CROSSOVERS
Crossing over from the R&B or country charts to the pop charts was a major concern of many artists and their record labels. It meant exposure to a much broader audience and greater economic returns. The Mills Brothers, Louis Jordan, and Nat King Cole were some of the very few black artists to cross over from the race charts (called Harlem, then R&B) to the pop charts in the 1940s. A new crossover trend accelerated by the mid-1950s with black male vocal groups: the Dominoes’ “Sixty-Minute Man” (1951) hit #17; the Orioles’ “Crying in the Chapel” (1953) hit #11; the Crows’ “Gee” (1954) hit #14; and the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” (1954) broke into the pop Top 10 at #5. These were the first new R&B groups or artists of the 1950s to cross over into the upper reaches of the pop charts. The Tin Pan Alley–based pop styles and forms they used most likely facilitated their entry. The two high-profile crossovers of “Gee” and “Sh-Boom” in such close succession, in May and June 1954, were a harbinger.
Solo artists who were more blues and R&B-based would soon follow. The axis between New Orleans (Fats Domino, Little Richard), Mississippi Delta and Memphis (Ike Turner), Saint Louis (Chuck Berry), and Chicago (Bo Diddley) was crucial in providing the first generation of black R&B artists to cross over. (Turner did much work behind the scenes in the 1950s as a musician, scout, and producer, but did not hit the pop charts until 1960, with his wife, Tina.) Black artists crossing over became common from 1956 onward: “Whereas during the forties and early fifties there were rarely as many as three black singers simultaneously in the popular music hit parades, after 1956 at least one fourth of the best-selling records were by black singers” (Gillett 1996: xix).
COVERS
Bill Haley and His Comets’ 1954 cover of R&B singer Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” three months after the original entered the R&B charts, could be taken as another sign that a new era was emerging. Turner hit #1 on the R&B jukebox chart in June 1954, but he did not cross over to the pop charts at the time (he would later cross over three times between 1956 and 1960). In August Haley’s cover broke into the pop Top 10 in all three charts (Best Seller, Juke Box, and Jockey). The previous year (1953), Haley debuted on the pop chart with his “Crazy Man, Crazy” at #12, and so he had already laid some groundwork with his sound—different from Turner’s, for sure—a sound that would become one of the most emblematic of the early rock and roll era (see figure 21).
A notorious case, because the cover came in such close succession and sounded so similar to the original, was “Tweedlee Dee.” First recorded by R&B artist LaVern Baker (on the independent Atlantic label), the original entered both the pop and R&B charts on January 15, 1955. Just two weeks later, on January 29, white singer Georgia Gibbs’s cover version (on the major Mercury label) entered the pop charts. And just as Baker’s original hit #4 on the R&B charts and was rising up the pop charts, Gibbs’s cover surpassed it, rising to pop best seller #3; Baker’s original stalled at #22. Baker wrote her Congress representative, protesting that her arrangement (and, presumably, style) should be protected by copyright, but to no avail (Billboard 1955c). The African American songwriters Jesse Stone (“Shake, Rattle and Roll”) and Winfield Scott (“Tweedlee Dee”) received their share of composer royalties from any cover versions; the vocalists, however, received royalties only on sales of their own recordings.
In 1950 a test case had opened the door for this common practice of pop cover versions of R&B hits, ruling that musical arrangements were not considered as copyrightable property. The independent label Supreme tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the major Decca for $400,000. Supreme claimed that Decca had stolen their arrangement of “A Little Bird Told Me,” sung by Paula Watson, when Decca had issued an almost indistinguishable cover by Evelyn Knight (Billboard 1950).
Gibbs’s cover of Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” may have prompted Langston Hughes’s (1955) article later that year in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender: “Highway Robbery across the Color Line in Rhythm and Blues.” Imitation can be a form of flattery, Hughes noted, but blacks did not have the same access to venues, radio, and film, and so the practice was inherently unfair. The week after Hughes’s article was published, Pat Boone, who was perhaps the most notorious practitioner of producing bland pop covers of R&B hits, entered the pop charts covering Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame,” with Domino following close behind. Domino’s original had been at #1 on the R&B charts for eleven weeks in the early summer. While he crossed over to pop best seller #16, Boone’s cover hit #2 and remained there for many weeks as the original fell off the charts (see figure 21). Boone’s cover may have inadvertently pulled Domino into the otherwise impermeable pop charts. Domino had placed twelve songs in the Top 10 of R&B charts since 1950, with none crossing over. He had performed earlier in 1955 at Alan Freed’s first Rock ‘n’ Roll Ball in New York City, so perhaps the time was right for him to reach a new audience, under the banner of rock and roll. According to Boone, years later Domino called him up to the stage to thank him. “This man bought me this ring with this song,” Domino said pointing to one of his diamond rings, and they sang “Ain’t That a Shame” together (J. Miller 1999: 101). Composer royalties earned from Boone’s cover may have taken some of the sting out.
Ray Charles, whose style was much less threatened by pop cover versions, had a generous attitude in his assessment of the practice: “White singers were picking up on black songs on a much more widespread basis. They had always done it, but now it was happening much more frequently. Georgia Gibbs and Pat Boone and Carl Perkins and Elvis were doing tunes which originally had been rhythm-and-blues hits. It didn’t bother me. It was just one of those American things. I’ve said before that I believe in mixed musical marriages, and there’s no way to copyright a feeling or a rhythm or a style of singing. Besides, it meant that White America was getting hipper” (Charles and Ritz 1978: 176).
The case of Boone and Little Richard may illustrate Ray Charles’s point about getting hipper. Boone’s early 1956 cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” reached pop best seller #6, surpassing the original, which had stalled at #17 and dropped off the chart. But, very soon after, Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” spent a few months on that same best-seller pop chart, reaching #6, while Boone’s cover barely registered there, appearing for just two weeks and only reaching #23.5 Little Richard later spoke of this moment back in 1956: “When Pat Boone come out, I was mad … because, to me he was stopping my progress. I wanted to be famous. And here this man done came and took my song…. Now, in later years I thought about that, and said, that was good. But back then I said, oooh I can’t stand him…. I wanted the whole world to know that that’s not the way it went.”6 Bo Diddley continued that thought in conversation with Little Richard: “I felt about the same way you did, until I learnt that, hey, I am important, very important, because if these cats think enough of me to imitate me, that’s pretty good. Because I know guys out here can’t even get arrested” (Hackford 1987-v, disc 3).
Cover versions coming out many months, or even years, later can have positive effects, as when in 1963 the Beatles, for example, covered Chuck Berry’s 1956 “Roll over Beethoven,” not only bringing Berry composer royalties, but also stimulating interest in his music for a younger generation. Many other British Invasion bands covered Berry early in their career, including the Rolling Stones (“Come On,” “Carol”), Animals (“Memphis, Tennessee,” “Around and Around”), and Yardbirds (“Too Much Monkey Business”). Berry noted that his fee jumped from $1,200 to $2,000 a night when he returned to performing after a prison term (1962–63) and the Beatles had arrived in the United States.7
A key question concerns the creativity of the cover version—does it offer anything new? Ruth Brown voiced a pragmatic approach: “My gripe would never be with legitimate covers, or subsequent versions like [British singer] Cliff Richard’s, but with bare-faced duplicates, with no artistic merit whatsoever. Everybody in the business accepted covers as fair game…. I covered several songs myself … but they were never by any stretch of the imagination mere duplicates. We contributed to the songs” (1996: 110).
FIVE