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 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 for decades before the rock ‘n’ roll
era. Close to the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, 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.