The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Inkstainedwretch]

Years ago (hence, this is from an old memory), I saw a special on ancient Roman technology and they had something called a steam ball. it was a metal ball suspended on an axel over a fire with two valves pointed in a away that when steam came out, it pushed the ball into a continuous spinning motion.

Rome never took it any further and saw it as a curio (again, based on my old memory). But effectively, they had the rudimentary element of a steam engine and with it the ability to harness its power. But to your point, no one in Rome grasped the implications. Boy would the world be a different place today if Rome had had a very early industrial revolution.

The invention you're thinking of is the aeolipile, which was invented by a Greek scientist at the Museum of Alexandria which was, incidentally, the first pure research facility. Several times in Classical antiquity the possibilities of steam power were demonstrated, but the ancient world had abundant slave labor and therefore no motivation to develop labor-saving devices. It took the labor shortages of the 18th century to bring about the Industrial Revolution.

 

[GHT]

It took the labor shortages of the 18th century to bring about the Industrial Revolution.

Plato is quoted as saying that necessity is the mother of invention. The steam locomotive was born out of the steam beam engine, the latter being used to pump water from mines. It does strike me as odd that the UK railway track system, including bridges and tunnels were built by hand. All bar the last one which was built, the London extention that is, just before the turn of the 20th century, and for that steam cranes and mechanical shovels were used.

 

[Edward]

I knew I was skating on thin ice with Jobs as I really didn't know the history well (as I do with Fleming), but despite my ignorance, the point is there are singularly special people who dip into our well of knowledge - available to all - and do something special with it - like, it seems, Ive's did in inventing the iPod. Thank you for the correction - sincerely.

Oh, absolutely - your point stands nonetheless. (I just have a very low tolerance for the Cult of Steve Jobs ). There'll always be those who draw the dots, but many fewer who can join them...

I'm not so sure about any of this. There are lots of elements to musical entertainment and when it comes to pop and folk music, probably the performer is the biggest thing, followed by the music itself. There was a time when performers in quite different styles could and would do the same song and it would sound great both ways. Later, certain songs became much more identified with individual artists.

The biggest sin of the Beatles and the likes, in my eyes - or, to be fair, of those who laud them - has been to devalue the role of the performer. Elvis was never a writer, but what a performer. To me, being a truly great performer isj ust as valid as being a truly great writer, but post-Beatles, far too many serious music types (popular musicians, that is) sneer at the value of performance alone if you don't also write the material you perform. This is what is ultimately killing live music (and, in the long run, will ruin writers too if there's no space left to perform and be heard).

Years ago (hence, this is from an old memory), I saw a special on ancient Roman technology and they had something called a steam ball. it was a metal ball suspended on an axel over a fire with two valves pointed in a away that when steam came out, it pushed the ball into a continuous spinning motion.

Rome never took it any further and saw it as a curio (again, based on my old memory). But effectively, they had the rudimentary element of a steam engine and with it the ability to harness its power. But to your point, no one in Rome grasped the implications. Boy would the world be a different place today if Rome had had a very early industrial revolution.

That could be the basis of a superb historical novel....

The invention you're thinking of is the aeolipile, which was invented by a Greek scientist at the Museum of Alexandria which was, incidentally, the first pure research facility. Several times in Classical antiquity the possibilities of steam power were demonstrated, but the ancient world had abundant slave labor and therefore no motivation to develop labor-saving devices. It took the labor shortages of the 18th century to bring about the Industrial Revolution.

Plato is quoted as saying that necessity is the mother of invention. The steam locomotive was born out of the steam beam engine, the latter being used to pump water from mines. It does strike me as odd that the UK railway track system, including bridges and tunnels were built by hand. All bar the last one which was built, the London extention that is, just before the turn of the 20th century, and for that steam cranes and mechanical shovels were used.

I was thinking of Plato when I read the above. Improbably as it sounds, this theme is explored very well in the Harry Potter universe, wherein the wizarding types are really very much stuck in the middle ages in terms of much of their technology, be3cause they've always had magic on which to rely. I have discovered myself reaching a point where there are many (certainly not all, but many) new technologies for which I simply have no use and therefore feel no need to explore them.

 

[MisterCairo]

Ahem...
The Beatles performed.
And then some.
AND wrote... (to paraphrase Edward, they drew the dots, changed the shape of the dots, made the dots do things dots had never done before, joined the dots together, and invented new ways of dot joining)...
And then stopped performing.
Because they couldn't perform what they'd drawn and joined together...
And because they could...

 

[GHT]

And there, MisterCairo's clever, if convoluted post, describes the mind of one John Lennon, perfectly.

This sneering snobbery about having to both write and sing. Can you imagine it in the world of classical music? Luciano Pavarotti bit of a has been really, OK he performed Nessun Dorma at The Football World Cup. Big deal, never saw him write like Giacomo Puccini. (Nessun Dorma is an aria from Puccini's opera: Turandot.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

A number of the great songwriters of the Era also made successful recordings of themselves performing their own material, among them Noel Coward, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Harold Arlen, Sam Coslow, Johnny Mercer, and Harold Rome. But there was no such thing as this rock-era concept of an "original version" or a "cover version." Songs were a common pool in which all performers were welcome to swim.

There was, however, such a thing in the Era as the "cut in." This was a situation where songwriters would offer to "cut in" a popular singer or bandleader on the royalties from a particular number in exchange for their agreeing to feature -- or "plug" -- the selection on their records or in their radio broadcasts. This would usually be done by simply adding the performer's name to the official credits registered with ASCAP. Al Jolson was known for getting "cut in" on quite a few songs, and Rudy Vallee was also known for indulging in this practice -- but only if he was allowed to actually make changes in the number. I suspect the vogue for the "singer songwriter" has as much to do with wanting to get the whole chunk of the ASCAP/BMI royalties as with any idea of whole-souled artistic integrity.

One of the things I resent most bitterly about "The Fifties" is their near-complete effacement of just about every bit of pre-WW2 popular music. If it isn't "rock" or "roots of rock" it's considered unworthy of discussion or consideration. The cult of "The Fifties" started that, and it's continued to dominate popular culture with its great greasy smear ever since.

 

[BlueTrain]

I understand the Erie Canal was built without the aid of any professional engineers and presumably by hand, too. I don't know if all of that is true or not. It seems like universities were producing lawyers before they were producing engineers.

Returning to music, however, I think being a performing artist these days is more difficult than it used to be. At one time, e everything was live. Performers traveled a circuit performing in different theaters around the country. That was vaudeville. Recording may have made a difference and radio, too, but nothing like television. When performers put on a show before a live audience in Buffalo, let's say, they did the same performance in the next stop on the circuit in Cleveland. They didn't have to constantly come up with new material to learn.

Then, at the same time, the availability of "good" music in the form of professional performers on recordings and later on radio and television probably did a lot to kill amateur musicians playing popular numbers in the parlor on Sunday afternoon. There are a lot of good professional musicians, too, as well as good amateur musicians. There are lots on YouTube. Some are good enough to perform in public (if they aren't already) but some have more stage presence than others.

Only once in a while will a musician come along that not only forms a group and performs well but writes most of their music and to a greater or lesser extent, practically defines a certain kind of music. In fact, I can only think of a couple at the moment.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Radio was notorious among vaudevillians for its consumption of material. After his first radio broadcast, Fred Allen -- a performer who'd been a star of vaudeville and Broadway for twenty years by that point -- sat in his dressing room and said to himself "What am I going to do now? I've used up my whole life." He had to entirely revise his working method and focus on creating new material every week, thirty-nine weeks a year, for the next eighteen years, instead of creating one strong routine and honing it to perfection night after night. No wonder Allen called his autobiography "Treadmill to Oblivion."

Performers dealt with this in different ways. Eddie Cantor hired a man named Dave Freedman to write his shows, Freedman being known for owning a file containing over a hundred thousand jokes, filed and categorized and cross-referenced according to topic. Correll and Gosden -- "Amos 'n' Andy" -- decided to minimize their use of jokes and gags and turned instead to serialized storylines focusing on characterization. Jack Benny picked up that emphasis as well, and hired a series of writers who could build him a unique characterization that could get laughs simply by standing silently before the microphone. All of this was accomplished in the early 1930s -- twenty years before television caught on.

 

[Fading Fast]

I believe the turn to singer songwriter in the '60s was driven in part by a desire to get all the money (I'm sure), but also, as has been well documented in the Rolling Stone's case, the desire / need to build a unique band identity and, less so, the lack of enough of the "right" material to cover.

The Stone's manager pushed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards hard to write their own songs - against Mick and Keith's initial resistance. Funny how what would become one of the most successful song writing teams was all but forced to begin writing their own songs. Sure, they had already shown they could perform, but what if they couldn't write - quite a different history to Rock and Roll that would have made.

 

[BlueTrain]

I'm not so sure I agree with your assertion that "rock" ruled the music scene in the 1950s, Miss Lizzie. There were, in fact, new forms (sort of new, anyway) of music coming from groups that produced a very smooth harmonic sound. The best known was (or is) probably the Beach Boys but there were others like the Four Lads, the Four Aces and others, not to mention lots of other pop singers that probably wouldn't be categorized as rock, from Patti Page to Tom Jones. Even Elvis did songs that had an appeal to more than just rock and roll fans.

The thing is, of course, rock and roll doesn't have a rigid definition and performers don't often limit themselves to a narrow form of music. Besides, as both the performers and their fans grow older, their recordings seem to gravitate to the bins in the music stores labeled "easy listening." I will admit that some music is anything but easy listening. Also, no musical style exists in a vacuum and uninfluenced by other forms of music. There is a German pop singer who started out as a little girl singing and yodeling stuff like kleinen Teddybär but now sings (at the age of about 37) Dirndlrock. You get the picture. Music is whatever you want it to be and good performers can do most anything, not that they necessarily do. For a performer you may be more familiar with, think of Roy Clark.

Anyway, that's how I look at it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm talking more about the cultural legacy of "The Fifties" than the actual historical 1950s -- as I've expressed thruout this thread, I don't consider them the same thing. One is the common perception of the period, the other is the actual reality of what that period was.

"The Fifties" as a cultural phenomenon started the trend of "rock" as the default form of popular music -- and the Boomer generation, especially, has carried this forward in its thinking and its criticism. All other forms of popular music in the Anglo-American discourse are valued for the level of their connection to the evolution of "rock." Thus the only forms of pre-"Fifties" popular music that are considered to have any significance or worth are such things as blues, jump, some forms of country, and other "roots music." The mainstream popular music of the first four decades of the 20th Century -- a period of extraordinarily rich musical creativity -- is written off completely by the postwar musical cognoscenti because it didn't influence any of the notable "rock" artists. This is a legacy of the synthesized construct of "The Fifties."

As far as the actual 1950s go, my mother was a member of the Class of 1957, the dead-center demographic for the first wave of "rock-n-roll." She *hated* it -- she thought Elvis was disgusting, and during the years of my own childhood we had absolutely no rock-n-roll of any kind in the house. Her favorite musical artist of the 1950s was, and remains, Liberace. But even she, now, remembers Elvis as the definitive figure of "The Fifties."

 

[MisterCairo]

And there, MisterCairo's clever, if convoluted post, describes the mind of one John Lennon, perfectly.

This sneering snobbery about having to both write and sing. Can you imagine it in the world of classical music? Luciano Pavarotti bit of a has been really, OK he performed Nessun Dorma at The Football World Cup. Big deal, never saw him write like Giacomo Puccini. (Nessun Dorma is an aria from Puccini's opera: Turandot.)

Hey, who you calling clever???

 

[MisterCairo]

The King of Rock and Roll is and always will be Buddy Holly. Wrote, played, sang.

The other guy had a pretty face and a great voice, but I'll take Peggy Sue over Clam Bake any day.

Oh, but for the crummy heater on that bus...

 

[HudsonHawk]

I don't remember who it was, but during a Michael Jackson special, I saw a clip of a performer (in the '40s or '50s, but definitely pre Michael Jackson) doing the moon walk thing Jackson was known for. To be fair, Jackson might have discovered it independent of this earlier performer, but I agree, not that much is fully new.

The "moonwalk" has been around for decades before Jackson. Cab Calloway did something similar back in the 30s, and it was performed in mime and comedy routines by the likes of Dick Van Dyke and Marcel Marceau. James Brown and Jackie Wilson did it in the 60s, and it was first called "the moonwalk" on the old TV show H.R. Pufnstuff in 1969. It was a staple of early hip-hop street dancers, or "B-boys" as they called themselves, in the late 70s. I first remember kids at school doing it around 1980, several years before Jackson made it his signature move in 1983.

 

[BlueTrain]

I'd have to say, in the context of this thread, that popular culture impacts some people more than others, if at all.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The "moonwalk" has been around for decades before Jackson. Cab Calloway did something similar back in the 30s, and it was performed in mime and comedy routines by the likes of Dick Van Dyke and Marcel Marceau. James Brown and Jackie Wilson did it in the 60s, and it was first called "the moonwalk" on the old TV show H.R. Pufnstuff in 1969. It was a staple of early hip-hop street dancers, or "B-boys" as they called themselves, in the late 70s. I first remember kids at school doing it around 1980, several years before Jackson made it his signature move in 1983.

The moonwalk, or something very similar to it, actually goes all the way back to minstrel shows and a step called "The Virginia Essence." There is nothing new under the sun.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

A music phenomenon of the Golden Era/50s/60s I haven't seen addressed is what I call the awful-voice singer. A few of the best-known singer-songwriters of the era had terrible singing voices. There was Jimmy Durante, whose voice was once described as "ä rusty wood rasp calling for its mate," Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote "Stardust,"one of the most popular songs of the era yet sang in a monotone. Above all, perhaps, Marlene Dietrich, who had one of the worst singing voices in the history of noise, yet was an enormously popular singer. One vocalist/songwriter of the 60s who adopted the awful voice was Bob Dylan. He actually had a very good singing voice. Find his very early recording of "Pretty Saro,"which reveals that he really could sing. But he adopted that awful, grating, nasal voice because it made every note he sang stick in your mind whether you wanted it to or not. In a similar vein, the 50s was when advertising began to deliberately adopt annoying commercials because they forced you to remember the name of the product being advertised.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Durante at least had the excuse of being a comedian. Ray Eberle, who bayed like a lovesick hound for years in front of Glenn Miller's band, had no such excuse.

 

[MisterCairo]

A music phenomenon of the Golden Era/50s/60s I haven't seen addressed is what I call the awful-voice singer. A few of the best-known singer-songwriters of the era had terrible singing voices. There was Jimmy Durante, whose voice was once described as "ä rusty wood rasp calling for its mate," Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote "Stardust,"one of the most popular songs of the era yet sang in a monotone. Above all, perhaps, Marlene Dietrich, who had one of the worst singing voices in the history of noise, yet was an enormously popular singer. One vocalist/songwriter of the 60s who adopted the awful voice was Bob Dylan. He actually had a very good singing voice. Find his very early recording of "Pretty Saro,"which reveals that he really could sing. But he adopted that awful, grating, nasal voice because it made every note he sang stick in your mind whether you wanted it to or not. In a similar vein, the 50s was when advertising began to deliberately adopt annoying commercials because they forced you to remember the name of the product being advertised.

Billie Holiday's voice, one of the most distinctive and beloved of all in jazz, was one that many consider an acquired taste. It played a huge part in her popularity and her place in jazz history. You can immediately identify it. Not talking about her singing skill, which was beyond compare, but the sound she had.

Compare it with, say, Sarah Vaughn. Both beautiful, but Billie's was haunting...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Billie Holiday's voice, one of the most distinctive and beloved of all in jazz, was one that many consider an acquired taste. It played a huge part in her popularity and her place in jazz history. You can immediately identify it. Not talking about her singing skill, which was beyond compare, but the sound she had.

Compare it with, say, Sarah Vaughn. Both beautiful, but Billie's was haunting...

Holliday's voice was not dissimilar to that of Mildred Bailey, who was one of the pioneering women to sing jazz. Likely the reason that Holliday is remembered today and Bailey isn't is that Holliday fits the rock-era paradigm of a great artist who destroyed herself with drugs. Mildred Bailey had the great misfortune of dying a boring death from diabetes.

As for performers who could turn on a dime from hot to sweet, I point to the example of no less than Bing Crosby. A boring old white man singing Christmas songs to most of the Boomer crowd, Crosby in the thirties was one of the most exciting singers in the business -- who could swing with the best of them when he wasn't the king of the crooners. His early-thirties sides with the Boswell Sisters and the Mills Brothers are the essence of "hip" long before the rock-uber-alles crowd came along to steal that definition for themselves.