the times | Saturday April 30 2022 saturday review 9interpolating ragtime at the wrong speed
in a New York bar, or Little Walter playing
blues with a distorted, amplified mouth
organ, or Gene Autry singing cowboy
ballads with a Swiss yodel thrown in. Or
George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue,
which in 1924 aimed for the serious, but
also showed how pop could head towards
new emotions, cleverness and fun; it sug-
gested the sense of something quite differ-
ent arriving, a possible future that was free
of borders and discrimination.
An unavoidable fact that became appar-
ent through the narrative of Let’s Do It,
though, was that segregation was legally in
place in many American states from the
1870s to the mid-1960s — almost the entire
time span of the book — and for most of
this time Jim Crow racism wasn’t ebbing
away, but intensifying. As well as jazz and
blues, minstrelsy always lurks in the back-
ground of America’s pop energy; it’s only
very recently that white American hip-
hop acts such as Jack Harlow have stopped
clearly appropriating African-American
moves. So along with the creative tri-
umphs of Louis Armstrong and Nat King
Cole, there were horror stories.
Women having any kind of career — let
alone one in the music industry — were far
less common in the first half of the 20thmusic really began (not with Elvis)
century than they would become in the
second. The upshot of this, which hadn’t
seemed causal to me before, was that al-
most no women had pop careers that
spanned decades.
It felt good to have the chance to ac-
knowledge the underappreciated, such as
the pioneering crooner Vaughn De Leath
and the extraordinary bandleader Ina Ray
Hutton, as well as more familiar stars such
as Sophie Tucker, Peggy Lee and Barbra
Streisand, who did overcome the odds to
enjoy long-lived success.
Delving into the stories behind the
familiar and unfamiliar names, I discov-
ered how the music and the lyrics told
the story of race, class and emancipation.
Indeed, they didn’t just tell the story, they
became the story, with pop music acting as
a driver for social change.
History can be rewritten to suit modern
tastes. I noticed that names venerated in
the rock age, such as the blues man Robert
Johnson, often meant little to nothing in
their own era. And because there is only so
much that collective memory can hold,
many acts who were huge in their day have
been largely forgotten. Although both
were great innovators, in 2020 Sun Ra is
undoubtedly better known to those under
40 than his band-leading contemporary
Count Basie, who was infinitely more pop-
ular at the time.
The way in which genres such as rag-
time and barbershop, not to mention
music hall and the British excursion into
“trad” jazz, have been largely written up as
whimsical old-time music — not least by
their practitioners — was something I
wanted to overturn. The work of the great
jazz pianists Hazel Scott and Mary Lou
Williams only seems to be explored by so-
ciologists and feminist academics. Crosby,one of the great technical innovators,
without whom tape recording may not
have emerged for another decade, is writ-
ten off as the punchline to a David Bowie
joke on Saturday Night Live. I’ve aimed to
give these people’s lives and their music
room to breathe, to give them back their
place in the story.
I wanted to give personality and shape to
names that are, like Berlin, now just part of
the furniture, and give space to many
others who are virtually forgotten but
really shouldn’t be — the songwriters,
singers and arrangers whose collected life
works hover on the brink of extinction:
the Hollywood writer Harry Warren, the
singing flapper Annette Hanshaw, the
pioneering pianist Reginald Foresythe
and others such as Kay Swift, Wynonie
Harris and Ethel Ennis. These are the
secret heroes of the story.
I wanted Let’s Do It to read like a story, a
page-turner. Almost everyone in the book
would have considered themselves an en-
tertainer, and I wanted Let’s Do It to cap-
ture the zip and heads-high enthusiasm of
their music. Pop music, after all, should
never feel like homework.
Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop by Bob
Stanley is published on May 5 by
Pegasus at £25Jacob Schmidt was
caught in a mustard
gas attack. It made his
voice perfect for radio
Before rock: 10 heroes and innovators of early pop
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; ALAMYScott Joplin
Joplin was pop music’s original
entertainer. In 1899 his Maple Leaf
Rag was ragtime’s breakthrough
hit. More than anyone else, the
bar-room pianist Joplin was the
genre’s creator and its leading
light. The Entertainer, published in
1902, went on to sell two million
copies as the theme to The Sting
in 1973. There’s longevity for you.Louis Armstrong
Armstrong maybe wasn’t the
first to stretch the fabric of New
Orleans jazz, but in establishing
the cornet solo he encouraged
others to jump in with invention
and variation. Effectively, hot jazz
was created and, beyond that,
swing. You could look at Benny
Goodman’s band in the Thirties or
the Modern Jazz Quartet in the
Fifties and say that everyone was
playing in the style of Armstrong.Mildred Bailey
Bailey’s innovatory vocal style
was clearly an influence on the
future giants Billie Holiday and
Ella Fitzgerald. Her version of
Irving Berlin’s I’ve Got My Love to
Keep Me Warm was an idealised
picture of urban Thirties America:
sophisticated, casual, frankly
uninhibited. Bailey was at the
forefront of modernity: a plus-size
star with ethnic ambiguity, and a
woman who could get her own
way in an age when that was a
male prerogative.Isham Jones
With the lyricist
Gus Kahn, Jones
wrote an
incredible
run of hits
in the mid-
Twenties
that dried
up as
quickly
as it had
begun:
It Had to
Be You,
Swinging
Down the
Lane, I’ll See You
in My Dreams. As a
bandleader he was
hardcore, making his musicians
walk on stage in line, like
prisoners, and banning them from
drinking even on days off. The
result was a short-lived band with
some of the heaviest boozers in
the business.The Boswell Sisters
Martha, Connie and Helvetia were
brought up in a house on Camp
Street, New Orleans, and were just
about the most inventive and funact of the early Thirties. They
caused a revolution in close-
harmony singing and became the
first singers to use their voices as
part of the orchestra rather than
singing over it.Duke Ellington
Ellington was an innovator who
wisely dodged conversations
about the specifics of jazz: “I am
trying to play the natural feelings
of a people... and popular music
is the good music of
tomorrow.” In the
early Fifties he
understood
the cultural
weight of
the album
before
almost
anyone —
including
Frank
Sinatra —
and would
write music
specifically
to fit on two
sides of the new
vinyl format.The Mills Brothers
Donald, Harry, Herbert and bass
man John Jr were a jazz-fired
barbershop quartet from Piqua,
Ohio, where they had started
out singing in cinemas between
Rin Tin Tin features. Their 1931
recording of Tiger Rag, a three-
minute slice of pure joy made up
of just their muted yet zippy
harmonies and a single acoustic
guitar, would influence doo-wop
groups decades later.Claude Thornhill
This 1940s bandleader helped
to shape what came after the
swing era. With as little vibrato
as possible, his band’s sound
hovered, heavy but thrilling; part
of the strangeness came from
using eight clarinets, a set-up
no other band could boast. Gil
Evans wrote the arrangements
— orchestral bop mixed with
ethereal ballads — and the
band’s theme, Snowfall, was
perfectly titled, being a blanket
of stillness.Big Jay McNeely
On his most raucous recordings,
the sax player McNeely sounded
like a goose trying to stop a
runaway train; through this
cacophony he found a unique
midpoint between jazz and
rock’n’roll on records such as
Willie the Cool Cat (1949) and
Jay’s Frantic (1950). Just where
the jazz ended and the R’n’B began
on these records was a moot point
— it was pure party music.John Barry
There was a progressive way
out of the postwar jazz malaise
that didn’t involve bebop,
supporting club singers, or diving
blind into rock, and that was
cinema. Barry’s recording of
The James Bond Theme looks
back with its Stan Kenton full
brass blast, and forwards with
its growling bass guitar to the
Shadows, the Stranglers and
New Order.
Bob Stanley
Listen to Bob’s playlist of early
pop at spoti.fi/3ESGMpgg
tomorrow.”
early Fift
unders
the c
wei
the
be
a
a
in
F
Si
an
writ
spec
tto fit o
sides of t
vinyl formatTheMills Brothersicist
onese You
ms. As a
he was
making his musiciansswinging Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Below: The Boswell Sisters