This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
James Brown (12:44)
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part One
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From the lesson
Motown Pop and Southern Soul (1960-69)
Berry Gordy and the rise and first flourishing of Motown. Atlantic, Stax, and southern soul (Memphis, Muscle Shoals, New York). Parallels between Motown and Stax. James Brown and the roots of funk.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We now turn to the music of James Brown.
And the strange, in terms of the discussion that we've already been having,
the strange kind of situation where James Brown, in his music, makes hardly
any contentions to what might be thought as of preferences and white taste.
Nevertheless, he releases record after record in the 1960s,
the 1970s, that crossover on to the pop charts and have tremendous success.
So how can this be?
How can this be, when Barry Gordy, Jr., had it all sort of
worked out what it would take to get these records to crossover that James Brown,
who's not doing any of those kinds of things, is having such success?
Well, let's talk about the career of James Brown,
because he's a very interesting figure not only in the history of Black pop,
but certainly in the history of American popular music in the 20th century.
His early career, James Brown was born in South Carolina but
raised in Southern Georgia.
He had regional success in the mid 1950s with his group The Fabulous Flames
who were booked by Little Richard's manager.
Little Richard, remember, came out of the Southern Georgia area as well.
And in fact, when Little Richard's Tutti Frutti caught on nationally,
all of the sudden he was a hit artist and all that kind of thing.
The manager for Little Richard still had a bunch of gigs booked that Little Richard
was supposed to do, but he didn't want Little Richard to do them because he
wanted to send him off to do television dates and other kinds of things
that were out of Georgia and out of the region and much, much bigger.
And so, actually, James Brown did those gigs for Little Richard.
I can't tell you for sure whether or not they even bothered to tell the people who
bought the tickets that that wasn't Little Richard they were seeing.
But nevertheless, James Brown got one of his first big breaks by sort of being
Little Richard at gigs that had been booked fro Richard.
James Brown's first big hits Please, Please, Please,
number six on the R&B charts in 1956.
James Brown was signed to King Records in Cincinnati, which was run by Syd Nathan
and had a very long standing relationship with King Records in Cincinnati and
with Syd Nathan who became a kind of mentor figure to James Brown in many ways.
James Brown's music in the 1950s is mostly in the Doo-wop style.
If you listen to Please, please,
please I think you'll say that it sounds an awful lot like some of the other
Doo-wop of the era, maybe a little sort of rawer in a certain kind of way, because
already there's that kind of passionate, enthusiastic James Brown vocal sound.
Kind of this sort of aggressive vocal of his.
A little bit over the top with the pleading on the please, please, please.
But we will begin to see a change in that style when we get into the 1960s.
Before we talk about that, though, it's important to acknowledge the central
role of the stage show in the James Brown experience.
Often referred to as the hardest working man in show business,
and by the early 1960s, James Brown's stage show was kind of
famous on the R&B circuit, having a lot of the elements in it
that we have come to associate with James Brown through the years.
And not only his athletic dancing.
Remember, we talked about the Temptations before and
how sort of athletic and advanced their dance steps were.
Well, James Brown was another guy who really did the athletic steps.
In fact, when Michael Jackson was just a little kid,
whenever James Brown was on the television,
his mom would make him get in front of the television and watch James Brown.
And Michael Jackson said how he was sort of transported by James Brown,
who was the master.
And so in many ways, we think about Michael Jackson who developed not only as
a child star but into the late '70s and certainly into the '80s, a lot of that is
taken from this sort of James Brown physical form of dance moves that he did.
And the other thing that's famous of James Brown.
If you've never seen this, you should look it up, look up a video on the Internet of
this, is this routine he has at the close of a concert.
At the close of a concert, he acts like he's so
exhausted by the concert, that he's somehow delirious.
And his roadies come on and they put a coat or
a jacket, or a robe or something on him.
And they start to lead him off, as if they didn't lead him off,
he wouldn't know what to do or he'd fall down.
He almost gets off the stage, then all of a sudden he throws the coat off and
runs back to the stage and grabs the microphone.
He's got some more energy left in him.
He does that a number of times and people came to expect this.
And so it became sort of like a kind of a thing where if he didn't do it five or
six times, it really didn't feel like they got their money's worth at the end.
But his thing of saying I'm giving you every ounce of what I
have tonight because that's how important the audience is to me, and
it became really sort of his trademark routine.
That stage show really became a big part of what it was to experience the musical
expression of James Brown during those years.
And so maybe it's not surprising that when they started thinking about ways that they
could build James Brown's career, they decided, well, they would do a live album.
And that album was released in the Fall of 1963, went to number two in the pop
charts, called Live at the Apollo, which is essentially James Brown doing
what he was doing at that time live at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.
I really showcases his range and captures his energy.
And it's maybe one of the most important sort of
early documents we have of James Brown as a sort of important crossover figure.
And already we're talking about 1963.
Here's a guy singing in an unabashedly sort of Black style, singing for
a Black audience and part of the city that's largely Black.
And he's got an album that's number two on the pop charts in 1963.
Now, probably you should say that
back in those days album sales were not what they were later.
I mean, the album was the kind of a secondary thing.
It really was the business about hit singles at that time.
But still, that's a pretty doggone good performance for 1963 with James Brown.
And we start to see in 1960 his music starts to become more soul influenced.
He sort of leaves the Doo-wop thing behind.
James Brown, so often known as the Godfather of Soul, and so
we start to get this tight and driving style where the groove
is driven forward by the bass and the instruments.
The bass, the guitar, the drums.
Really sort of getting into kind of a great kind of groove that has all of
the instruments sort of interlaced into almost like every instrument is a kind of
a percussion instrument, and the whole tune kind of sort of rides on this grove.
And on top of this grove, you have to imagine James is doing his dance steps,
but he's also doing these lyrics that are sort of, I don't know,
sort of innocuous, repetitive, sometimes a little bit crazy or outrageous.
But he's definitely not trying to tell a story or talk about his emotional
relationship with a woman or any of the other kinds of things that pop songs do.
It's almost like the lyrics themselves are kind of extraneous and the voice itself
becomes another element in the percussion element of, in the percussion
sort of fabric of these fantastic grooves that his music develops during that time.
In 1964 we hear Out of Sight,
one that everybody knows, Papa's Got A Brand New Bag,
a number one hit in R&B charts, number eight in the pop charts in 1965.
I Got You, I Fell Good is from 1965.
It's a Man's Man's Man's World From 1966, and
Cold Sweat from 1967, all are very identifiable sounds.
When you hear a James Brown record come out on the '60's,
it could only be one person, and that's James Brown.
Music business people will tell you,
that's one of the most valuable features to have is a real kind of sonic trademark.
Once people hear just a few seconds of that record, they know who it is.
And that's how those James Brown records were.
And like I said before, one of the most interesting elements of it is that
his music is so markedly Black in a lot of kinds of ways.
And you might think about what constitutes markedly Black,
what are the musical features, if I didn't know this artist were Black,
how would I know from just listening to the music itself that he or she is?
And it's an interesting kind of question.
The more you think about it, the harder it is to really answer.
But most of us, I think, really get a sense that we know what that
is intuitively, even if it's very difficult for
us to externalize or articulate exactly what constitutes that.
But whatever it is, his music was viewed as markedly Black, but
makes no concessions to white tastes.
So then, why was it so popular with white audiences?
And I think it's because he had that
characteristic kind of sound that was his own.
His own kind of trademark with the emphasis on the groove, and
the rhythmic hipness of what was going on, the drive of it,
with a kind of aggressive vocal and the lyrics that were almost nonsensical,
sometimes just sort of kind of funny maybe if you thought about it and
not particularly kind of serious.
There's nothing really threatening in the blackness of what James Brown was doing.
It all just seemed to be a fantastic celebration of the groove and
the music that was going on at the time.
So, while Barry Gordy is going for elegance,
James Brown is going just for the pure feel of his music.
These groups of his were so highly rehearsed they had a reputation for
actually fining members of the band if they made a mistake.
They would rehearse like crazy so
they got all the sort of intense rhythmic interplay absolutely perfect, and if
someone made a mistake on the bandstand, he would point to that person and
afterwards he would dock their pay for the gig because they'd made a mistake.
Now, how often that happened, I don't know.
Everybody tells stories, you never know what to believe.
But the idea is that people thought was the case, and so
they thought that meant that that band was more thoroughly
rehearsed than any other group would have been at the time.
They had a reputation for excellence.
Now, as we close this week and start to think about the way forward in
part two when we talk about Black pop in the 1970s,
where one of the most important events in black culture, Americana culture, really,
in the '60s, but certainly it has an effect on the music business and
on the history of Black pop, is the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.
That happens at April of 1968.
And in many ways it's considered a kind of turning point,
not just in the Black community, but really in Black music.
Even the guys in the Stack studio, Steve Clapper, said after that day
things we're just a little bit different in the studio, even though there'd
never been any kind of racial tension among the people working at Stacks.
There was just something, something was different after 1968.
And so, you would think this would make certain artists angry or
maybe more menacing in a certain kind of way, the anger about Dr.
King's assassination.
In fact, there were riots around the country and people were outraged.
And there was a new kind of racial tension in the country
in the wake of this terrible event.
And this idea of Black pride began to rise, and you would think that maybe for
somebody like James Brown, this would be a tough situation for him to be in.
But on the other hand,
James Brown became one of the great peace makers of the end of the 1960s.
In fact, the day after the assassination of Mark Luther King
he was scheduled to do a concert at the Boston Garden.
Now the city, the mayor maybe it's not a good idea to get a bunch of young people
together the day after.
We got riots in other cities, maybe we shouldn't do this.
So what they decided to do was they decided to televise the concert for free.
So anybody who wanted to watch the James Brown concert could
watch it in the Boston Area, they didn't have to go down to the Boston Garden.
So, only a few thousand people actually went down to the Boston Garden to see
the show, they got all the good seats right in front.
But it was broadcast on television, and that performance is,
the reputation of it is that it helped bring the Boston community together,
black and white together, through James Brown's efforts.
And really, in many ways, sort of quelling a riot in Boston and
trying to get people to think about understanding.
Now, we're going to return to a discussion of Motown and James Brown in part two
of this course when we get to the music of Black pop of the 1970s.
But in our next and final week,
we're going to talk about the music of psychedelia at the end of the 1960s.
What happens when rock music goes psychedelic?
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