Wall of Sound

The musical genres of jazz, world, alternative and indie rock, folk and Americana tend to be in the margins of mainstream music radio in the US, but interestingly, they are particularly prominent in the programme schedules of the college radio stations I studied here. In North American radio, each of these genre terms cover a wide range of music, while still not embracing the full range of music made available by the genre-ordering structures used in music cultures outside radio playlists. It is necessary, then, to understand in what sense these could be understood as alternative musical forms, and why particular recordings are included in a programming category, while others are neglected.

Chris Atton (2002; 2004), through an engagement with the key texts of media structural analysis, has shown how neglected the notion of alternative media is, and maps the idea of an ‘alternative media’ within discourse on culture and political society. His attempt to produce an analytical definition which emphasises media subject matter and organisation, and covers artistic and subcultural, as well as political practices, is very helpful. However, as he himself shows, so wide are the range of practices that can be defined as alternative that it extends beyond the unconventional and radical. In this study, I do not seek to provide a definition of ‘alternativeness’ against which the radio stations I studied can be compared. Instead, I want to explore in some detail how the development and contemporary operation of radio broadcasting within the USA has constructed various and particular notions of ‘alternativeness’ as they are applied to music and radio. Following Michel Foucault’s (1972: 49) methodological directive, I am more interested in teasing out the discursive practices which constitute alternative radio as a cultural object.

Any notion of alternativeness must, of course, have a binary ‘other’ against which it is set. In music culture, these senses of alternativeness are built around a notion that there is a ‘mainstream’ which dominates music culture. This metaphor is itself interesting, and contains within it two senses. First, that – in the range of music possibility that runs analogously from bank to bank of a waterway – there is a central flow where the culture runs most clearly and speedily, without the eddies and complex clutter of the margins. Second, that this mainstream runs down from the source in a continuous flow. The mainstream is the common current of thought or practice.

While this analogy is widely used in both vernacular discussions and more systematic academic analysis, the concepts and the way they are deployed receive little scrutiny. For instance, while Raymond Williams (1976) established an approach to discussing the ‘Keywords’ of culture and society, he did not include the concepts of alternative and mainstream; and neither did the authors who updated the work (Bennett, Grossberg et al. 2005). Primarily, this is because the selected keywords are the terms through which intellectuals ordered their analysis of culture, rather than the terms used by the participants who practiced it.

The very notion of a mainstream is constructed by two parallel processes. One, in which an idea of the common current is an assertion of the values of the norm in society: ‘common sense’, ‘what we like’, ‘not esoteric’; the other, in which a mainstream is constructed as an ‘other’ against which values of difference, freedom, and non-conformity can be asserted. These values of difference are in themselves variable, and not necessarily compatible. Most relevant to the discussion here are the polarisation of the exotic from the everyday, the exciting from the indifferent, the substantial from the lightweight, the experimental from the formulaic, and the authentic from the manufactured.

While earlier studies of college radio have used a core notion of alternativeness, and one at least presents clear evidence that college radio staff use phraseology similar to that utilised by the respondents in my own research, these ideas remain undeveloped in the presentation of the research data. We can see this clearly in, for instance, R. Wilfred Tremblay’s (2003) investigation of college radio faculty advisors’ attitudes to the future of college radio. He quotes station staff as champions of programming around ‘alternative music, blues and jazz etc’ (: 173), and concludes that there is an acceptance of ‘the traditional college radio ideology: to be an alternative to commercial radio’ (: 179). He also reports that localness was an important driver within the stations, and that such programming independence, rather than national networking, were often seen as the basis of future success (: 180). Similarly, Samuel J. Sauls (1995; 199 has discussed college radio and the formation of alternative rock music in two descriptive conference papers which summarise journalistic commentary on college radio. Neither researcher, though, takes the opportunity to drill down further into the ways in which differences in programming and presentation practices order this idea of alternativeness, and then make it manifest in the broadcast.

In essence, this is the task I set myself. Following three quite distinct radio stations over a five-year period, I examined the changing programming and presentation practices within each station in some visits and discussions with key staff in 2003 and 2006, and by scrutinising their playlists, programme schedules and broadcasts on a yearly basis from 2002. During my visits, I watched presenters at work selecting and broadcasting the music in their live shows, and went through the music programming practices with key station personnel, including the senior management, programming staff, presenters and faculty advisors. In our discussions, notions of alternativeness were a common theme. As I will show later, my findings reveal considerable variation in practice and output, and incremental but significant change over the five-year period. My analysis shows that these music programming practices drew on the differing repertoires that operate in the wider music cultures associated with the forms of music played.

In more straight-forward terms, there is not one type of alternativeness; and the distinctive sense of alternativeness articulated by the jazz, world, indie rock, folk and Americana music played on the college stations was as much rooted in the cultural histories of those musical genres as it was in the way they were programmed and presented. In addition, the cultural uplift agenda of the 1920s’ university-based stations, the progressive mission that underlay the birth of NPR, and the counter-cultural radio form of the 1960s are all also apparent to different degrees in the way that the alternativeness of the music is articulated within the stations and on air. The music itself, the programming practices, and the presentation styles, then, operate as a ‘homology’ which, paraphrasing Dick Hebdige paraphrasing Levis-Straus, we can understand as the ‘symbolic fit’ between production values, subjective experience, and musical forms (Hebdige 1979: 113). These become apparent if we explore the way that college radio deals with genre styles of indie rock, jazz, and world and folk.

In the 1980s, the association between college radio and certain forms of rock music became so strong that the homology was articulated in the term ‘college rock’. In a retrospective attempt to capture the trajectory of the term, All Music Guide presented it as a ‘confluence of new wave, post-punk, and early alternative rock’ with better selling bands with ‘thoughtful lyrics and socially conscious idealism’, ending in 1991 with the introduction of many of the bands into commercial station playlists after college rock staple Nirvana gained international commercial success (AMG 2007). Certainly, by 1987, the New York Times linked college stations with emergent forms of rock, and six years later presented college radio as key to the development of what would become known as grunge (Pareles 1987; Schoemer 1992).

The ordering of alternative rock codified the experimental forms of free form radio that developed in colleges in the early years of FM into a more organised, and probably more widely palatable, radio format, just as the introduction of station programmers on commercial FM stations had built its elements into the AOR (Adult Orientated Rock) format (Neer 2001). Keith Negus suggests that the growth of interest in college radio by record companies during the late 1980s moved the stations away from the domain of enthusiasts and a maverick image (Negus 1992: 103). The codification of college radio as a format is most apparent in the development of CMJ as a taste leader amongst station staff. Key to the sense of rock music’s alternativeness in the accounts is a merged sense that the music is exciting, substantial, authentic and occasionally experimental, set against a view of music programming on commercial radio as indifferent, lightweight, manufactured and formulaic.

By contrast, jazz programming has tended to construct a sense of alternativeness by following a pattern set within a paradigm established by academic critics constructing jazz as a tradition of great artists, whose performances they actively disassociate from the commercial music industry in which they were created (Ulanov 1952; Stearns 1956; Williams 1959). In doing so, they remade jazz as ‘America’s classical music’. Jazz programming, and presentation on the jazz shows that developed at NPR and college radio stations from the mid-1970s, reflected the ideas of a historical canon and the discographic detail found in the critics’ journalism and books. In particular, the programmes gave little attention to the new forms of music which developed out of the black arts movement, and the retelling of jazz history by black cultural critics (Jones 1966; see Looker 2004).

Jazz programmes were often the cornerstone of college radio’s specialist shows, most often found in the evenings or at weekends, and presented by knowledgeable station staff with large record collections of their own. These programmes presented jazz’s alternativeness as ‘substance’ in contrast to the ‘lightweight’ of other popular music. Most significant was the idea of a mainstream jazz as a tradition which had to be learnt, and into which individual artists had to be placed (Gennari 2006: 207 to 251). It allowed for the idea of a peripheral avant garde, but favoured a textbook rendition of the music’s past. More recently, jazz’s tradition has been recontextualised by the
adoption of the ideas of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who have articulated the music’s development within African American culture (Ellison 1964; Murray 1976; Ellison and Murray 2000). These perspectives have been influential within jazz education, on musician and educator Wynton Marsalis (via cultural critic Stanley Crouch), and on wider notions of jazz as a concert, or repertory music. This has placed jazz, along with classical music, comfortably as part of a discourse of cultural uplift, and it is in this context that it is most often programmed and presented on college radio.

Folk music, and particularly its reinterpretation by Bob Dylan, was an important element in the 1960s counter-cultural movement which lay at the heart of what Keith has characterised as ‘underground radio’(Keith 1997). The association of folk forms with progressive politics has a long history (see Denisoff 1971; Eyerman and Jamison 1998), where folk is asserted as possessing an authenticity that is contrasted with the manufactured nature of mainstream popular music. From the 1970s onwards, a similar association, rooted in the activities of field musicology and song collecting, built around the vernacular forms of other peoples. Marketed as ‘world music’, it connects to the idea that localised music from different parts of the world is more authentic than the international repertoire that is played on stations with for-profit owners (Taylor 1997). World music works in radio programming terms as ‘exotica’ against the ‘everyday’ of American life, and is presented as part of cultural uplift in widening personal horizons beyond the limitations of North America. It is significant that such programmes hardly ever include music from the homelands of prominent minority groups within the US, and reggae, for instance, is preferred over contemporary US black music forms.

I want to argue, then, that a sense of an alternative music culture is built up out of a series of discursive practices around music, which are then reinforced in the programming and presentation of the music on air through remnants of the ideas of cultural uplift, progressive politics, and counter-culture that have pervaded not-for-profit radio in the US.

This is an extract from a longer paper on college radio in the USA which will be published soon in the Radio Journal

University-based radio stations have a long tradition in the USA, and a number of issues trelating to music programming in the twenty-first century are first found in the origins of this form of broadcasting. Some of the earliest radio stations established in the first half of the 1920s were based at universities or initiated by faculty staff, at a time when only 7% of radio broadcasts came from profit-maximising stations (Dimmick 1986), and by 1923 the 72 university stations constituted a major category of broadcaster (Barnouw 1966: 4). State universities were particularly prominent among these early broadcasters, and their leaders tended to share a view that radio was an important part of a wider progressive agenda which aimed (in the terminology of the time) at cultural ‘uplift’. In this they juxtaposed their intentions to utilise the new medium for broader social purposes against those of for-profit broadcasters, who aimed to maximise audience size as a means to attract programme sponsors. The debate is captured in a contemporary commentary, in which a professor of political science at The University of Chicago, Jerome Kerwin, argues that profit maximisation was incompatible with educational programming because, “in order to secure the largest audiences which the advertisers want and will pay for, it is necessary to stage the least elevating types of programme” (cited in Smulyan 1994: 135). Derek Vaillant’s study of the Wisconsin state station WHA in the 1920s indicates that music was an important part of a culturally ‘uplifting’ programming mix. Performances of classical music by the university’s orchestra were central to an attempt to produce music programming noticeably different from what WHA’s first broadcast chief referred to as the “jazz and other worthless material” broadcast by for-profit stations (quoted in Vaillant 2002: 64).

Susan Smulyan (1994) has characterised the period in radio history from 1920 to 1934 as a struggle between organisations representing, on the one hand, the primacy of social objectives versus those in pursuit of profit; a struggle in which ‘commercialization’ eventually won out. The progressive agenda of the early university stations had difficulties surviving in an environment in which federal policy tended towards a ‘corporate liberalism’ that privileged certain forms of ownership, versions of intellectual property rights and the commodification of audiences that benefited for-profit corporate oligopolies (Streeter 1996). Regulatory changes in 1927, and the policies of the Federal radio Commission in particular, made it increasingly difficult for such stations to survive against growing competition from profit-maximising stations funded by sponsorship. In the five years to 1926, 177 licences were issued to educational stations; only 12 were issued in the five years from 1927, and only 38 of the 202 stations licensed in the fifteen years since 1921 were still running in 1936 (Smulyan 1994: 130).

While the historical record of the politics of regulation bears out Smulyan’s analysis, there are another set of dimensions to the issue which were as important for the early college radio stations as they are eighty years later. State universities and land grant colleges seemed to be most successful in keeping their licences, perhaps because of their collective commitment to a progressive mission of education, cultural ‘uplift’, and economic and technological development, and the modernist aspirations of senior staff. However, the managers of these stations still struggled with questions about the processes involved in programming decisions, the relationships between the programming in the university-based stations and that of other broadcasters, and of the relationships between the broadcasters and the communities who could listen to the station. Vaillant’s study of the operation of WHA in the 1920s sets the desires of the station’s staff to be part of a project to “rejuvenate and reform rural culture through educational programmes and uplift” against the reception of the programming amongst Wisconsin’s rural communities (2002: 84). So, while some of WHA’s classical music broadcasts were clearly valued by some listeners, others argued for music which was rooted far more deeply in the cultural values of the rural community.

These examples of debates within organisations pursuing social broadcasting aims (offered by Smulyan), and of programmers trying to resolve the friction between audience expectations and their own objectives (offered by Vaillant), are indicative of the wider, century-long, history of radio broadcasting as an institutional form within the US. The progressive mission of some early broadcasters did survive the initial decline of the university stations, and can be understood to have developed within the campaigns of the broadcast reform movement of the 1930s, and in the establishment of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1967 (Engelman 1996; Mitchell 2005).

However, the post-war transformation of the dominant form of radio, from mixed programming to music radio, happened outside the university-based and public radio sectors, primarily in the commercial sectors. For Eric Rothenbuhler and Tom McCourt (2002) ‘radio redefines itself’ in the US in the fifteen years from 1947. This transformation is apparent in programming, the inter-relationships of stations, and the relationship between a station and its respective publics. For Rothenbuhler and McCourt, it is primarily a movement from a network era to a format era. The pre-war, centrally-devised, mixed-block programme broadcasting gives way to locally-devised, strip-structure programming, using a recorded music and news format but overlapped by a transitional period of diversity and experimentation.

By the point that the hegemonic network system had fully given way to a plethora of small independent stations making local decisions within strict conventions, diversity in programming had significantly declined, and the variety that did exist was organised within conventional formats aimed at specific audiences, mainly of teenagers, urban African-Americans and rural whites. The development of Top 40 programming structures (Rothenbuhler and McCourt 2004) was paralleled by the growth of black music format stations (George 1988; Barlow 1999) through to the 1960s. From these roots, a dominant form of AM pop radio developed, built around personality DJs and a fast rotation of a few records, selected on the basis of market information published in music and radio trade journals.

By 1960, then, a dominant music radio ‘mainstream’ had been established in the USA. Presentation became a highly conventional form, taking many of the mannerisms of black radio presenters, but codifying them into a youth-orientated ‘total station sound’, in which the single elements of personality and recorded music were less important than the overall identity of the station. The centralisation, and later the computerisation, of music programming became a central part of ensuring that the station sound predominated. Although as competition within music radio intensified new formats of music broadcasting were developed (Barnes 1988; Berland 1993), pop AM stations relied on well-worked-through formulas to hold market share. These formulas were only challenged in the late 1960s and early 1970s by stations operating on the FM band.

College radio, as distinct from university-based radio stations, developed in the 1960s, to some degree in parallel with FM radio as a technical method of transmission and as a style of music radio. Both the expanded college stations and the for-profit stations explored new forms of presentation and music programming aimed at a rising, young and increasingly wealthy middle class population that saw itself as part of a music-centric counterculture (Eyerman and Jamison 1998: 106 to 139). This expansion in music radio took advantage of the opportunity to transmit on the underused VHF band, and of regulatory changes which discouraged simultaneous AM and FM broadcasting.

Transmission of sound by modulating the frequency of the radio wave, rather than its amplitude, had been established by RCA as early as 1935, but the technical challenges of broadcasting pictures, the second world war, and regulatory changes over the frequencies of VHF transmission standards meant that a settled system was not in place until it was used to send stereo signals as part of the development of domestic high-fidelity audio playback systems (Shingler and Wieringa 1998: 7 to 10). The retarded social application of FM radio and the relatively high cost of FM receivers created an underused broadcast space that, in contrast to the highly formatted AM broadcasters, allowed experimentation with music programming and presentation that was later to be called freeform radio. In Steven Van Zandt’s mythologizing words, the form of broadcasting that developed as FM in the US was ‘quieter, even though it was louder. Peaceful, while it spoke of revolution. Slower, while we evolved at an inconceivably rapid pace’ (2001: viii). The presenters, and their choices of music, were actively constructed as offering an alternative to AM pop radio where, in the contemporary critique from freeform radio pioneer Tom Donahue, ‘the disc jockeys have become robots performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound’ (1967: 2).

These freeforms of music radio returned the control of music selection to the programme presenter, who adopted an antithetical style to AM pop radio, purposely juxtaposing music of very different styles; playing lengthy album tracks rather than high-rotation singles; talking slowly for long periods, or not at all; never interrupting a music track and maybe even leaving pregnant pauses (Keith 1997; Neer 2001). The presentation styles were of particular appeal to college students, who adopted many of the practices in their new low-power campus stations.

By contrast, the main thrust of forms of cultural uplift programming, which had motivated the university-based broadcasters of half a century before, was focused on the development of a national public radio system. In the early 1970s, the newly formed NPR distributed classical music concerts for broadcast by public stations, but they did little to engage with a wider issue of diversity of music (McCourt 1999). However, the trajectories of anti-format broadcasting, alternative provision and cultural uplift were to play out in music culture and college radio over the next-thirty five years, through the idea of alternative music cultures.

Here’s a rewrite on the notion of progress in jazz:

My starting point in exploring David Murray’s thirty-year career is to adapt some of the key questions and ideas used by Scott DeVeaux to analyse Coleman Hawkins’ relationship to the bebop musicians of the 1940s. Deriving this idea of a ‘disciplinary matrix’ from Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) analysis of paradigm shifts in science, DeVeaux’s exemplary historiography sees bebop as a paradigm shift in jazz, which he analyses through an examination of ‘the sum total of practices, values and commitments that define jazz as a profession’ (44). Thus change in jazz becomes more than the introduction of new forms of music, and instead a transformation of the cultural practices and political economy that produce this new music. He calls upon the widely noted view that the jazz world in which bebop was created was in crisis, but challenges us to see past the notion that the new music was simply the product of original and brilliant musicians taking advantage of that crisis.

The extension of this approach to the 1970s New York new music scene is a relatively straightforward proposition. Similarly, the neo-traditional movement of the 1980s and 90s represents a further important paradigm shift. Each is characterized by significantly different cultural practices, which attempted to solve a crisis in the wider jazz world. Most importantly, though, the adoption of a methodology akin to that of DeVeaux – namely, studying a single musician through the concrete practicalities of a jazz career – allows a fundamental research question to be addressed:

What did it mean for a young African-American man to pursue the career of professional jazz musician in the last decades of the twentieth century? In particular, what did it mean for him to be progressive? (paraphrasing DeVeaux, 45).

There are, immediately, some intriguing parallels between Hawkins and Murray. Hawkins set the standard for the tenor saxophone, and showed how it could be used for virtuoso performance, while Murray explored its outer limits, regularly playing beyond the instrument’s conventional range. They both escaped what they saw as a restricted jazz scene in New York to live in Paris and other northern European cities, playing with a diverse range of musicians and absorbing musical ideas from outside jazz. They both played a pivotal role in constituting a new sense of jazz improvisation and group interaction.
These similarities in the two musicians’ careers, though, should not suggest to us that each operated within the same sense of progressivism, or that there is only one notion of progress available for understanding the professional life of a jazz musician. On the contrary, the sense that these two musicians worked in quite different disciplinary matrices of jazz musicianship is underpinned by the way each related to ideas of progress.
This is apparent in the most intriguing connection between Hawkins and Murray: their respective recordings of ‘Body and Soul’. Unlike Murray, Hawkins achieved both critical and popular success, and his 1939 recording of this standard was simultaneously a commercially lucrative release, highly played on jukeboxes in black neighbourhoods, and a mainstay white jazz aficionados’ record collections (DeVeaux 1997: 98 - 110). It has become one of the most analysed of jazz recordings, and for DeVeaux the performance is an example of innovation and increasing musical sophistication in jazz improvisation as well as ‘a way of playing that privileges the virtuoso over the composer’ (104). Murray certainly seemed to assign Hawkins and his ‘Body and Soul’ recording an important place in jazz history; it was the first standard he recorded when he produced a solo rendition in 1978, and it became his most recorded composition (six times in my sample) when he returned to it in 1983, and produced four versions of it in the early 1990s .
However, each musician, and each performance, is positioned to jazz and popular music in significantly different ways. While Hawkins’ recording relates to the composition’s status as a well-known popular song and a standard of the jam session repertoire of improvising musicians, Murray’s recordings relate directly to Hawkins’ rendition, and latterly to his own earlier versions. As such, the activities of each musician suggest very different notions of progress. If Hawkins’ performance privileges virtuosity as a progressive ideal within the disciplinary matrix of bebop, Murray’s has to be understood both in the context of the Hawkins’ ‘statement’ and the different notions of progress which developed within jazz from the late 1960s.

Three repertoires of progress
It is, in fact, possible to draw out three distinct notions of ‘progress’ that are relevant to this discussion of David Murray’s career. For clarity I will call these the European avant-garde model; the African-American progress model; and the African-American classical model.
The first, built out of a particular European modernism, transforms the belief that the future will be better than the past, and that innovation is a virtue, to embrace the notion of radical change (Berman 1982). Jon Parish (1997) has suggested a second African American take on the notion of progress through a comparison with Euro-American uses of jazz in American post-war popular culture. He traces an ahistorical individualism in the adoration of jazz musicians by white progressives which contrasts starkly with the historically-inflected communal experience articulated by black writers. In particular, he notes the white writers’ preoccupation with the soloist in jazz, and an interpretation of improvisation as a universal experimental technique, deploying spontaneity and freedom (79-117).
I should also note that the European avant-garde model had a contradictory relationship with black culture, celebrating its vibrancy and yet constructing black bodies and practices as ‘primitive’. Indeed, Sieglinde Lemke (199 has gone as far as arguing that modernism and primitivism constituted each other. The degree of confusion about the place of jazz in European models of art and entertainment can be seen in the way that black performers – including Armstrong and Ellington – were presented through a dominant discourse of ‘primitivism’. They were most often featured in Britain as novelty music hall acts (Parsonage 2005), at the same time that fans like Spike Hughes used ideas of the cultural genius to celebrate Ellington’s ‘hot’ jazz performances, and denigrate his role in the Cotton Club’s entertainment, and the band’s ‘turn’ at the London Palladium (1933a/R1993; 1933b/R1993).
Houston Baker, in his exploration of African-American artistic production in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, has likewise contrasted a European modernism, which rejects ‘outmoded forms’, with a black American modernism, which has the: ‘necessary task of employing … extant forms in ways that move clearly up, masterfully and resoundingly away from slavery’ (1987: 101). Alain Locke certainly saw jazz as ‘the characteristic musical speech of the modern age’ (1936: 90) and Ellington certainly personified Locke’s ‘New Negro’ (Locke 1925; Floyd 1990) with his progressive cultural agenda, interest in black history and urban culture, and dislike for labels like ‘jazz’ that restricted his work (Tucker 1990). However, whilst there was a strand which celebrated jazz and blues, most Harlem Renaissance intellectuals utilized a third model based in European models of progress and classicism (Vincent 1995: 145 to 172). More importantly for my analysis here, such classical models of cultural development are also apparent in the positions of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, two of the key intellectuals of jazz as an African-American art form, and both centrally influential on the formation of the neo-traditional movement in jazz in the 1980s.
Ellison asserts that jazz musicians draw upon particular African-American sensibilities to remake individual and community traditions into multiple new possibilities, and his ideas have been adapted by Craig Werner to argue that there is a ‘jazz impulse’ running through the whole history of popular music (Ellison 1972; Werner 1999). If Ellison shares any of DeVeaux’s sense of bebop as a paradigm shift, he does not see it necessarily as an example of progress (see Ellison 1959 / 2001). As is apparent in Ellison’s exchange of letters with Albert Murray (2000), his idea of remaking the past is rooted in European concepts of classical culture. Albert Murray’s own work similarly tries to construct a lineage within jazz history as the continuity of black American experience (Murray 1976).
Of course, Albert Murray’s work has been identified as a direct influence on Stanley Crouch, and through Crouch on Wynton Marsalis. Their ideas have been central to the repertory movement in jazz, which seeks to recreate ‘classic’ jazz forms in live events (Martin 2002: 360-5). Murray’s emphasis on the blues as the blood flow of jazz, and the more widespread notion that jazz is America’s classical music, has most often been taken as an imperative to preserve jazz as a musical product in the cultural spaces of the elite arts. This extrapolation is surprising, given that Murray’s nuanced analysis deals extensively with the practices and political economy of the unfolding of African-American culture and entertainment over a century.
DeVeaux locates Hawkins’ sense of progress in the rhetoric of African-American leaders like Booker T Washington about individual self-improvement and communal collaboration (45), and Steven Elworth has suggested that bop was an opportunity for ‘black musicians to seize their discourse from the white-dominated culture industry and to create something less likely to be appropriated’ (Elworth 1995: 59). Yet the dominant story of bop resides in the cult of jazz genius and was produced by white ‘hipster’ fans, however sophisticated the confluence of ideas about race, ethnicity, commerce, art and culture which they drew upon were (Ross 1989).

In the end Ellington, Hawkins and Murray all faced the same challenge: how to explore practices of change in economic circumstances not of your own making. For Ellington, the Cotton Club and the Palladium, and for Hawkins, the white-owned small Manhattan jazz club and independent record company, were the only spaces available to make a living. These were largely opportunities made available by individuals from European and Euro-American cultures, and they involved being judged by critics from similar backgrounds, who deployed the cultural resources available to them. It is noticeable that, up until the 1950s, most white critics used ideas of continuity and change from classical European culture to understand jazz history (see, for instance, Blesh 1946; Finkelstein 1948; Ulanov 1952; Stearns 1956). Together with Ellison’s and Murray’s work, such investigations have all involved an attempt to create a ‘totalising’ history which ‘inserts events into a grand explanatory system and linear process, celebrates great moments and individuals and seeks to document a point of origin’ (Sarup 1993: 59).

I would argue that these same totalising histories are apparent in the interpretation of free jazz in the 1960s. Frank Koftsky (1970), for instance, offers an analysis of late 1960s players that mirrors many of the characteristics of the white progressive bebop fans studied by Parish. Jacques Attali’s analysis is far more theorized, and combines a critique of what he sees as the tyranny of the political economy of repetition with the proposal that the ‘organized and often consensual theft of black American music’ provoked ‘the emergence of free jazz, a profound attempt to win creative autonomy, to effect a cultural-economic reappropriation of music by the people for whom it had meaning’ (Attali 1985: 138). However, using selective examples he goes on to conflate the musical experiments of the 1960s avant-garde with the musicians who came to form the New York new music scene in the 1970s, and defines free jazz as ‘a meeting of black popular music and a more abstract theoretical explorations of European music, [which] eliminated the distinction between popular music and learned music, broke down the repetitive hierarchy’ (140).

Gary Giddins, a white American critic more attuned to the generation of musicians with whom Murray first worked, has suggested that ‘the 1960s avant-garde, in clearing the slate of preconceived notions, paradoxically opened jazz to a more generous involvement with its past’ (2007). And, as Lorenzo Thomas (1995) shows, the Black Arts Movement practitioners who followed expressed their desires for economic and aesthetic independence through an exploration of black vernacular cultural forms of all sorts, and an antagonism to the way that white liberal criticism dominated interpretations of jazz in particular.

When Murray performed in the US and Europe from the 1970s onwards, then, he was participating in a paradigm shift in what constituted jazz, and yet these changes were set in the context of discursive practices which constituted earlier paradigm shifts. In the narrative of the neo-traditionalists, the musicians of this period neglect the values that make up what Martin Williams (1970) termed the ‘jazz tradition’. As I will show, this period was in fact characterized by a deep engagement with the idea of an African-American tradition, both as a basis on which to build progressivism in jazz, and also as a means to resolve tensions between European and African-American ideas of progress.

We can consider jazz history, then, to have two dimensions: a synchronic one that focuses on the interaction between a set of African American-derived and a set of European-derived senses of progress at a particular moment; and a diachronic one that focuses on the meaningful interaction between the socio-musical practices in operation at different times. This allows us to embrace both the immediate practices of Murray’s milieu, but also the way that these practices relate to a past of, and future for, jazz and the critical commentary which frames the interpretation of Murray’s music and career. As I will show, this critical commentary has tended to fetishize certain aspects of Murray’s performance, seeing them narrowly as articulations of creative and political freedom, and ignoring alternative notions of progress used by the musicians themselves.

Conclusion
The decade from 1955 to 1965 saw some significant changes in social dance. Over the twentieth century the relationships between individual social dancers, the couple, and the community of the dance floor shifted a number of times. The dance fads of the 1950s and 1960s did herald a greater emphasis on the individual that was to come to fruition later in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Perhaps more significantly, they shifted emphasis back to an earlier sense of communal dance, and away from the couple-orientations of most of twentieth century dance up to that point. The meanings of the dance articulated in a significant, but sadly not a profound, way a sense of optimism, both for a culture of youth and for the meanings of ethnic identity. In Europe, black music and black forms were to take on significance for working-class youth, and the British Mod subculture, with its adoration of American jazz and soul, reinterpreted modernism for another society. This passion for black dance music of the 1960s survives to this day in Northern Soul. Record collectors in this peculiarly British scene have a particular veneration for the dance records of Cameo-Parkway. However, you will not hear “The Twist,” or even the “Mashed Potato,” on these dance floors, but instead all those records that fell into obscurity or did not sell first time around.

In these lost records, as in the chart hits, are the dreams of a modern America. Built on ideas of youth and excitement, for a generation of African Americans they were also expressive of the possibility of an integrated society. However, that moment did not last, and the growth of rock music in the mid-1960s with its free form individualistic dance styles and shift to non-dance forms of practice were to take white American music away from African American texts. Black Americans, frustrated with the failure of the civil rights movement to live up to their dreams, shifted their tastes to soul and funk with their articulations of an Afro-centric identity, and a whole new set of dance floor, community-bound dances.

Music, dance, and the media remain central to issues of the politics of identity. We just need to keep making the connections as we move.

I’ve written a short piece on the relationship of the music and dancing on the Northern Soul scene in the UK and African American culture.

Notes

1. While some web sites marked the record’s April 12, 1954 New York recording anniversary in 2004, most used 1955 reflecting the March 1955 release of the MGM-produced film, the track’s release as an A-side single, and the single’s number one spot on the Billboard chart in July 5, 1955. See detail at Rockabilly Hall of Fame, “Rock Around the Clock Tribute,” http://www.rockabillyhall.com/RockClockTribute.html (accessed January 2006).

2. Extract from New Musical Express quoted at 100 Rock Moments, “Riots at ‘Blackboard Jungle’ Movie,” http://microsites.nme.com/rock100/site/63.html (accessed January 2006).

3. Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer (London: London Press Exchange [for] Incorporated Practitioners in Advertising, 1959).

4. It was ranked at number one or two on the Billboard pop and R&B charts, and on the New Musical Express chart in 1955.

5. Tim Wall, Studying Popular Music Culture (London: Arnold, 2003), 61.

6. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (London: University College London Press, 1998), 123-159.

7. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, New York: Routledge, 1991), 51.

8. Katherine Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), x.

9. Such as Atlantic, Chess, Duke/Peacock, Imperial, King, Savoy, Modern, and Speciality.

10. Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale: How WDIA Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-Black Radio Station and Created the Sound That Changed America (New York: Pharos Books, 1992).

11. See “Negotiating Compromise on a Burnished Wood Floor: Social Dancing at the Savoy,” by Karen Hubbard and Terry Monaghan for a full discussion of the derivation of the name Lindy and Lindy Hop.

12. Christian Batchelor, This Thing Called Swing: A Study of Swing Music and the Lindy Hop, the Original Swing Dance (London: Original Lindy Hop Collection, 1997), 86-87; 189-91.

13. These dances are widely referenced in books and web sites dedicated to 1960s dance and received coverage in contemporary national U.S. news magazines.

14. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (London: Souvenir Press, 1988), 208.
Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1968), 5.

15. Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality (London: Routledge, 1999), 86.

16. Robert Pruter, Chicago Soul (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 191.

17. Julie Malnig, “Let’s Go to the Hop: Community Values in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s and Early 1960s” (paper presented at the annual Conference on Research in Dance (CORD), Tallahassee, FL, November 2005), 6.

18. John W. Roberts, From Hucklebuck to Hip Hop: Social dance in the African American community in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Odunde, Inc., 1995), 35-7.

19. Pruter, Chicago Soul, 192.

20. Malnig, “Let’s Go to the Hop.”

21. Ibid., 2.

22. Steve Perry, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: The Politics of Crossover,” in Facing The Music: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 51; 87.

23. Richard Cook, Blue Note Records: The Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), 194.
Jazz Discography Project, “Ray Bryant Discography,” http://www.jazzdisco.org/bryant/dis/c/ (accessed January 2006).

24. Cited in DCRTV Mailbag, January 11-20, 2001, http://dcrtv.org/mail/mb0101b.html (accessed January 2006).

25. Al Brown’s Tunetoppers’ “The Madison” (probably recorded in 1960).

26. Savoy Central, “Class Overview,” http://www.savoycentral.org/classoverview.html (accessed January 2006). Jitterbuzz.com: Lindy Week Review, “Group Dances of the 1950s,” http://www.jitterbuzz.com/dance50.html (accessed January 2006).

27. William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 134-153.

28. Tony Cummings, The Sound of Philadelphia (London: Methuen, 1975), 55-60. John A. Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

29. The analysis is based on the Edward Love-choreographed version featured in John Waters’s film Hairspray (1988); on Bob Barrett’s analysis at Friday Folk, St. Albans, “Madison—The Figures,” http://www.fridayfolk.org.uk/madi40.htm (accessed January 2006); and on some personal experimentation.

30. Pruter, Chicago Soul, 191. He makes special note that, “of all the dance records of the 1960s the lyrics of the Madison records were the most specific as to how to do the dance.”

31. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge, 1990), 312.

32. The analysis is based on the Edward Love-choreographed version featured in John Waters’s film Hairspray (1988); contemporary footage compiled in Ron Mann’s 1992 documentary Twist (DVD, Home Vision Entertainment 2005); interviews with respondents who danced in the 1960s, and some personal experimentation.

33. Gerald Jonas, Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with Thirteen/WNET, 1998), 181-2. Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 35-37.

34. Hebdige, Subculture, 52.

35. Tim Wall, “Out on the Floor: The Politics of Dancing on the Northern Soul Scene,” Popular Music 25, no. 3 (2007).

The basics of the Madison are easy to explain. The dancers stand in parallel lines facing outwards with ground movement bounded to forward and backward steps. A basic figure of sweeping feet and a step/clap combination are broken up by a series of figures–tracing out letters with the foot, or stylized choreographed actions like throwing an imaginary basketball–responding to a spoken narration on the record. However, the execution requires more skill and cultural competence than this description suggests. For instance, although Bryant’s record is a R&B mid-paced boogie shuffle in 4/4 time, the main Madison step is based on a six-beat pattern, and the shifting weight, sweeping feet, and controlled trunk feel counter-intuitive to the propulsion of the music without the reinforcing communal experience of the line. Each “chorus” figure is built around very different movements combining steps derived from the Stroll, turns and upper body mimes, which produce pleasurable senses of symmetry and contrast. These pleasures are reinforced by the music’s “behind the beat” time, echoed in the improvised timing of the spoken narration, and its direction of the dance moves trigger by a repeated verbal motif of “hit it.”

Contrary to an often-expressed view, the narration does not instruct dancers how to do the Madison or describe the basic Madison figure; the other figures are merely suggested, and, as I show later, its role relates far more to sub-cultural competences. While the technical mastery required to perform the dance is somewhat less than that required in earlier popular dance forms, competence in the 1960s dance crazes means something different to that of the Savoy Lindy dancer. Rather than individual display and partner interaction, the Madison is built on a communal activity in which the group shaping across the whole floor produces a sense of participation and belonging. Yet the dancers are more than “rhythmically obedient” music consumers. The dance is a communal and individual display of cultural competence achieved, in part, through a mastery of the figures, the unconventional timing, the knowledge of the cultural references in the narration, and their interpretation as stylized movement imbued with the insolence and understated swagger of youth.

The Twist, by contrast, is more obviously a partner dance with no real steps. As the name suggests, its basic form is focused on a twisting of the body created by swinging the knees in parallel in one direction around the pivot of the ball of the foot, while swinging the upper body through the arms in the counter direction. It is performed with a strong sense of swing to a mainly up-tempo, syncopated beat. The dancers often execute shifts of balance that undermine the symmetry of the Twist in three main figure categories: lowering the body gradually through the bending of the knees; transferring weight to one leg, and then the other, often accompanied by the raising of the un-weighted leg from the knee; and incorporating elements of other dances such as steps, partner turns, or upper body moves.

In the historical development of social dance the Twist seems to be a move towards the individualistic dancing of the later 1960s and the first move from couple-based dances. This is largely because the coupling of the dancers is based on an orientation, rather than physical contact or holding. However, the moves of individual dancers are performed with reference to other couples, either in mirrored solidarity, or dexterous competition. This creates some of the same communality produced in the Madison, underscored by a similar performance of “attitude,” but with a greater emphasis on command of swing and balance as a key element of competence.

Both the Madison and the Twist, then, mark a significant break from the social etiquette that had governed social dance up until the 1950s, and we can speculate that these changes represented shifts in cultural attitudes and identity associated with post-war youth culture. While the dancing couple had been the center of the social organization of popular dance, and remained the structure in which the individualism of the Lindy-hopper played out, the Madison and the Twist place a heavier emphasis on the social group, and on processes of shadowing and mimicking one’s peers. While both created the possibility for the more individualized dancing that was to be characteristic of the dances of the later 1960s, they were themselves strongly orientated towards group solidarity, even when they contained elements of individual display or competitive competence.

The early 1960s dances were swiftly superseded by a series of other dance fads. In the five years from the Twist and Madison, scores of new dances–including the Horse, the Pony, the Continental, the Roach, the Watusi, the Hully Gully, the Popeye, the Roach, and the Mashed Potato–were established and disseminated across major urban centers. All these dances shared an emphasis on prominent body movements and on communalism, and most represented the same cultural trajectory of black to white dissemination that was a key feature of the Madison and the Twist. This transmission did create a bi-racial pop and possibly a new regard among young whites for black culture but it did not, of course, deliver the dream of integration. The speed with which they were taken up and discarded was not a characteristic of the involvement of television, or manipulative record companies (although they were very important), but of the modernist cultural drive among American teenagers for the “new thing,” and of the desire to be one of “the in-crowd.”

Conclusions

Here’s what seems to be an advanced promo for a television documentary on the African American DJs who transformed radio into music radio in the 1950s and 60s. If the promo is anything to go by it’s well researched, got lots of very good interviews and high production values.

The concept of “crossover” describes the economic exploitation of a cultural phenomenon, and describes the sales success of a product aimed at one market being reproduced in another. The stories of the Madison and the Twist offer telling insights into the way that these cultural and economic processes relate. The records associated with both dances reveal the cultural crossover from black adult juke joint, via black teenage disc hops, to white high schools. Ray Bryant’s “Madison Time” was an unlikely teen dance record. Bryant led a jazz piano trio playing hard bop, a music with a strong blues and gospel styling that was then a staple of the black community bar jukeboxes and radio playlists. Checker’s “The Twist,” by contrast, is a sweetened cover of an earlier dance R&B record, recorded and promoted with white teenagers centrally in mind.

The origins of the Madison in black culture, though, go back well before the recording of Bryant’s record in March 1959 in New York. Dance historian Lance Benishek suggests that the Madison started in Chicago in the late 1950s; Pruter indicates the dance was associated in the midwest with a completely different recording. Benishek also claims that it was danced in Cleveland after the Baltimore Colts brought it to Baltimore in 1959. Bryant’s record was clearly adopted for a pre-existing dance within black youth culture, and then picked up within the black entertainment world. This also explains how a hard bop instrumental became a black teen dance record with a vocal, and the reasons it gained novelty status in white teenage culture. Sometime between Bryant’s recording and its play on The Buddy Deane Show, a spoken narration was over-dubbed. This narration was provided by radio DJ Eddie Morrison, whose early 1960s afternoon show on WEBB Baltimore mixed jazz and R&B records with slick raps.

Like most radio DJs of the time Morrison would have also hosted record hops where he would have picked up on the popularity of Bryant’s record and seen how young dancers developed dance moves to fit. He could have easily started calling some of the dance actions executed at these hops on his show. The pace and funk swing of “Madison Time” is certainly ideal for Morrison’s DJ style, which was characteristic of black radio talk of the 1960s. For black dancers it asserted a common culture; to white teenagers his adjectives “wild,” “crazy,” “looking good,” and the abstract verb “hit it” would be as exotic as the musical sounds. Morrison’s lyrics also reference the contemporary television westerns, variety shows, and spectator sports, which were common cultural reference for both black and white teenagers. These cultural resonances were clearly understood in the wider entertainment world because sometime in 1960 Bryant’s recording was licensed by Columbia and, with added talk over, was released as a single aimed at white teenagers. The novelty of the dance and the record, and its local popularity, brought it to the attention of the producers of The Buddy Deane Show and then to other such dance shows across the country. Thus, it reached a broader range of local white dancers.

The crossover of the Twist follows a similar path from black dance culture, but the details of its progress reveal other interesting aspects of the crossover. Most accounts emphasize the manipulations of American Bandstand host Dick Clark who supposedly picked up on the popularity of the dance and its associated record by Hank Ballard and the Moonlighters, among Philadelphia youth. He worked with the Cameo Parkway record label (responsible for helping promote some of the key teen idols of late 1950s) to create a watered down cover record by Chubby Checker, which Clark then hyped into national and international success. The Twist was certainly one of the few fad dances that was taken up beyond teen pop in the U.S. and Europe, and its presentation reflected the novelty status of the Mambo a decade before. However, the central historical implication is probably to be found in the difference between two independent record companies trying to exploit the new bi-racial pop.

The original version of “The Twist” was released by Federal Records using its well-tried strategy for success in the R&B market: combine a dance B-side with a ballad A-side. The record charted in the R&B listings in 1958, and the dance B-side was widely danced to at black record hops during the late 1950s. It did not come to the attention of Dick Clark until early 1960. Chubby Checker’s recording is plainly built on crude commercial opportunism to sell to white youngsters. The artist’s stage name was an adaptation of Fats Domino, and the cover smoothed the gospel vocal recasting the R&B track as a classic piece of bi-racial pop. The Cameo Parkway staff understood the importance of dance culture and television to the youth market in the way Federal, with its roots in an earlier generation of R&B, did not. Cameo, and its more black-orientated Parkway subsidiary, released a whole slew of dance records after 1960–including variations on “The Twist” by Checker and, more notably, Dee De Sharp’s “Mashed Potato” and The Orlons’s “Wah Watusi,” which were to become the staple of black dance in the early 1960s.

White youngsters were clearly attracted to the music and dance of African American culture, and black radio and record companies were clearly adapting to a new youth audience. Television, in its pursuit of a white middle class audience, continued the processes of cultural dissemination that radio had begun. But now white youngsters could both hear black music and see the associated dances. However important though, the meanings of these dances are not to be found primarily in this economic and cultural context but in the movements of the dances, in the new senses of dance competence they worked with, and in their status as fads.

Next part

A fuller understanding of the cultural dynamics of the “dance fads” of the early 1960s can be gained through an examination of the dances most associated with these fads: the Madison (the first nation-wide fad) and the Twist (the most widespread and prominent). They provide a revealing case study of the way that the disparate elements of 1960s dance culture–as mediation, music, and movement–came together as a meaningful cultural experience.

Like most fad dances of the 1960s, both the Madison and the Twist have a distinctive set of codified dance moves (often like the Twist signified in the dance’s name), they are linked strongly to a particular recording, and they were featured prominently on teen television programs. The Madison is what we would now call a line dance, originated on the Baltimore broadcast The Buddy Deane Show, and was danced primarily to Ray Bryant’s 1959 recording “Madison Time.” The Twist was a non-contact couples’ dance, popularized on the Philadelphia-recorded, and nationally syndicated Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, and danced at this point to Chubby Checker’s recording of the same name.

There is a tendency to explain these dances as pure media-creations, replaced at an increasing rate by the next “new thing,” limited in form compared with the popular dances that preceded them, and so requiring little dancer competence. This is revealed in the “here today, gone tomorrow” sense of the term “fad dance” itself. It is also reflected in Charlie Gillett’s contention that “locally differentiated dancing styles were replaced by a nationally homogeneous set of styles derived from the programs . . . and the increase in turnover of styles modified the meaning of change . . . to mean a relatively minor modification” ; and in the Stearns’s view that “as the dances multiplied the quality deteriorated. Many new dances were simply charades, pantomimes with hand-and-arm gestures and little body or footwork.”

This is an overly simplistic conclusion, however. By re-inserting the dance moves into their cultural and historical location, we can more clearly understand their importance and meanings, and in particular, their relationship to changes in black and white American youth cultures that took place after (but not necessarily because of) the U.S. Supreme Court’s declaration on educational segregation.

As case studies, the Madison and the Twist also allow us to rethink exactly what we mean by competence in dancing. Here I draw on work developed by Ben Malbon in exploring more recent dance practice. For Malbon, competence in dance is not an absolute concept, but a relative one. He formulates dancing as “a conceptual language with intrinsic and extrinsic meanings, premised upon physical movement, and with interrelated rules and notions of technique and competency guiding performance across and within different situations.” For Malbon, the meaningfulness of particular dances can be understood in its specific historical and cultural context. In particular, he is interested in the way that dancing produces a construction of self around the binary oppositions of the in-crowd/out-crowd, in the relationships of the individual to the dance space and to other dancers, and to the performance of the dance itself.

Three particular aspects of the Madison and the Twist and their associated dance cultures allow us to explore how, and with what significance, the dances “crossed over” from African American to white American youth culture. First, I explore the role of television in this transmission, primarily to understand the role of late 1950s teen dance television programs in teaching white teenagers how to dance dances that originated in African American communities; second, examine the way dances related to particular records, and how an analysis of the recordings and how they were perceived and then promoted by the record industry helps us to understand the phenomena of cultural “cross-over.” Finally, drawing on Malbon’s approach, I want to examine the sense of competence utilized on the dance floor, and how these dances (and their fad nature) were meaningful as a form of modernism.

Learning the Madison and the Twist

Robert Pruter has argued that both the Madison and the Twist, and those fad dances that followed, had their origins in the African American communities. In this he sees popular dance as exhibiting the same notion of crossover that others have dealt with in relation to music. He explicitly rejects the other, more widely expressed view that the dances were media concoctions linked to trite music conceived only for commercial reasons. “Before any records were made,” he argues, “[the dances] were the spontaneous outcome of the dance experience of black high-school youth.” In this he echoes Carl Belz’s notion that dance was an unconscious exploration of popular music’s meanings, and an expression of up-to-date-ness that constituted the essence of youthful modernism. Nevertheless, Pruter himself identifies an important role for key dance party television shows, such as American Bandstand and The Buddy Deane Show, that are prominent in other historical accounts. Following Pruter then, our examination needs to relate the spontaneous popular culture of dance to its televised mediation.

The shows were based on a simulacrum of a teen disc hop, hosted by a clean cut “older brother” figure, featured lip-synching appearances of the musical artists and the dancing of “ordinary” teenagers. The earliest shows were highly segregated in production most with separate days for different ethnic groups. However, their broadcasts must have had bi-racial domestic audiences as they occasionally featured both black and white social dancers (though never integrated couples), and the teen dance show became a key means for artists and dances from African American culture to “cross over” to white dance culture. There is certainly evidence that the Philadelphia-broadcast, The Mitch Thomas Show, targeted to a black audience, exposed white teenagers to the Bop and associated dances that gradually replaced the Jitterbug in the early 1950s; Robert Pruter has traced the genesis of the Twist from black culture through The Buddy Deane Show and American Bandstand to the wider white audience.
This evidence also shows that before their televised appearances these highly codified dances were passed from city to city through locally organized dances, and through this process copying became a powerful means of transmitting dance moves. Innovation, then, was a product of the culture itself–and not a simple effect of the television programs–and the search for novelty was an expression of a sense of modernity. These dance innovations needed to involve prominent display, and both be quickly mastered and discarded, because they served this modernist sensibility that the new should be embraced, and the old cast out.

Dance historian Julie Malnig observes that the teen dance party programs exhibit the same sense of communality–both in their construction and consumption–that was characteristic of the teenage culture itself. She concludes that these shows were the key way in which young Americans learned to be teenagers. The lesson of the shows, of course, was that a key competence of youthful modernity was the ability to dance the latest dances. This very communality, along with the fact that television gave youngsters access to the physical as well as musical aspects of popular dance, extended the possibilities for cultural exchange and did create a form of youth culture that at some level cut across racial lines. However, dancing to black music was not the same as acting to create an equal society. The black music and dances within the white teen culture meant “modern innovation,” but not “social transformation.” And the teen dance programs used already established familial and high school models of social relationships–the older brother, the record hop–to create “a sense of community, security and familiarity.” These distinctions were certainly apparent to music industry entrepreneurs. As they increasingly focused their attention on the new youth audience, they attempted to assist and exploit this ability of black music and dance to cross over, and television teen dance shows became an important part of record promotion.

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The story of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll is so well known that it is worth starting by making it strange; by exploring how it developed within British popular culture. The music was first taken up by a small, but culturally significant group of mainly working-class youth, known as The Teddy Boys, whose name referred to their adoption of men’s Edwardian dress styles. They expressed their position as an underclass by combining a European sartorial statement with the music and dance of American youth culture and a stance and attitude picked up in the slew of U.S. youth-oriented high school films like Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock. In 1955, films like these were important to young Europeans because rock ‘n’ roll could not be heard or seen through the BBC-monopolized broadcast media (there would be no domestic music radio in Britain until 1967, and television made almost no provision for young people). These imported films gave access to the new music, and as importantly, ways of dancing. Watching documentary footage of young Britons “jiving” in the mid-1950s reveals the dances to be British variations on the Lindy Hop dance associated with the popularity of pre-war swing, combined with moves copied from the imported high-school films.

Dick Hebdige has suggested that for the Teds “rock seemed to be spontaneously generated, an immediate expression of youthful energies which was entirely self-explanatory.” This coding of rock ‘n’ roll primarily as “youthful” and “exciting” obscures a set of paradoxical attitudes to the racial politics which contextualized the music in the U.S. On the one hand, there is an undoubted debt to African American culture, signaled in the widespread use of terms from black vernacular speech–for instance the use of the verb “to jive” and the adjective “jiving” as terms used to talk about dance–among British rock ‘n’ roll fans. On the other hand, Teddy Boy subculture was strongly associated with racial conflict with black Caribbean migrants. By contrast, for young black Americans, rock ‘n’ roll was differently coded. The music’s strong R&B origins connected it to the small-scale neighborhood bars or “juke joints” of black urban communities, and back further again to the Southern rural entertainment spots of African American communities, to produce what Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has called the “jook continuum.” This connection is reflected in the way that the key black dances of the early and mid 1950s–the Bop and the Stroll–draw on a lineage of posture, body movement, and proxemics developed within a segregated African American culture.

However, as Ward has demonstrated, the idea of rock ‘n’ roll simultaneously offered teenage African Americans a symbol of an integrated, modern, young America. As the music began to be associated with a bi-racial youth culture by both consumers and industry in the late 1950s, a new hybrid black pop developed in direct conjunction with new forms of dance expression. As we will see, these new dances were created in different spaces (high school rather than juke joint), and performed new cultural functions (the possibility of integration rather than links to the past) for baby-boomer black Americans. Nevertheless, it is instructive to note the many practices the juke joints of the older generation contributed to the wider youth dance culture that developed in both black and white communities from the mid-1950s.

Most emblematic was the jukebox–the relatively cheap, coin-operated, mechanized record player, sounding out R&B music released by small regional record labels. The idea of the jukebox was also the model for the increasingly large number of radio stations that now switched the orientation of their programming to the black community, as their former audience of affluent white Americans and their more costly general programming had been lured away by television. In turn, the playlists of these jukeboxes and radio stations gave white American youth access to musical forms that race politics, culture, and geography usually kept segregated. It was no coincidence that Elvis Presley belonged to the first generation of white Americans who could access African American music on Memphis’s WDIA-radio without leaving their own cultural sphere.

However integrated the market for rock ‘n’ roll music in the U.S., it was consumed in segregated cultural institutions. By adopting black musical forms initially through the radio, teenage white Americans culturally severed the music from the dance practices of the “juke continuum” in which it had developed. This was further reinforced by the way black pop records were used in the “disc hops” which developed as the central institution of the teenage dance fads that followed. These events were most often organized in school halls or recreational facilities and based upon dancing to records rather than the live bands, which had been predominant for earlier generations. Increasingly, they became commercialized and then incorporated into the promotional strategies of radio DJs or record companies. In this context, of white American teenage culture–just as in Europe–rock ‘n’ roll connoted “excitement,” “newness,” and “youthfulness.” White and black American teenagers may have shared a continent, but for most the gulf of cultural segregation was as wide as an ocean. So, while radio and disc hops allowed a sonic cultural exchange, the physicality of dance remained initially separate. White dance forms in the mid 1950s continued to draw on the staples of the pre-war swing-era big band dance culture, rather than the black R&B dances, like the Bop and Stroll, which dominated black teenage dance culture.

The key antecedent of white rock ‘n’ roll dance, therefore, could be traced back to the ballrooms of Harlem in the 1930s and the partner dance, the Lindy Hop. The dance’s name–drawing on Lindberg’s successful transatlantic air flight in 1927–came into widespread American usage to describe the offbeat hop, which formed the basic step. Using a swinging body motion, and the distinctive hop or skip-based step, couples moved within a bounded floor space. In black dance halls it developed in a competitive demonstrative culture to feature “breakaways” in which the dancing partners demonstrated complex footwork and choreographed proxemics and acrobatic twists, partner balances, “air steps,” and throws. By the end of the 1940s, the dance was known as the Jitterbug, and in Europe, as indicated earlier, it was known as the Jive. Its characteristic moves can still be seen in the practices of those dancing in Blackboard Jungle. Thus, while young white dancers of the mid 1950s were dancing to a new music (rock ‘n’ role) their dance moves represented a continuation of movement with origins back to black popular dance of the twentieth century, via 1930s Harlem.

As I will show, by 1960 this was to change, and the dance moves of black youth were to become the most significant influence on white teenage dance. In fact it is possible to identify a transitional popular dance–the Mambo–that grew out of Swing, but also had many of the characteristics of the youth dance culture that was to follow. The Mambo developed in the early 1940s in U.S. Latin American communities and was then copied by first black, and then white, Americans. On the one hand, like the Lindy, it was a couple dance and danced to big band Jazz. On the other, it turned the usual step-beat relationship of earlier social dance on its heads by using pauses where there would formerly have been steps. Latin rhythms, or often just the word “mambo,” were inserted in a range of songs, recordings, and other ephemera, even when they held little resemblance to the dance or the music performed in Spanish Harlem or the south side of Chicago.

The progress of the Mambo from ethnic dance culture, to the night clubs of New York, and later the dance halls of small towns, also reminds us that innovations are always unevenly distributed across different social groups, and residual elements are retained just as emerging practices are incorporated. In segregated America, these dance halls created distinct dance cultures, each with their own practices, which sound recordings could not share. It would not be an over-generalization to argue that these dimensions–white separated from black, urban dancehall adopting the novelties of metropolitan night clubs–were characteristic of the first half-decade of twentieth-century of popular dance.

This was not to remain so for long, though. Just as rock ‘n’ roll shifted the assumptions and meaning of popular music, the developments in teenage culture a few years later were to transform the meanings of popular dance. And just as radio played a significant part in allowing the transmission of black music to white communities in the development of rock ‘n’ roll, television was to have a significant role in the transmission of black moves to white youth a few years later. However, as I will show, our grasp of these innovations are too often lost in the totalizing histories that construct the musical revolutions of rock ‘n’ roll as significant, and the revolutions of dance fads of the late 1950s and 1960s as simply a conformist, novelty-driven, mainstream television conspiracy to exploit youth.

next part

The year 2005 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the chart success of Bill Haley and the Comet’s “Rock Around the Clock,” and the fifty-first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark declaration that segregated schooling for black and white pupils was inherently unequal. The media featured prominent commemorations of 1955 as the start of rock ‘n’ roll, the “birth of the teenager,” and the rebirth of popular dance. Far less attention was given to the milestone in civil rights, and yet both the musical recording and the legal decision were intertwined.

Haley’s recording reached a wider audience as the soundtrack to the opening and closing credits of the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle; an exploration of juvenile delinquency and race in U.S. urban high schools. In Britain, the film’s screening was linked in newspapers to stories about riots in cinemas and of young people “jiving” in the aisles. The following year the record’s title was recycled as the title for a film starring Bill Haley, in which his fusion of white country and black R&B works as a metonym of an integrated world of teenage culture. By juxtaposing music, dancing, and the politics of race these films tied together youthful rebellion with dreams of racial integration. The commercial success of the films and the record demonstrated that the new prosperity of young people could be exploited if one only understood the meanings of this teenage culture.

Dancing was a central form of music consumption in this new teenage culture, and so it is no coincidence that dancers and dances are featured prominently in the films and television programs aimed at the new teen market and dominated the post-rock ‘n’ roll music released on record and played on radio over the next ten years. During this period there were hundreds of dances, each strongly related to one or two recordings, and most only securing popularity for a few months at best. It is possible to piece together a basic cultural history of the period covering the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, with its roots in black R&B and white country music, its dissemination through radio, the simplification of the earlier dance forms, and the representation of all of this in film. I will touch on this history as well as the related issues of the growth of black teenage dances (like the Slop, the Walk, and the Bop) in the late 1950s in tandem with the development of a new black pop; the wider media profiles of dance and black pop in youth television shows; the dissemination of black dances and records to white culture as dance fads (starting with the Madison and Twist in 1960), and finally, the decline of dance within white culture and its renaissance in black communities in the late 1960s.

All too often, the significance of teenage dance culture–the dances and their relationship to music, youth culture, and the politics of race–is most often reduced to an indicator of the perceived triviality of the moment. Almost all histories see this period as an interregnum between the excitement of early rock ‘n’ roll and more sophisticated rock music that would form in the late 1960s. As I will show, these accounts tend to emphasize the music as watered-down pop, the media and record industry as manipulators of naive teenagers, exploiting the power of good-looking teen idols over musical originality, and fad dances as ephemera. Even those celebrations of the period–like John Waters’s film Hairspray, or dance-fan websites–present its dance culture through the restricted lens of post-modern kitsch.

If we replace these subjective aesthetic judgments with the view of a cooler eye, we can see that music and dance were profoundly linked in new forms of social organization that transformed the key assumptions of the music industry about popular music culture. The earlier record industry “rule of thumb” that different communities purchased different types of music became an increasingly poor guide to recording and selling music. “Rock Around the Clock” sold strongly among white and black Americans, and Europeans, and by 1963 the long-running chart for sales among black consumers had been discontinued. Mid-1950s rock ‘n’ roll records like Haley’s dispensed with the entire major record company infrastructure of A&R (Artists & Repertoire) departments, songwriters, arrangers, and trained musicians. Sheet music publishing became incidental as record sales became the primary source of revenue; radio, film, and then television became the key means through which records were promoted. Musically, the genre categories of white mainstream pop, white country, and black R&B became blurred as songs were covered by artists from other traditions, or crossed over from one market to another.
Historian Brian Ward sees this bi-racial youth market–in which black artists accounted for an unprecedented proportion of pop hits among white record buyers and the young black audience bought white pop–as a profoundly different expression of mass black consciousness from the R&B music that preceded it and soul music that followed. He explicitly links this new consciousness, and its musical expression, to the campaigns against racial segregation. Ward documents the widely held view among African Americans in this period that the success of black artists with white audiences heralded a significant shift in attitudes to race; that the popularity of white rock ‘n’ roll stars with black teenagers represented an important inter-racial sensibility (Haley’s enthusiasm for black R&B was welcomed in black journals like the Birmingham World and Chicago Defender) and that black artists saw the new black pop as a realization of their cultural and commercial ambitions.

As I will show, dancing was far more than a simple way to consume this new bi-racial pop, but held a central place in the way that this music was meaningful to its young audiences. Teenagers from different communities related to dance and music in different ways, and for different cultural ends, even when they danced to the same music with the same moves. However, as symbolic of an aspiration for integration as the new black pop was, it did not represent actual integration, nor did ideas of “youthfulness” overcome racial inequalities.

Of course a comprehensive study of all the dances, music, venues, media, and their associated tributaries of popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s would demand a volume of its own. Here, then, I attempt to bring out a few of the most telling threads from the more complex history. To produce this historiography, I have drawn on secondary accounts; an analysis of dancing represented in contemporary media sources; as well as films and fan websites which recreate the time. I start with a discussion of the growth of youth-oriented dance in the 1950s before developing a case study of two of the key dances of the 1960s: the Madison and the Twist. I end with some conclusions about dance in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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