ALAN writes:

“Pop culture is filth,” John Derbyshire wrote in an essay several years ago.  And music is part of pop culture.

At a time when blacks and whites compete to determine who among them can produce the most vulgar, tasteless, and repulsive noise in the history of recorded sound, I thought it may be useful to consider what kinds of songs American blacks were singing half a century ago.

Here is a list of 20 popular songs that I compiled from memory.  These were sung by black men, women, or groups and played on AM radio stations in the years 1962-’64:

“I Can’t Stop Loving You” – Ray Charles
“Gina” – Johnny Mathis
“The Locomotion” – Little Eva
“Soldier Boy” – The Shirelles
“Ramblin’ Rose” – Nat King Cole
“Up On the Roof” – The Drifters
“Beechwood 4-5789” – The Marvelettes
“What Will My Mary Say?” – Johnny Mathis
“Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer” – Nat King Cole
“He’s So Fine” – The Chiffons
“One Fine Day” – The Chiffons
“Our Day Will Come” – Ruby and The Romantics
“Easier Said Than Done” – The Essex
“Then He Kissed Me” – The Crystals
“So Much in Love” – The Tymes
“Wonderful, Wonderful” – The Tymes
“That Sunday, That Summer” – Nat King Cole
“It’s In His Kiss” – Betty Everett
“Under the Boardwalk” – The Drifters
“Chapel of Love” – The Dixie Cups

It was common for those who made these songs into hit records to appear on TV shows like “American Bandstand” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

The girl groups were well-groomed and wore dresses.  None of them agitated for feminism or welfare handouts or sang about whore culture.  The men wore suits and ties.  None of them spoke or acted like thugs or sang about cop-killing.  All attempted to present themselves as attractively as possible.  They sang about dating, romance, a first kiss, deferred pleasures, loyalty to a boyfriend or girlfriend, self-restraint, optimism, patriotism, daffodils, happy summer days, the stars in the night sky, the pleasure in walking together, peace and quiet, and looking forward to marriage.

Some of these songs were lovely ballads.  Many had cheerful, infectious melodies that people could sing or hum along with after hearing them a few times on the radio.

Not one off-color word, sentiment or suggestion can be found in any of these 20 songs.

One of those songs merits additional comment.  I doubt that any of your readers is old enough to remember the charming ballad “That Sunday, That Summer.”  I fell in love with it when it was released and I first heard it on radio in the summer of 1963.  It is a timeless ballad, understated and beautifully arranged and sung by Nat King Cole and the Ralph Carmichael Singers, and deserves to be better known than it is.

If popular music is a measure of a nation’s moral-philosophical-cultural well-being, then Americans today are entrenched in filth. Such filth could not gain currency in a culture run by grown-ups, but there are few grown-ups left in American culture today.

Listen to any of those 20 songs and then compare them with the vapid, vile, vulgar noise that Americans today agree to call “music” and you will have a concrete example of why American culture today is as  decadent as it is.

— Comments —

Pete writes:

The members of the “Baby Boom” generation are fond – even today – of claiming the great music of the post-war golden age of pop music as their own. However, the trouble with this view is that while it serves the zeitgeist of the counter-culture and the left, it is manifestly untrue. We will stipulate that many of the great artists on your list date from the 1950s and early 1960s, but apart from attending their performances and buying their recordings, the baby boomers had virtually nothing to do with the success of artists such as Nat King Cole, Ray Charles or the Drifters. Which is to say that these and other performers mentioned in your article were, for the most part, themselves products of previous generations. So were the producers, arrangers, session musicians, recording industry executives and who helped them realize their talents.

Ray Charles was born in 1930 in Albany, Georgia, and sent his formative years in the small town of Greensville, South Carolina. It is doubtful, indeed highly improbable, that anyone in Greensville at that time even knew what the counter-culture was – even if the term had been coined by that time. Although Charles is credited with being one of the pioneers who broke the color line in popular music and crossed-over from the R&B charts to the pop music charts (at that time, music industry publications such as “Billboard” magazine charted blues, rhythm and blues, gospel on a separate list from so-called pop music), and eventually became a popular music icon and international star, his first years performing were about as far from up-town as one can get. Charles paid his dues in full on the “chitlin’ circuit” – long before he made it as a nation or international sensation. In his autobiography, ‘Brother Ray,” Charles discusses the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and – while he is polite-enough – his disdain for the hippies and their culture is quite clear. Although he ended up selling a lot of records to teens, Charles certainly didn’t cater to them in the way many acts did. Those familiar with Charles’ sophisticated and highly-original music know that it has deep roots in jazz, blues, gospel, and even country-and-western – none of which are styles associated with the baby boomers.

Charles enjoyed his earliest (and perhaps greatest) sustained artistic success at Atlantic Records. Atlantic was founded by businessman and musical impresario Ahmet Ertegun (b. 1923, died 2006). Ertgun was ably assisted by legendary producer and A&R man Jerry Wexler (born 1917, died 2008). Neither Wexler nor Ertgun were baby boomers – nor were most of the people who worked for them when Charles and the other great artists of that time were at their peak. Someone who was twenty-one years of age in 1964, would have been born sometime in 1943 – which predates the baby boom – and many of the people responsible for the post-war golden age of pop music were considerably older than that.

One of Ray Charles’ musical heroes and inspirations was Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965)  – a man many music historians regard as one of the first genuine cross-over artists. Most modern-day music aficionados know Cole from his smooth and wonderfully-expressive baritone voice and the string of ballads and other hits he enjoyed during his career as a star vocalist, but Cole was also a world-class jazz pianist, composer, arranger and group leader – who forged a career as a jazz giant before moving into the pop music realm. During a time when it was all but unheard of for a black artist to have a show of his own, Cole hosted “The Nat King Cole Show” on NBC beginning in 1956 – and it proved an immediate hit.

Again, we see that Cole himself – as well as the people who supported his career (both in the audience and behind the scenes) – largely predate the early 1960s. Cole was a long-established star by the time the ‘boomers came on the scene as teens/young adults with spending money. The self-important baby-boomers weren’t the folks who broke the color line on national TV and gave Cole a show – it was their parents and grandparents who were responsible.

The baby-boomers who claim that Ray Charles, Nat “King” Cole, the Drifters, and all of the other artists you have listed somehow “belong” to them or are a product of their generation simply don’t know what they talking about. Instead, in order to see and hear the “real” products of the most-narcissistic and corrupt generation in American history, we need to examine what happened to popular music (and popular entertainment generally) on the ‘boomers watch – i.e., around the time they attained positions of influence in that industry. If we call 1946 the start of the “baby boom” cohort, then its products would have been reaching adulthood and moving into positions of influence certainly by 1970, possibly sooner. In other words, right about the time our popular culture took a nosedive. It isn’t their parents or grandparents who gave us the nihilism, violence and crudity of rap and hip-hop, but the baby-boomers themselves.

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