An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 17 | MAINSTREAM POPULAR MUSIC AND THE MASS MEDIA IN THE POSTWAR YEARS 413

The old 78-rpm format, ten inches in diameter, remained available through the

1950s, supplemented and eventually superseded by a new format: the 45 , seven

inches in diameter, made of sturdier vinyl and spinning at forty-fi ve revolutions

per minute. Each side of the 45, like the 78, had a playing time of about three

minutes, well suited to popular songs. Manufactured with a larger hole in the

center, 45s accommodated the automatic mechanism of the jukebox, an impor-

tant source of revenue for record companies. The same feature also permitted

the stacking of several discs on a home phonograph to play in quick succession,

allowing listeners in effect to create their own albums or playlists of favorite

records.

Introduced in 1949, the 45-rpm single, at the lower end of the market, com-

plemented the 33 1 ⁄3-rpm long-playing record (LP) at the upper end. LPs at fi rst

were issued in two formats, either ten or twelve inches in diameter; the former

was used largely for jazz, the latter for classical music. By the late 1950s the larger

format was used for all types of music, edging out the ten-inch LP in popular-

ity. Each side of the twelve-inch LP could hold about twenty minutes of music:

an entire Mozart symphony, several jazz numbers, or about six popular songs.

Riding the rising tide of the postwar economic boom, these new formats found

tremendous commercial success. Revenues from record sales topped $214 million

in 1947, fi nally surpassing the previous peak, set before the Great Depression,

and sales increased to $514 million in 1959.

New technologies also affected how music was recorded. Chief among

these was magnetic tape, developed in Germany during the 1930s and avail-

able for commercial use in the United States shortly after the war ended. Tape

recording allowed new possibilities in editing, as musicians could rerecord

unsatisfactory passages and splice the corrected versions into the master

tape—the same procedure used in the electronic music studio. Also shared

with electronic music was the process of overdubbing, in which instrumental

and vocal parts could be recorded separately and then superimposed, and the

addition of artifi cial reverberation, or reverb, which could make the musi-

cians sound as if they were performing in a massive stone cathedral—or in a

tiled bathroom.

A pioneer in the use of these new studio techniques to make popular record-

ings was the guitarist and inventor Les Paul, whose records sound as if he is play-

ing up to eight separate guitar parts simultaneously. Paul would record some of

those tracks with the tape running at half speed, so that when played back at

normal speed the part sounds twice as fast and an octave higher—again, a type

of tape manipulation borrowed from the electronic music studio.

Another pioneer was Mitch Miller, a classically trained oboist and English

horn player. As an A&R man for Mercury Records and then Columbia Records,

Miller greatly increased the artistic role of the record producer, who oversees

the recording process. Whereas previous A&R men had exercised control over

the choice of performers and material, Miller extended that control to supervi-

sion of the musical arrangement and especially the recording process, exploit-

ing the potentials of the new technologies.

In the late 1940s and 1950s Miller produced a series of hits for Mercury and

Columbia, many of them novelty songs fi lled with recording gimmicks, such as

“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” (1952), which featured Patti Page

singing overdubbed harmony to her own lead vocal, punctuated by a yipping

the 45

the LP

studio techniques

Les Paul

Mitch Miller

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