Bob Stanley does not think small. His last book Yeah Yeah Yeah, published in 2013, was a mammoth 800-page work, a history of post-war pop from 1950 to the invention of iTunes. Universally acclaimed, it allowed him to add the title of pop historian to multi-hyphenate roles as film producer, label owner, vinyl collector and founder member of British indie-dance darlings Saint Etienne.
Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop serves as a prequel and a pre-history, an intricate map of the musical tributaries that originated from transatlantic light entertainment traditions, and from “race music”, minstrelsy, vaudeville and ragtime, to create an ocean of 20th-century popular music. The book’s structure is broadly binary, alternating between chapters that deal with musical schools or movements, and those that profile innovators and entrepreneurs.
In the former category, there are explorations of the pop song’s ancestral provenance in jingoistic jingles designed to bolster the war effort. These took many forms: sabre-rattling songs, slow airs for homesick soldiers (Vera Lynn’s speciality), or instant whistlers like It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty. But there were also tunes designed to take your mind off the war, rug-cutters by army dance combos, or close harmony jazz-hand hootenannies by America’s sweethearts the Andrews Sisters.
Elsewhere in this rabbit warren of a book there are wry accounts of hokum songs about dogs, dinners and fashion trends lifted from the music hall songbook; there are mini-biographies of institutions such as Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and the Ziegfeld follies, and of genres like doo-wop, barber shop and New Orleans swing. There are masterfully condensed profiles of big band kingpins like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, of hillbilly trios, vocal groups, folk revivalists, rhythm and blues bands, rock ‘n’ rollers, Rat Packers, exponents of exotica, burlesque artists, writers-for-hire like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and George Gershwin, architects of the great American songbook in all its states of various.
Hitmakers and oddballs
The remaining chapters deal chiefly with studies of individual trailblazers. Many of these are immigrants, outsiders and oddballs. There’s Irving Berlin, a prodigious craftsman and the author of There’s No Business (Like Show Business) and White Christmas, the son of Siberian emigrants whose village was razed by Cossacks. Or Louis Armstrong, who was brought up in a New Orleans brothel, pushed a coal cart for a crust, and earned the nickname Satchmo, abbreviated from Satchelmouth, because that’s where he hid the pennies earned from dancing on street-corners. Or Al Jolson, self-promoting to the point of pathological, famous but widely disliked, “at once ancient history, a cultural embarrassment, and the first major pop star of the 20th century”. The hitmakers keep coming. Helen Kane, the real-life Betty Boop. The blues sisters Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. The arch-Duke Ellington, regal and mysterious precursor to Sun Ra and Prince, don of the Cotton Club, lord of the dance. “He was all of American music,” Stanley writes, “no one had a comparable skill for blending jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, even folk and classical.”
The century’s middle years heralded the era of the solo vocalist, with Judy Garland and Billie Holiday marked for distinction as modern-day pop star avatars. “They have permanence,” Stanley writes. “Holiday’s slightly-behind-the-beat wooziness may well have been the single most important influence on female singers of the last two decades. Garland’s blend of blow-the-roof-off talent and insecurity . . . has correlated to the new century’s TV talent show winners.”
Frank Sinatra is accorded even more status as “the fulcrum of this book . . . the various phases of his career – pin-up boy vocalist, album-oriented adult singer, late-period duets – are still a blueprint for artists in the 21st century.” What made Sinatra so special? His fluid phrasing, breath control, perfect pitch, immaculate diction, and a character actor’s ability to tell a story, the knack of making the fatal human flaw work in service of the material, infusing lyric and melody with tenderness, anger and hurt. In terms of business strategy, Sinatra also possessed the ability to evolve, escaping teen-idol obsolescence by way of star turns in movies as disparate as From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm.
Crisp and lively
After Sinatra came the other giants of vocal stylism: Tony Bennett, Dino and Sammy, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee, the latter perfectly described as “pop’s Mona Lisa, unknowable, enigmatic and most desirable”.
As with the subject matter, style is everything here. Stanley’s prose is crisp and lively, his attitude light, quick-witted, never stuffy, with a keen eye for the bar-rail anecdote, the thumbnail history, the capsule-sized rise-and-fall. Accessibility is key: the reams of research are never allowed to obscure the overview or slow the tempo, but you’ll find a quirky factoid on every other page. Stanley loves the mechanics of how things are named, how crazes begin, the rub between the hustle and the art, the way innovations in technology and marketing affect the music. Before recorded sound became popular, sheet music was the iTunes of its age. Consequently the early days of radio amounted to a cultural revolution, producing its own system of newly amplified sotto-voce audio stars such as Bing Crosby, originator of almost four hundred hit singles. Later, the introduction of the long-playing album emphasised the notion of longevity and consistency, “legacy” artists, before television made an aural medium into a visual one.
Let’s Do It is the story of industry as much as art. Composers were opportunists, they Americanised their names, or exoticised them in order to seem like European royalty. But Stanley also loves an underdog, frequently shaking his head and pursing his lips at the many unsung heroines or overlooked geniuses of the century. Indeed, so motley is this book’s epic cast of hucksters, hacks, charlatans, doomed geniuses, outlaws and writers-for-hire, it resembles nothing so much as the musical equivalent of the Herbert Asbury’s Gangs Of . . . series.
Bring this book on holiday. You might never come back.
Peter Murphy is author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River (Faber). He records and performs under the name Cursed Murphy
