Because the Wurlitzer jukeboxes, which flooded the industry at the time, contained forty recordings.
