5 / 10
PREVIEW
5
By mid-1956
,
it was official: rock ‘n’ roll
was not a fad. It was threatening to take over
American popular music. You could ignore
it at your own peril, and that choice might
cost you your career.
The warning signs had been there for a
few years. There was a new style of music
that the teenage kids were drawn to. Some
of it seemed primitive, but not all of it was
simple. Some, but not all of it, was
categorized as ‘Rhythm & Blues.’ Much of
it was uptempo dance music but some of it
was classified as ballads. One thing for sure:
The records sounded different from the top
songs of just two or three years earlier. The
singers had a different approach, the bands
behind them sounded different, even the
songwriting was different. Whatever this
new stuff was, it plainly couldn’t be
dismissed. Hard as it was to admit, this new
music was the future.
Nobody in the music business wanted to
be left behind. The hell with ego. It was time
to capitulate. Do it or be left in the dust,
watching while the world moved on.
The question for the ‘major’ record
companies was,
“What should we do about
it?”
And the answer depended on who ‘we’
was. For record company bosses and A&R
men there was one obvious thing to do,
something they’d been doing for years. If a
song is getting popular, let’s record it with
one of our artists and hope that ours is the
most popular version. This tradition of
making ‘cover records’ was standard
practice well before the rock ‘n’ roll era. Les
Paul recalled rushing into the studio with
Mary Ford to make a better version of Patti
Page’s 1950 record of
Tennessee Waltz
,
weeks before a Capitol Records vice
president suggested covering it. (Patti’s
record was itself a cover of Pee Wee King’s
country original.) In 1954 five different
versions of
Stranger In Paradise
were Top
20 hits. Everyone knew how to make cover
records, at least within the styles of music
that were popular and familiar to them.