The Origin Of "The Fifties"

[Edward]

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.

There's always the same amount of good and bad music in any era (usually 1%:99%), but it varies significantly as to what flourishes, as being good isn't enough (or often even relevant) - it has to be marketable.

It's certainly true that very many spaces that were formerly performance spaces have been killed off because it is cheaper and easier to just have a jukebox. Back in the 90s, music venue licensing law changed, and the fees were significantly hiked: it became exponentially more expensive for a licence for more than a duo, and so suddenly very many venues just stopped bothering to licence to have bands in. If there was live music at all, it was mostly the 'duo with a real guitar and a keyboard with a bunch of prerecorded backing tracks' affair. In more recnet years the law improved - you no longer need a specific licence for a band if you have a venue of less than 400 capacity, if memory serves. The damage was already done , though, in many places....

Also, you can't overestimate the impact of a generation of kids raised on streaming services is gonig to happen. The music industry missed the boat on the web, then it panicked, then it overreacted..... and now it has convinced kids that music is essentially worthless: at most, they pay Spotify ten bucks a month to not hear ads, otherwise they listen for free. That's all music is worth to them - nothing. (And that's assuming they even do it legitimately...). Meanwhile, Spotify collect the advertising revenue and/or their $0 subscriptions, and throw a penny or two in the direction of the artist. Consumerism and profiteering is killing music.

 

[Edward]

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."

Puts me in mind of how the 'alternative comedy' generation of the eighties revolutionised stand-up and live comedy in the UK. Prior to them, all the big names had one live show that they did for their entire career. Even greats like Morecambe and Wise, who did do lots of varied material for television had one live show set of one hour's duration, which they toured for the best part of thirty years.

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.

Indeed.... luckily they could. The Stones wrote at least as well as the Beatles.... and the former far outclassed the latter as performers. For proof of that, look no further than Beatles' number "I wanna be your lover" (which I think they might have written for the Stones, and later recorde themselves, if memory serves). The Beatle's version is bloodless. Reminds me of Billy Connolly's comments on talent show children from way back in the early 80s ("Wee kids who should be out ridin' their bikes... A wee boy's singing 'I'm gonna love you all night long', an' he hasnae even got pubic hair!"). The Stones, by comparison, made it something glorious, naughty, and wonderful.

I always wondered what Richards and Lennon might have produced together.... course, I dobut they'd have lasted a week before Richards smacked Lennon in the face for being a pompous, pretentious ass.

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...

Buddy Holly deserves a hell of a lot more credit than he gets. He was the first rock and roll star to popularise the solid body electric guitar - previously it had been viewed by the pulbic at large as something for country music. The Crickets were also the first big name band to really push the 'two guitars, bass and drums, no non-instrument-playing singer' format that would later become a core staple (this was a particular influence on the Beatles.... as well as the insectoid name...). and Rave On is pure, primal, prototype punk rock. For a recording career that lasted, what, all of eighteen months at most, it's incredible just how important he is, let alone howc unacknowledged that is.

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

Pretty much. I remember sneering at the opening sequence of the fourth Harry Potter book when I first read it. Essentially, it involves a large number of wizards trying to pass among normals ('muggles'), and being wildly ignorant of how these folks dress and behave. It seemed ridiculously overplayed to me.... right up until I started to think about my own awareness, and lack thereof, of contemporary, mainstream popular culture. When I was fifteen, I consciously dropped out of the mainstream. These days, I'm only vaguely aware of it. I could name you maybe one record that I know to have been a UK chart number one since 1995... and that was 2009. I don't think I've ever heard a single Rihanna song. I'm only aware of who she is because of the 'showbiz' pages in the morning freesheet I skim on the way to work. Between Netflix and free-to-air channels' online catch-up services, I've not watch a single programme on regular television for months, which means I only see what I actively choose to watch. I might be able to identify a fashionable outfit if I saw someone wearing it in public, but I couldn't for the life of me describe what is 'trendy' now. One of the key things about current society is its fragmentation into often isolated interest groups and offline. It's a pre-internet thing (I remember a teacher of mine in 1992 telling us how varied our generation was compared to the fashion and pop-culture conformity of her / our parents' generation in their youth - bomers, I think (late forties born) - though that's not so commonly used a term over here), but the web has certainly exacerbated it. Personally, I find this very heathly indeed.

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.

I alwaus loved both Dietrich and Dylan's voices, but then many if not most of my favourite vocalists are what some would call "bad singers." Bob has gone through phases of really hamming it up, often simply because it annoys him that as a living artist with such an amaing body of work, there will always be one or teo folks who turn up just to treat him as a sixties nostalgia trip.

Is it "timeless" because they've been raised in a culture that *tells* them it's timeless?

Undoubtedly that's a huge factor. There are one hell of a lot of folks out there who aren't really much interested in music but who own a Beatles album or two, PInk Floyd's The Wall and some Led Zeppelin for no reason other than "they're among the top ten albums ever", because these infernal 'best of' lists keep saying they are.... Most of them had a few decent tunes. but the sheer level of artificial credibility some acts enjoy just mystifies me. I mean.... Zeppelin? Really?

 

[EngProf]

I wonder if there are plagiarism issues involved with the Harry Potter wizards' attempts to mingle with the ordinary folks.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a similar great story ("Trouble with the Natives", 1951) about alien diplomats trying to deal with the human residents of an English village, using language and customs that the aliens learned from listening to the BBC.

 

[vitanola]

That must be Czech or Slovene. Even traditional music changes over the years, you know. It changes partly because it's a living thing. But once it comes to this country, it starts growing in a different climate, so to say, and it changes in a different way. Thanks for the link.

Slovenian. "St. Clairu" is Cleveland's St. Clair avenue, the Rialto of the Slovenian community. Matt Hoyer was born in tha Old Country, of course. In Cleveland he developed a style which included some of the voicings of small Jazz Era dance orchestras. His accordeon style was rather influential here in the 'States. The post-war Polka fad has his fingers all over it. He was Frank Yankovic and Johnny Pecon's teacher, and his basic line-up; Traps, Banjo, Bass (Brass or string) and two accordions became the standard "Polka Band", dominating other ethnic traditions.

You might look for Mary Udovich & Josephine Lausche. Lovely singers, interesting accompniments.

 

[BlueTrain]

When I was in college in Morgantown, West Virginia, I could sometimes pick up some Slavic broadcast from Pittsburgh. I didn't listen to it very long before switching back to the local station playing the Mommas and the Poppas. It was a lot later that I discovered British and European folk music. When I moved to the Washington, DC, area, there was a flourishing folk dance scene and I quickly joined three different groups doing Scottish, all of which met weekly. In no time at all I was thoroughly integrated into local groups, including public performances now and then. We used recordings at our meeting and only occasionally had live musicians, most of whom came from Canada. One of the curious things we noticed, having used recordings from a variety of bands, was how everything the live band played sounded the same.

I did not grow up with people who ever talked about music. My father sometimes listened to the Grand Ole Opry at work on Saturday nights (I sometimes went with him) and there was only one station on the TV, when we finally got one in the late 1950s. But my impression was that rock and roll hardly dominated the fifties, depending, of course, how you define rock and roll. It is a highly elastic term that can be stretched to cover several different styles. Some sounds pretty good but not all of it. But you'd be surprised at how seriously rock and roll musicians take their music. It's their business.

There are two things that happen with music. One is, the performers age, but so does their audience. The other is, everyone wants music that is fresh and new, mostly, even though they may not necessarily want something in a different style. The artists themselves create the styles in the first place; they don't come out of nowhere but sometimes they go nowhere. And the styles evolve. Sometimes there are even new instruments that enter into the equation. How certain instruments spread around is interesting, too, like how a Hawaiian steel guitar can be popular in American Country & Western music as well as in Hawaii itself. I remember being very surprised at discovering how many CDs of American performers there were for sale in a department store in Trier, Germany. You wouldn't think Willie Nelson would have found an audience there, although a few German performers have sang songs popular here for decades--in German. One Swiss group does El Rancho Grande, a Mexican number from the 1930s, which Dean Martin also recorded. Good music is good music in any language.

As others have mentioned, music changes for more than one reason. After WWII, for instance, large dance bands became something of an economic burden to bandleaders, although a few bands still packed the dance halls when they still existed. I imagine the musicians were getting paid more after the war. But the advent of television meant more. People stayed home on Saturday night instead of going out for dining and dancing. Before the war, even a little town like I grew up in had a (relatively) big hotel with a dance band. There was even a local recreation park, coincidentally owned by the same man who owned the big hotel, that had a good dance band. The bands themselves were from out of town and surprisingly, even included all black bands, although these were all small bands. Small towns, small bands.

Some towns had regular opera houses that had big city pretensions, although they usually tended to be quite small, smaller than your local high school auditorium probably. They weren't dance venues, of course, but that's where the vaudeville performers did their gigs.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Speaking as another vintage Baby Boomer (born '47, thus even more classicaler than EngProf) I have to plead our cultural media upbringing. By the mid-50s, the pre-eminent transmission of pop songs was the 45 rpm record. These were what we heard on the radio and these were what we bought. There were only a handful of radio stations and even fewer tv stations. We knew little about 30s and 40s music because it wasn't played on the radio any more. That wasn't our choosing, we were too young to have any say in such things. The Big Band venues - all those Ballrooms, Dance Halls and Revues, had pretty much died out. It was radio and the juke box that we heard and responded to. It was in later years - the 80s and 90s and later, that Public radio and the multitude of venues that became available with Cable, that we were exposed to Cole Porter, Gershwin, the Big Bands and other great music of the past. Now I can flip on my local NPR station (as I do every morning) and listen all day to jazz, Big Band, '40s country, Ragtime, blues and all the other great American music styles of the early 20th century, but those just weren't available in the 50s - 70s.

You should have scanned your radio dial a bit. "NBC Bandstand" was a very popular feature thruout the latter half of the 1950s, featuring remotes from hotels and dance venues around the country, and many of the bandleaders of the Era were still active and broadcasting. The Dorsey Brothers even had their own television series for a while -- largely remembered today as the first national TV program to present Mr. Presely. Even on radio stations oriented more to the youth market, the mix of music was a lot broader than people tend to remember it was. I've listened to a great many aircheck recordings of radio stations from 1955-60, and it's not all "rock and roll" by a long shot, even in stations with a youth orientation: a "pop" station at that time was far more "middle of the road" than "top forty."

I was listening, myself, to radio starting in the late sixties, and 1930's-40s music was still very easy to find on the air to anyone with an AM radio, especially after dark. A particular favorite of mine was a show called "Your Mother Should Know" -- broadcast out of the Boston area, hosted by a man named Stan Poulten. It was named after a Beatles song, but that was intended to be purely ironic -- what Stan played, exclusively, was popular music from the 1920s to 1942. Then there was William B. Williams and the "Make Believe Ballroom" on WNEW out of New York, "Joe Franklin's Memory Lane" on WOR, "The Harley Show" on WBAL, Baltimore, and then when I got an FM radio in the mid-70s, I discovered Hazen Schumacher's "Jazz Revisited" on NPR, which was both entertaining and educational.

Television got in on the act, too. Most of the bandleaders and musicians of the Swing Era were still alive and well and performing well into the '70s. I watched Johnny Carson as a kid not for Carson but for the band, which featured several top talents including Al Klink on tenor sax and Will Bradley on trombone. Swing bands frequently appeared on specials featuring the likes of Bob Hope or Jack Benny, and there was even a series on CBS called "Happy Days" -- which had nothing to do with Fonzie, but instead focused on the entertainment of the 1930s, and featured just about every bandleader who was active at that time. Goodman, Ellington, Basie, James, all those guys were on there, and I was fascinated.

The music was definitely still out there, all you had to do was pay attention to it. The fact that many people seem to have no memory of this wide availablity is interesting -- another demonstration of what I've been saying all along, that the popular conception of "The Fifties," as well as "The Sixties" and "The Seventies" is much at odds with the reality of the actual 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. My argument is that the domination of popular-culture criticism and commercial marketing by self-focused Boomer voices since the rise of the myth of "The Fifties" in the 1970s has effectively erased pre-rock-era popular culture from not just popular memory but also, to a very large extent, from academic memory. The attitude seems to be "if Our Generation didn't experience and value it, it doesn't count." I reject, and have always rejected, that Boomercentric perspective.

 

[BlueTrain]

There used to be a program on a local PBS radio station that played what the DJ referred to as "obsolete music." It either went off the air or moved to some time slot that was out of my range. But I thought the expression was perfect for what it was, which was mostly "old time" music and vaguely roots music. The same station also formerly had Blue Grass music programs, too, but they've all been replaced by talk and more talk. Blue Grass seems to have the narrowest of definitions when it comes to musical genres and one that is not tied to a particular decade.

 

[MisterCairo]

look no further than Beatles' number "I wanna be your lover" (which I think they might have written for the Stones, and later recorde themselves, if memory serves). The Beatle's version is bloodless. Reminds me of Billy Connolly's comments on talent show children from way back in the early 80s ("Wee kids who should be out ridin' their bikes... A wee boy's singing 'I'm gonna love you all night long', an' he hasnae even got pubic hair!"). The Stones, by comparison, made it something glorious, naughty, and wonderful.

The song is "I Wanna Be Your Man". The Stones wanted to write their own stuff early on, but were having composers' block, and during a concert or some other event where the two bands were hanging out, John and Paul went off into a corner, wrote the tune, and handed it to the Stones, giving them their first hit record. It was good enough of a song John and Paul gave it to Ringo for his token vocal.

The Stones version as recorded may have had more "stones" (and that's debatable, the Beatles' version rocks, in fact), but what was the greater achievement - taking someone else's work and interpreting it, or creating it in the first place?

The Beatles showed the Stones how it was done, not the other way round.

I think that's an achievement.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There used to be a program on a local PBS radio station that played what the DJ referred to as "obsolete music." It either went off the air or moved to some time slot that was out of my range. But I thought the expression was perfect for what it was, which was mostly "old time" music and vaguely roots music. The same station also formerly had Blue Grass music programs, too, but they've all been replaced by talk and more talk. Blue Grass seems to have the narrowest of definitions when it comes to musical genres and one that is not tied to a particular decade.

The use of "obsolete" there is fascinating, and I think it demonstrates the point I've been making -- even when older music is acknowledged, it's rather passive-aggressively devalued. If it's given any value at all it's for its contributions to "rock."

I wonder -- do enthusiasts of Romantic composers consider the Baroques "obsolete?"

 

[BlueTrain]

The DJ was using the term obsolete for it's humorous effect, I suspect. But music doesn't necessarily have to fit a particular genre (which is another funny word), which is to say, it doesn't need to be pigeonholed. Good music can be played badly, though, no matter what kind of music it is. It also has to be played under good circumstances, somewhere where it can be heard well. I remember a description of a recording session for Bob Wills where they did some experimenting with moving instruments around the studio until they got the sound the way they wanted. Amateur records of public performances can sometimes be especially bad even if the sound and the performance is otherwise good. And by the way, there are a lot of contemporary YouTube music videos that are professionally produced and show it. I suppose they do them in most cases to promote the artist's CD and concert sales. It certainly works on me that way.

At some point, there is innovation in music and it's usually resisted by the traditionalist, even in rock and roll. Bob Wills, and forgive me for mentioning him a lot, was innovative but was too much for the Grand Ole Opry, at least back then. And I suppose rock and roll fans cringe when strings are added as background for anything. Sometimes the music become lifeless and other times, timeless. The theme from A Summer Place was never rock and roll and was nothing more than a light orchestral piece but what a tune. Was "Michelle" ever thought of as rock and roll?

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

My knowledge of '50s and '60s pop is pretty solid because that's when I was listening to it. My preference has always been for classical music but when I was growing up pop was the background music of our lives. It wasn't even about liking it, it was just always there. At home my radio was always tuned to the classical station and my records were all classical. But when you're a teenager you're always in somebody's car with the radio on, or at a kid hangout with the jukebox playing, so you absorbed the pop music of the era. In a college dormitory or an army barracks there was always a radio going. As Lizzie mentioned, the stations hadn't all become separated into single-category music and the Top 40 was mixed. When I was in Basic Training at Ft. Polk, LA in the fall of 1967, something from "Sgt. Pepper" might be followed by Sinatra singing "It Was a Very Good Year," Then John Denver singing "Wichita Lineman," and so forth, rock and schmaltz and country and easy listening all mixed together. And then there were the unclassifiable songs like "Quinn the Eskimo"and "Judy in Disguise"(some really surreal songs back then). After 1070 my knowledge of pop is nil, because when I separated from the Army I stopped listening to it.

 

[BlueTrain]

Oh, classical music was called "longhair music."

 

[EngProf]

My knowledge of '50s and '60s pop is pretty solid because that's when I was listening to it. My preference has always been for classical music but when I was growing up pop was the background music of our lives. It wasn't even about liking it, it was just always there. At home my radio was always tuned to the classical station and my records were all classical. But when you're a teenager you're always in somebody's car with the radio on, or at a kid hangout with the jukebox playing, so you absorbed the pop music of the era. In a college dormitory or an army barracks there was always a radio going. As Lizzie mentioned, the stations hadn't all become separated into single-category music and the Top 40 was mixed. When I was in Basic Training at Ft. Polk, LA in the fall of 1967, something from "Sgt. Pepper" might be followed by Sinatra singing "It Was a Very Good Year," Then John Denver singing "Wichita Lineman," and so forth, rock and schmaltz and country and easy listening all mixed together. And then there were the unclassifiable songs like "Quinn the Eskimo"and "Judy in Disguise"(some really surreal songs back then). After 1070 my knowledge of pop is nil, because when I separated from the Army I stopped listening to it.

Very well put!
The key sentence here is: "It wasn't even about liking it, it was just always there." This fits very well with the movie "American Graffiti", which was about George Lucas's autobiographical experiences growing up in California, and my experiences growing up in Nashville a few years later. (Our 1966 teen-age life in Nashville was identical in almost all ways with George Lucas' "Where were you in '62?" teen-age society in California.)

As in the movie, people here went to dances, went to the drag strip, cruised the drive-in, etc. with rock-and-roll on the radio all the time ("... it was the background music of our lives.") By the mid to late sixties the radio stations here had sorted themselves out and on the rock-and-roll stations you heard rock-and-roll to the exclusion of everything else. (A juke-box at Ft. Polk had to have a wider selection to appeal to a more diverse audience. Our radio stations had no such constraint, which was fine with us.)

I wasn't there back then, but I'll assume that people in earlier days bought a Caruso record and went home and put it on the gramophone and sat and listened to it. Later, I suppose that people turned on the Philco, waited for it to warm up, and sat and listened to Bing Crosby.
For the most part we didn't do that. Music was something that happened while you were doing something else - the activity was primary, the music was secondary.

I'm certainly not a musician or a psychologist, but I think this affects how Baby-Boomers think about music. In a group as large as ours there are likely some who bought Caruso records and just listened to them (Inkstainedwretch, for example), but for the main herd starting out as kids in the fifties and teenagers in the sixties, the use and purpose of music was as background sound.

This, more than any sinister vendetta against music from earlier eras, explains Baby-Boomers' lack of interest in that earlier music. It wasn't part of our background music, and could not have been, considering the circumstances prevailing at the time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That wasn't something the Boomers started. Radio-as-background-music was very common beginning as soon as AC-powered radios came on the scene in the late 1920s. Music to eat breakfast by, music to do housework by, music to work in factories by, music to read by, music to lull yourself to sleep at night -- all were broadcast thruout the pre-Boomer years. Car radios became common in the mid-1930s, and music-to-drive-by was a common thing. Every city had a small independent radio station that broadcast phonograph records and transcriptions from morning to night -- by the end of the thirties, the first 24-hour stations were on the air, and these were very common during the war. Portable radios exploded onto the scene in 1939 -- the smallest could fit in a purse or a coat pocket -- and by the start of the war they were quite common.

And yet, there was still a variety of music being broadcast, not simply swing bands for the teenagers and collegiate crowd. There was a strong youth culture surrounding this music, and it was widely played, but not to the exclusion of all else. You had Lombardo and Jan Garber for the old folks, Kay Kyser and Horace Heidt for the middle-aged, even Spike Jones for the kids. I have airchecks of mid-thirties radio stations playing everything from Delta Blues records to old-time fiddle records to Yiddish and Hungarian folk music to Gilbert and Sullivan. It was the specific desire of broadcasters to narrowcast to Boomer teens in the late fifties and early sixties that really started the transition to rigid "format" radio -- again as I said before, commerce and marketing started that ball rolling.

Nobody said anything about a "sinister conspiracy." A conspiracy implies a hidden agenda. There was no hidden agenda here. It was all out in the open, as is evident to anyone who reads Broadcasting magazine from the period in question. The erasure of pre-boomer culture is merely an unpleasant side-effect of that baldly commercial agenda. The Boomers themselves didn't institute that agenda, the Boys From Marketing did -- but they grew up to be the generation that perpetuated it. The assumption that so much of the way popular music is experienced began with the Boomers is simply an example of that perpetuation.

 

[BlueTrain]

I rather like the idea of the music being background music. A teenager's life is something like a so-so movie: not much of a plot but there's usually a soundtrack, for better or worse.

I think radio has changed since the 1970s, as if it wasn't always changing. Not so much radio as much as ownership patterns, which caused other things to change. Why would we thing something would never change anyway? Radio in large cities would also have been different than radio stations in small cities and the power of the station probably figured into it somehow but that's more of a technical thing I don't know enough about. But I don't think that any given station would have played just one kind of music to one audience segment all the time. At least it didn't where I am from. These days, though, I think there is more of a tendency for that to happen. But the local stations, as I recall, played a variety of music, with different kinds of music at different times of the day. The older big band music was featured, oddly enough, late at night. If I recall correctly, the name of the program was "Smoke Rings." I don't remember the name of any other program at the time from those two stations that we could get. I also don't remember anyone ever actually talking about music either. But I was definitely exposed to different kinds of music, at least of the sort you would hear in this country, except for jazz and similar kinds of music. Most, but not all, of the live music I heard was country & western.

Then at some point the music "we all knew the words to" became oldies and some stations did that. Stations had "formats."

 

[LizzieMaine]

The transcription libraries leased to radio stations in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s by NBC Thesaurus, World, Associated, Standard, and similar companies included every possible type of music, from the latest swing hits to folk music to show tunes to opera. These libraries were far more commonly used than ordinary phonograph records for much of the radio era, but some stations used a mix of both. Recordings survive of various prewar early-morning "wake up" shows on local stations in which both transcriptions and records are used, and you hear something like the Overture to Act 1 of Carmen played off a transcription, followed by the Casa Loma Orchestra's pop hit "Sunrise Serenade," and then a novelty Matty Malneck transcription and then an Artie Shaw record. Something for everyone.

It wasn't uncommon to hear older records, either. I have an aircheck from a Kansas City station from early 1936 in which a George Olsen record from 1926 is played -- just then the record labels were publishing "Not For Radio Broadcast" warnings on their product, and it was very common to turn on the radio and hear old records played that didn't carry these warnings. It wasn't even all that unusual to hear *really* old records going back to the turn of the century era -- comedian Henry Morgan often featured these on his WOR programs of the early forties. Bob and Ray did likewise on occasion during their WHDH programs after the war.

 

[EngProf]

That wasn't something the Boomers started. Radio-as-background-music was very common beginning as soon as AC-powered radios came on the scene in the late 1920s. Music to eat breakfast by, music to do housework by, music to work in factories by, music to read by, music to lull yourself to sleep at night -- all were broadcast thruout the pre-Boomer years. Car radios became common in the mid-1930s, and music-to-drive-by was a common thing. Every city had a small independent radio station that broadcast phonograph records and transcriptions from morning to night -- by the end of the thirties, the first 24-hour stations were on the air, and these were very common during the war. Portable radios exploded onto the scene in 1939 -- the smallest could fit in a purse or a coat pocket -- and by the start of the war they were quite common.

And yet, there was still a variety of music being broadcast, not simply swing bands for the teenagers and collegiate crowd. There was a strong youth culture surrounding this music, and it was widely played, but not to the exclusion of all else. You had Lombardo and Jan Garber for the old folks, Kay Kyser and Horace Heidt for the middle-aged, even Spike Jones for the kids. I have airchecks of mid-thirties radio stations playing everything from Delta Blues records to old-time fiddle records to Yiddish and Hungarian folk music to Gilbert and Sullivan. It was the specific desire of broadcasters to narrowcast to Boomer teens in the late fifties and early sixties that really started the transition to rigid "format" radio -- again as I said before, commerce and marketing started that ball rolling.

Nobody said anything about a "sinister conspiracy." A conspiracy implies a hidden agenda. There was no hidden agenda here. It was all out in the open, as is evident to anyone who reads Broadcasting magazine from the period in question. The erasure of pre-boomer culture is merely an unpleasant side-effect of that baldly commercial agenda. The Boomers themselves didn't institute that agenda, the Boys From Marketing did -- but they grew up to be the generation that perpetuated it. The assumption that so much of the way popular music is experienced began with the Boomers is simply an example of that perpetuation.

"It was the specific desire of broadcasters to narrowcast to Boomer teens in the late fifties and early sixties that really started the transition to rigid "format" radio -- again as I said before, commerce and marketing started that ball rolling."

We (Baby-Boomer teenagers) wanted to listen to a certain kind of music, musicians played it, and certain stations broadcast it. Everyone was happy - Why is or was this a negative outcome? (As I perceive that you believe it to be.)

"The erasure of pre-boomer culture..." Key-word here is "erasure". This implies that an action was taken by some person or persons with some motive. Who were they??
"The Boomers themselves didn't institute that agenda..."
True, and that makes my point that we (Baby-Boomers) didn't do anything wrong, including engaging in any sort of "erasure". We were obliviously neutral to the past in a lot of ways. You can make the claim that we should have been better educated and more aware of music, history, art, literature, and anything else you want to name, but we were fifties *kids* and sixties *teenagers*. (Such could be said, and has been, about the young people of ANY generation.)

As for "perpetuation" of an agenda, if someone wanted to play what we wanted to hear, and we listened to it, I see no wrongdoing there.

That leaves the infamous "Boys from Marketing"... If they engaged in "felony-erasure" of prior culture, that is for them to answer for... not us Baby-Boomers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Cultural erasure is a sociological term describing the process by which one culture imposes itself over another thru force of number or commercial power. It can be deliberate, as in forced colonization, or it can simply be an act of engulfment, like an amoeba surrounding and absorbing a smaller organism, or the gradual gentrification of a working class neighborhood by the bourgeoisie. It's a phrase used in many contexts and I'm using it here very specifically to describe the way in which Boomer culture has overwhelmed all forms of popular culture that preceded it. I believe it to be an accurate term in this sense, and I believe it to be the correct term. That erasure was not the intention of the development of format radio, but it was definitely a side-effect.

It is not an act of individual will, it's not an act that requires a specific action, and it's not something you have to get defensive about, because you, yourself, had no control over it. It was a cultural force larger than you, and you were merely swept along by its tide. I do consider it a very negative result, because I consider what's generally described as Boomer culture to be both overmarketed and overrated. That is my opinion, for which I offer no apology whatever. But I believe the erasure and the process by which it has happened, to be an accomplished fact. I've offered plenty of evidence for that in my prior posts.

 

[EngProf]

Cultural erasure is a sociological term describing the process by which one culture imposes itself over another thru force of number or commercial power. It can be deliberate, as in forced colonization, or it can simply be an act of engulfment, like an amoeba surrounding and absorbing a smaller organism, or the gradual gentrification of a working class neighborhood by the bourgeoisie. It's a phrase used in many contexts and I'm using it here very specifically to describe the way in which Boomer culture has overwhelmed all forms of popular culture that preceded it. I believe it to be an accurate term in this sense, and I believe it to be the correct term.

It is not an act of individual will, it's not an act that requires a specific action, and it's not something you have to get defensive about, because you, yourself, had no control over it. It was a cultural force larger than you, and you were merely swept along by its tide. I do consider it a very negative result, because I consider what's generally described as Boomer culture to be both overmarketed and overrated. That is my opinion, for which I offer no apology whatever. But I believe the erasure and the process by which it has happened, to be an accomplished fact.

As an amoeba - I have no problem with that definition. (There was even a movie that we Baby-Boomer kids liked that fits that analogy well: "The Blob" (Steve McQueen, 1958))

As for opinions - yours or mine - I have no problem with those, even if they are opposite in nature. However, I will defend my generation to the best of my ability, if criticized, but with no hostility.

If I were King of the Universe I'd go back and correct some government demographer who mistakenly included you with us in the beginning. No hostility there, either, I just don't think your late-in-the-game age-bracket really fits in with the rest of us B-B's. I was going to the Senior Prom when you were three years old - just not a lot of commonality there...

As to whether the Boomer culture is overrated, I'm sure you have experienced someone start to tell a story that he/she thinks is funny or interesting. When it starts to fall flat, he/she says, "Well, you just had to be there..."
Same with Baby-Boomer culture: "Well, you just had to be there..."

 

[LizzieMaine]

I am epically, epically glad that I wasn't. The world you boys dribble your nostalgia over offers nothing to me.

I've been trying to resign from the Boomer generation since I was five years old. The end of Boomer cultural hegemony can't come soon enough for me, and I take great comfort in knowing that my "late in the game age bracket" ensures that I will live long enough to see that happen.

If you know somebody in the head office who can help my resignation along, there's a five-spot in it for you.

(Oh, and you guys missed out on a hell of a lot of good music. To say nothing of radio, movies, books, theatre, sports, and social movements.)