Freed continued to mount live shows, expanding across the northeastern United States. But when violence broke out after a show in Boston in May, 1958, local authorities moved to indict him for inciting a riot. Eventually, these charges were dropped, but not before forcing the cancellation of a series of announced shows, resulting in a series of legal and contractual struggles. Then, in November 1959, he was served a subpoena backstage at a New York show for allegedly accepting money in return for playing records. The accusation cost Freed his radio show and ushered the word “payola” (a contraction of “pay” and “Victrola”) into the lexicon. Eventually convicted on charges of payola and tax evasion, Freed was never given another major market radio or television outlet. Though race was hardly raised as an issue with Freed as far as the general public was concerned, it was the driving force behind the industry campaign against him. Eight years later, a bankrupt Freed died of causes related to alcoholism.←46 | 47→
While local media outlets often echoed the hysterical demagoguery of ministers, politicians, and other civic leaders on the topic of race, the Freed saga follows the general pattern for the television industry in the 1950s, holding to strict discriminatory policies behind the scenes while programming proceeded as if race were not an issue in America. Only in the context of news did television producers begin to cover race-oriented stories, often following the lead of progressive film and print media that portrayed the attendant problems of racism from a perspective that suggested bigotry, not race-mixing, was the problem. Social problems were not entirely absent from consideration on television in the 1950s—Kraft Television Theatre and Ford Theatre were among the “Golden Age” dramas that dealt with a wide range of topics, including adolescent disillusionment and dysfunction—but television was essentially a bystander on the race issue at this point, neither exposing bigotry nor exploiting it as other media did. Aversion to giving offense to any potential viewing block would prevent television producers from tackling race head-on until well into the 1960s.
This dilemma is recreated in John Waters’s 1988 film Hairspray, which revolves around a fictional television dance show, The Corny Collins Show, based on the popular Buddy Deane Show in Baltimore (WJZ-TV, 1957–64). The conflict arises when Black and White kids, who were accustomed to dancing together at school and neighborhood sock hops, insist on doing so on camera, in contradiction to strict, if unwritten, segregation policy. In Waters’s rose-colored rendition, the adults relent and The Corny Collins Show is peacefully integrated. The unfortunate reality is that The Buddy Deane Show was cancelled within weeks of airing an episode in which White students unexpectedly joined a Black group during a live broadcast. According to media activist Danny Schechter, this was “the first and probably last civil rights ‘dance-in’”23 (77). What Hairspray lacks in verisimilitude it makes up for by capturing the liberating exuberance of the pre-Bandstand era of televised rock music. A remake of Hairspray in 2007 (following a successful run on Broadway) keeps the same rose-colored ending, but foregrounds the civil rights battle. The central character is Motormouth Maybelle (portrayed by Queen Latifah), who is both the host of The Corny Collins Show once a month on “rhythm and blues day” and a community civil rights activist.
But as the reality gap between Hairspray and the actual history attests, integration was not only slow in coming, but came at a cost. For all the dramatic progress made by the Civil Rights Movement in forcing integration of the armed forces (1948) and public schools (1954), less visible (especially to Whites) was the way in which opportunities for African Americans to move into the mainstream undermined the Black institutions that had developed as a self-reliant alternative to Jim Crow segregation. As Black artists became more accepted in concert halls,←47 | 48→ local clubs catering to an African American clientele, including many on the chitlin’ circuit, could no longer compete with White promoters in booking big name artists. As major labels belatedly added Black artists to their rosters, many of the independent labels that nurtured R&B fell by the wayside. But one area in which Black families were uniformly denied mainstream opportunities was in housing. The post-war GI Bill and other loan programs supported White flight from cities to suburbs while Federal Housing Administration policies and “red-lining” practices guaranteed that Black families could not take advantage. Suburbia became synonymous with the White middle class, and the media naturalized this “dreamhouse” environment (Spigel).
One measure of the success of the whitewashing of rock ‘n’ roll on television is the extent to which the music became associated with the suburbs. The version of rock music presented on American Bandstand was embodied by the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, who epitomized the kind of wholesome teenagers Dick Clark espoused. The pair was so affable that they were cast together in a series of lightweight films that constituted a new genre: Beach Party musicals, beginning with Beach Party in 1963.24 This new image of rock ‘n’ roll—kids frolicking on the beach concerned with little more than cars and dating—effectively severed the music from its urban (R&B) and rural (blues and country) roots. If you were not a White suburbanite, you were not in the equation, until Soul Train opened the door. But for young White hipsters, this sanitized version of rock ‘n’ roll became an object of ridicule, of a piece with manicured lawns, plastic appliances, and TV dinners. Plus, as Norma Coates points out, in addition to racializing and suburbanizing rock ‘n’ roll, American Bandstand also genderized it, reinforcing the public image of youth music as “a predominantly male and heterosexual preserve” (“Elvis” 243).
Divorced from its origins in rural areas and inner cities, rock ‘n’ roll was being packaged for middle-class suburban families. In addition to the persistent issues of race, there was also a class dimension. Charlie Gillett, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, and others have recognized that rock ‘n’ roll, in its original expression, emanated from disenfranchised communities. As Robert Barry Francos put it, “rock ‘n’ roll started with the poorer financial strata,” only reaching the middle class through the mass media (159). But for all the reassurance offered by its televised iteration, rock ‘n’ roll was a facet of a larger cultural upheaval that was bringing sweeping social change and threatening traditional standards of thought and conduct. The underlying fear, felt by many Americans in the post-war years, even with no racial or economic axe to grind, was of losing social control. This instinct to resist modernism and preserve hegemony was expressed, though rarely overtly, in myriad ways through television.←48 | 49→
Modernism
Much of the animosity expressed toward rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s may be seen as an expression of a deeper, generalized fear of modernism. Although modernism is often used in reference to a specific historical period with particular features, especially in regard to art and music, for our purposes the term will be used primarily in the sense that is interchangeable with modernity, including various aspects of contemporary life. Citing the art historian John Walker, Paul Grosswiler describes modernism as an aesthetic ideology that embraces technology and values new forms of expression over tradition. To the average parent in the 1950s, this ideology translated to a headlong sprint into unchartered territory and a breakdown of social cohesiveness.
In the post-war years, the new music became a visible, audial, and powerful embodiment of what Marshall McLuhan called the “Electric Age,” in which everything seemed to be getting faster and louder, and, as such, became the focus of resentment. Few people articulated modernism as a point of contention, but rock ‘n’ roll served as a surrogate for more generalized anxieties about technology, industrialization, and the acceleration of other changes in American society. Unlike expressions of modernity in literature and the fine arts, rock ‘n’ roll did not sit passively on a page or on a wall—it was loud, boisterous, and provocative. It could not be relegated to a museum or a library; it was on the streets and in the air. If rock ‘n’ roll represented what Marshall Berman called a “heroic