1950s PUNK: Sex, Thugs, and Rock'n'Roll!

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Ersel Hickey

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RockSex now brings you the actual,
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1950s Rock'n'Roll is the original Punk music. Here are the rawest, raunchiest platters that shatter.

Leather up and let's ride!

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1950s PUNK & SEX
by Tym Stevens

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Sparkle Moore

The Hydrogen Jukebox

The real '50s was dangerous.

Forget "Sappy Days" and kitsch retro diners. The 50's was McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, nuclear fears, and the explosion of the first youth culture. Every revolution has its voice and for the youth that tonsil-shredding howl was Rock'n'Roll.

Rock'n'Roll isn't simply a sound, it's a concept: putting cool things together makes a new thing even cooler. It is a mutation process that is exponential.

It has infinite branches and came from myriad roots; listen closely to those original wax sides and you can hear not just edgy blues and jump jive boogie, but also clanging honky-tonk, bluegrass fluidity, gospel chorals, scronking jazz, classical strings, Cajun hoedowns, New Orleans rippling keys, Hawaiian pedal steel, Mexican folk ditties, Vaudeville slapstick, Cuban cha cha cha, Tin Pan Alley torch songs...an all-inclusive, all-inviting sonic maelstrom.

It was everything those new world kids had ever heard combined and it spoke for them when they hadn't existed on the social radar before.

Playing "duck and cover" under the school desk wasn't going to save you.

The soothing consumable fantasy that they were being sold at every turn was a lie, and they knew it instinctively: Where is Democracy in segregation? Why is Rosie the Riveter back to being a house slave? Who tends the fields for no fair pay? Who beats up or executes the whistleblowers?

Despite the Red Scare, the "Enemy" wasn't Out There, it was right here; in the smiling duplicity, in the rampant poverty, in the corrupt police system, in the arms race to erase the human race.

Teenagers were considered a larval stage meant to become pod replicas of these mad liars. Something must be done to liberate oneself from this spirit-crushing machine. Some kind of movement...

It was in their hips all along.

To have a movement ya gotta move first. This is the Beat Generation, unbeaten, beatific, blasting beatitude to thebeat thebeat thebeat. The dance is rebellion, the dance is liberation, the dance is seduction, the dance is fornication. Dancing together ends constriction and induces new conceptions. The physical has become political. No more segregation, no sexual repression, no fear, no devil's due, "no more cryin' the blues". Gather together, get it on.

And, of course, Rock'n'Roll was a euphemism for DOIN' IT.

'Hey great-balls-of-fire, time to huckle up to the hucklebuck and shake rattle and roll that train all night long. The girl can't help it if she's the one who hollars more more more, so shake a leg coz when she's starts eruptin' ain't nobody gonna make her stop. Mercy!'

This is the generation "burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night!" (Ginsberg). These are the first teens, this is the regeneration, this is the declaration of self. This is the future.

Howlin' Wolf
"Angel headed hipsters" cavorting to the Devil's Music. It's the crossroads paved by Robert Johnson, careening frenzied between heaven and hellfire. "Gonna run through the world 'til he understands his pain/ Somebody help him get the demon home again," roars Screamin' Jay.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the end of all that Either/Or chess game. Maybe This-vs-That just got aced by the full spectrum of things. No more Black and White, no more cold war, no more madonna or whore. Every body, everybody everywhere, needs more more more. 'Goin' down that road, move hot rod move me, boom-chicki-boom-chi-bop-bop!'

This is the modern world. This middle decade is the crossroads to tomorrow.

Freeways to anywhere, radio towers strobing the night, TV theme songs and Sci Fi movies, cheap paperbacks and loose money. Use these tools to subvert it all, upstarts, to revert it to its promise which has been lost. Find yourselves, find the future. Who you are, who you aren't. 'Walk 47 miles of barbwire, sprinkle oogley-oogley all under your bed, just move on up try for further coz you're in a frenzy.'

"Rocket 88" (1951) is arguably the first Rock'n'Roll song. It's a '48 jump jive song called "Cadillac Boogie" retooled with a kit on it. This time it's faster, sung by horny teenagers who want to carouse crazy in a fast car on cheap wine. The guitar amp got damaged before the studio gig and emitted a snarling angry fuzz. There it is, that hard clang, that brutal buzz, that lascivious sneer. The jukebox is now a jackknife, baby. These are the first punk songs that rocked the sisters and brothers like furthermuckers.

And the Edge wasn't always in the guitar, it's in the hipgrinding sax, in the rollicking keys, in the pounding drums, or the singer's furious shreik. Kid Thomas' gutter growl on "Rockin' This Joint To-nite!" (backed by Link Wray) slashes like a switchblade.

Rock'n'Roll cut quicksilver through every border, separation, and preconception. It immediately greasefired through jukeboxes, radio waves, indie labels, and sock hops. By 1959 -even as fate and force took down Elvis, Buddy and Ritchie, Jerry Lee, Chuck, and Little Richard- it cascaded unabated through cover bands in Britain and France, Mexico and Spain, and by 1960 elbowed bold through Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and more dominos beyond. And contrary to any deleters, it was full of Rockin' women who fought harder for their shot at a blasting 45rpm than anyone. This was their moment, this was the renewed now.

This is the new music, tight, terse, loud, abrasive, cackling with wild abandon. It doesn't care what you think coz it knows how it feels. "Rave on, it's a crazy feeling/ I know it's got me reeling." It is our new communal faith, something to believe in with all our heart. That beat that beat that beat...

Rock'n'Roll is liberation.

© Tym Stevens

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See also:

• The Real History of Rock and Soul!: A Manifesto, A Handy Checklist

• 1950's PUNK: Sex, Thugs, and Rock'n'Roll!, with Music Player!

• CHUCK BERRY: The Guitar God and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• BO DIDDLEY: The Rhythm King and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• BUDDY HOLLY: Rock's Everyman and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• LITTLE RICHARD: The Voice of Rock and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• JIMMY REED: The Groover of Rock, From Motown To Sesame Street, with 2 Music Players!

_________________________

• 1950s Rock, A: The '60s Disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, B: The '70s Disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, C: The '80s disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, D: The '90s disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, E: The 2000s disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, F: The 2010s disciples, with Music Player!

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Revolution 1950s: The Big Damn Bang of Rock'n'Roll!

...with massive
Music Player!

24 hours of
international Rock'n'Roll music,
in order from 1947 to 1960!

1950s ROCK'n'ROLL REVOLUTION
by Tym Stevens

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RockSex
brings you the actual, all-inclusive history of Rock'n'Soul music,
with essay overviews and Music Playlists.
▶ History Checklist


Let's start with the Big Bang itself, 1950s Rock'n'Roll.

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The Revolution of 1950s Pop

Until 1955, radio belonged to the adults in America.

The Popular Music charts were mainly somnolent syrup lulling war-weary elders into a saccharine trance. Music was the loll of reassurance and restraint. But small record labels, jukeboxes, and night owl radio waves changed that. The youth heard crazy voices whispering from this alien ether and acted on them. Overnight the word 'Pop' became a whole new universe, a joyful free-for-all, where everything combined and recombined in endless new shapes. What had been became everything that would be, blendered in the restless energy of the young.

What were the seeds of this cultural revolution?

Sax and electric guitar were a new jolt to Jazz in the decade before, leaping in and carousing like a drunk crasher. Their raunchy edge whipped the crowds crazy into communal spasms like the modern age had never seen. Swing Jazz orchestras pumped the war years up with brassy horn sections and liquid crystalline guitar. But war shortages pared the big bands down to quartet combos, easier to fit in a car and feed. In the late 40's these trimmed-back troubadours pounded out Jump Jive and Boogie Woogie to kids from coast to coast. The primal pulse was that Boogie. It shook hips without shame from juke joints to hoedowns nationwide. To this raw rhythm was added the refined sound of electric guitar. Les Paul and his cohort Mary Ford reeled off lightning licks so complex, mercurial, and high-pitched they sounded like they were chiming in from another world. And every kid with a twanger for thirty years would take notice.

Gutbucket Blues framed the skeleton of Rock. That wrestle with the Devil, with conscience, with life, all with laughing abandon. And that hard clang, that terse swagger, that moody intonation. Blues was the edge, the truth. It infects blazers like Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog", LaVern Baker's "Jim Dandy", and Chuck Berry's "Reelin And Rockin" with its ambivilent zest.

Country hit a hard-twanging gallup in the early-'50s with Honky Tonk music. While many blues masters scowled terse chords, hillbilly sages barnstormed the hayrides with blue streak riffs honed out of Bluegrass. It was the heady mix of blues fuel with country wildfire that ignited Rockabilly. Country riffs are rife throughout songs like Chuck Berry's> "Too Much Monkey Business", Joe Clay's "Duck Tail", Carl Perkins' "Put Your Cat Clothes On", Ricky Nelson's "Believe What You Say", Little Jimmy Dickens' "I Got a Hole In My Pocket", and the hypersonic string wizardry of Joe Maphis and his 13-year-old accomplice, Larry Collins.

But Rock'n'Roll was no chess game, no black and white, not just Country and Blues.

It's a shock, I know, but listen up. Or rather, just listen to those records again, and look closer at the people making them. Like all actual culture, it was a jigsaw puzzle. Simultaneously it was splicing strings from Classical, slide from Hawaii, syncopation from Cuban Jazz, two-step from Tex-Mex, eerieness from Electronic music, and Folk strains from all immigrant traditions.

Culture isn't constant or owned by a pure group. Culture is constantly renewing itself through everyone.

It is an intersection of ideas. We refract everything we've taken in. From each other, with each other, for each other.

Country kids (such as my Dad) hid radios under their pillows to taste all of the flavors of the world beyond and then became radio beacons made flesh. Soundwaves bypass all boundaries, whether on maps, in cultures, or in one's head.

Kindergarten activists who knock Elvis for singing a Blues song miss the point; he also sang Bluegrass, Pop, and Gospel songs in the same breath, and channeled them without the barriers. He made further music out of the music that he lived and breathed. Using a separatist model of colonialism on him would be ludicrous and oversimplified. Similarly, but unnoted, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley> made their breakthroughs based on Country songs simultaneously.

Elvis, like his generation, was the fruition of tearing down all separations. Rather than a King, he was part of a pantheon of young men and women rethinking the future. There was no ruler because there were no more rules. Everyone was king and queen, if only for a performance, a 45, a school dance, a love affair, a night ride, a new idea shared.

The 40's Jump Jive music and Jitterbug dances unleashed the shared Rock revolution.
The '50s was a smorgasbord, with sooo many flavors to choose from. Fats Domino tickling Crescent City piano rolls. The Big Bopper possessed by Jump Jive. The Five Satins converting Gospel chorals into soaring teen lust. Little Richard> roaring out barrelhouse Blues past the speed of tongue. The Coasters trajecting the Marx Brothers through Rhythm and Blues. The Drifters wafting over epic string sections. Ronnie Self sneering wanton through Honky Tonk. The mighty Howlin' Wolf gargling gravel and electric Blues. The Everly Brothers countrifying the celtic hymn tradition. Santo And Johnny and The Ventures sailing out into the first ripples of Surf to come, with Mediterranean, Hasidic, and other worldly melodies churning beneath.

And the personalities. The smooth spacefaring glee of Mary Ford. The smoldering satisfaction of Ruth Brown. The cocksure Bo Diddley. The ethereal Platters, wings to the archangel Tony Williams. Lascivious Presley. The ever charming Carl Perkins. That hellion Wanda Jackson, so fair and fierce. The riotous theatrics of The Coasters and Don And Dewey. The eerie dreamscape of The Flamingos. The intense urgency of the seeming everyman Buddy Holly>. The startling virtuosity of Jackie Wilson's performance of "Lonely Teardrops". And sweet Gene Vincent, blasting headlong and hardscrabble.

The Big Bang of Rock'n'Roll detonated ideas, debunked constrictions, fractured the status quo, burst past borders, blasted revelation, and birthed revolutions. Even as US politicians, bonfires, and disc jockeys moved to contain the shock, its waves already rebounded through the world.

Creativity is crossroads. Rock'n'Roll is a tryst of combined intimacies that deepen the soul and expand the mind. Boogie and Mambo (Cuarteto Don Ramon, Celia Cruz, Fay Simmons, Georgia Gibbs), Boogie and Country-Western (Merle Travis, Skeeter Davis, Big Joe Turner), Honky-Tonk and Boogie Blues (Forrest Sykes, Hank Williams, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Bill Doggett), Rock and Gospel (Sister Rosetta Tharpe), along with Cha-Cha-Cha (Richard Berry's original "Louie Louie", Rene Touzet, Tiny Topsy) and Cajun (Hank Williams, Chiemi Eri, Dave Bartholomew) and Jazz (Peggy Lee, John Barry, King Curtis, Margie Anderson) everywhere. Human arts flow from heart to heart, and leave delusional limits in the dust.

Doo Wop came out of the Gospel quartet tradition, but went lateral lickety-split. Las Hermanas Navarro from Mexico were covering "Sh...Boom (Cancion Pop)" in 1954. There were many other all-female Doo Wop acts like The Debs, Gay Charmers, and Vikki Nelson. There were female-and-male acts like The Six Teens, The Platters, and Los Cincos Latinos (Argentina). The Crests ("16 Candles") had one female, one Italian-, one Puerto Rican-, and three African-American members.

The Crests
Segregation in the USA was a repressive martial law that went against the inclusive, diverse core of the immigrant nation, and it was already being overthrown in the music and on the dance floors. And around the world.

From 1956 onward, there was Rock music in Mexico (Los Rebeldes del Rock, Los Teen Tops), Canada (The Diamonds), Jamaica (Laurel Aitken), Cuba (Perez and Brana), Brazil (Celly Campello), Spain (Los Estudiantes), Africa (Jimmy Masuluke), England (Tommy Steele, John Barry), France (Johnny Hallyday, Catarine Caps), Germany (Little Gerhard), Sweden (Owe Thornqvist, Rock-Olga), Italy (Adriano Celentano), New Zealand (Max Merritt, Johnny Devlin), Australia (Johnny O'Keefe), South Korea (Shin Jung-hyeon), and Japan (Billy Morokawa, The Peanuts).

The Chantels
And, as in all things, women were straight there with it, just as strong for the long with every song. Big Mama Thornton, Ella Mae Morse, Ruth Brown, Wanda Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Janis Martin, LaVern Baker, Lorrie Collins, Etta James, and The Chantels, a singing band who played their own instruments. Emancipation exclamation.

These voices gave voice to all the un-adults, to their dreams, pains, schemes, and refrains. It lit the secret night like a clarion call only they could hear and act upon. It understood the addled essence of adolescence, the comedy of errors that was their lot. It promised them a world without constriction where anything could happen, if they took up the call...

In 1955, the future belonged to the young.


© Tym Stevens

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See also:

• The Real History of Rock and Soul!: A Manifesto, A Handy Checklist

• 1950's PUNK: Sex, Thugs, and Rock'n'Roll!, with Music Player!

• CHUCK BERRY: The Guitar God and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• BO DIDDLEY: The Rhythm King and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• BUDDY HOLLY: Rock's Everyman and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• LITTLE RICHARD: The Voice of Rock and His Disciples, with 2 Music Players!

• JIMMY REED: The Groover of Rock, From Motown To Sesame Street, with 2 Music Players!

_________________________

• 1950s Rock, A: The '60s Disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, B: The '70s Disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, C: The '80s disciples‏, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, D: The '90s disciples‏, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, E: The 2000s disciples, with Music Player!

• 1950s Rock, F: The 2010s disciples, with Music Player!

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SHAKE AND FINGER POP! Soul Music and the Interior Truth

...with Music Player!

Booker T And The MGs
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Soul music is the shared emotion of experience. As such, everyone breathing can relate to it, be touched by it, be moved by it. Soul, like all great traditions, is actually what each person has brought to it and what we shared from it.

No one has a monopoly on pain. And the human heart is too huge to be bound by fake distinctions like class, body type, or skin. We breathe the same air, dream the same hopes, feel the same emotions. As souls, we share this life, and when we forget our commonality, music brings us back to the root; the interior truth of self.

From the beginning soul stew was cooked by everyone. It's initial gumbo ingredients were the sacrilegious mix of Gospel and Blues, but Jazz brass horns, voodoo mythos, Country tearjerkers, European strings, modern pop, Rock swagger, political Folk, and even spy themes have flavored it over time. It was male and female, and included label owners, talent scouts, songwriters, producers, and performers from every possible human persuasion.

Case in point. Until the late 1940's, all music made by African Americans was called "Race Music". Jerry Wexler, a writer for Billboard magazine's music sales charts, found this disgraceful. There had to be a more dignified term, but how do you encompass the various musics being made? Since urban Jump Jive and rural acoustic Blues were the most popular, he split the difference with the umbrella term, Rhythm & Blues. While R&B later became yet another flat euphemism for 'black music', it actually spoke to divergent sounds. As 1950 dawned, small independent record labels sprung up everywhere to sample the smorgasbord of homegrown talent nationwide. Jerry Wexler became perhaps the preeminent Soul music producer of all time working for Atlantic Records, owned by the astute and hyper-hip Ertegun brothers from Turkey: Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, the Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, the Rascals, and may more were his charges. Similarly, the Chess brothers parlayed the Chess label, the home of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Etta James, etc. The jewish family had slept with a horse in their house back in Poland to keep warm in the winter. As hardluck musicians migrated from the depleted southern states to their Chicago studios, they found kindred sympathy.

In the South, Gospel music was God's music, and Blues was the Devil's by default. The line between the sacred and the profane was absolute. But the 50's was when the imaginary barriers started being challenged. Ray Charles, a cocksure upstart, committed heresy by combining the two. In 1955 he turned a hymn about love for Jesus into a secular ode to a girl with "This Little Girl of Mine". Churchfolk burned like brimstone over it, but young people felt the relief of constrictions evaporating. Ray had combined the sacred and profane and arrived closer to real life. He showed that any segregation is stillborn while synthesis is always rebirth. All too quickly, radio segregated everyone's psyches using separatist terms like 'Rock'n'Roll' for whites and 'Rhythm & Blues' for blacks. Most often this music was the same thing, just separated by the superficial. But at dancehalls all kids shook their hips the same, yelled the same, felt it the same. It made you move and it said something you understood inside.

Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Taylor, the Womacks, and scores more also left the amen corner to sing new hymns from their hearts about the way they lived, and how they felt. By the early 60's, the R&B tag waned along with the doowoppers and the jivin'wailers. It was a new ere, with the Civil rights movement come to redeem America's heart and open up its future. It was the era of Soul music.

Robert White and Joe Messina of the Motown house band,
the Funk Brothers.
It came from everywhere and back. Motown records in metal Detroit. Chess in hogkiller Chicago. Atlantic in nosebleed New York. Stax in funky Memphis. And from one-hit and no-hit wonders on meteoric labels throughout the south and west and north, and soon from as far east as the United Kingdom. It was tender or tortured ballads, uptempo dance stompers, crazed gobbledygook, strutting proud testimonials, and anthems for justice. It consoled your pain, conjured your joy. Berry Gordy called his label "The Sound of Young America" to transcend useless terms like black and white, but that was only the beginning. Soul music had tapped into the declarative, confessional nature at the heart of all the world's folk musics. Its passionate vocals were a shared memory in all cultures. As such, it was felt, resung, and rebounded back. It was a universal chord that resonates through all pop history since. The British Invasion couldn't win without it, and its influence fused with Jazz, metronomed beneath Psychedelia, got all Funked up, hothoused Ska and Reggae, boogied Glam, strobed Disco, swelled under New Wave, spliced Rap, throbbed in the abstract through House and Jungle, inverted itself as Neo-Soul...well, you feel me.

Every great label had a house band cooking up all the hits. Stax made Memphis soul stew with Booker T and the MG's. Rock steady drums, pulsing melodic bass, slinky azz organ, and zen essence chank guitar. Bring in the class brass of the Memphis Horns, a killer tune, and a belting singer and then look the hell out! Besides their own proto-funk instrumental classics, like "Glass Onion" and "Hip Hug Her", they backed Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Albert King, and more. Like their rivals at the Muscle Shoals studios, they were soul brothers one and all, and the fact that they were varied hues only added more flavors to the brew.

Etta James recording with the Muscle Shoals house band.
Soul music is the soundtrack of the human experience. It's cheap and easy to wear attitude like armor. But it takes real courage to bare your heart to the world. To confess doubt, hurt, or wrestle with anger or anguish. To drop the skin and disclose the interior truth of self. That kind of vulnerability is the core of real growth, toward maturity, solace, wisdom. Listen to these brave songs, where men and women stand vulnerable before the eyes of the world. Listen in recognition as they unveil our common heart.


© Tym Stevens

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See Also:

• "Time Is Tight!" - Booker T > The Clash > Elvis Costello > Squeeze

• "Take Me To the River" - Al Green > Bryan Ferry > Talking Heads

• "Tainted Love" - Gloria Jones > Soft Cell

• LADIES FIRST: "What A Man" - Linda Lyndell > Laura Lee> Salt-N-Pepa

• LADIES FIRST: "You're No Good" - Dee Dee Warwick > Betty Everett > Linda Ronstadt > The Plasticines


• The Real History of Rock and Soul!: A Music Player Checklist

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