Skip to main content

The Flamingos - A Kiss from Your Lips

Musically, rhythm and blues artists, translation,  African American artists, were making tremendous, groundbreaking music, but sales were a tiny fraction compared to lilywhite Pop music, which still made the bulk of the profits for all record companies. Rhythm and Blues was sold as race records through the distributors, a blatant classification based on skin color. Much the same could be said of country music, translation, whites who played rough sounding folk music, sold through the record stores as hillbilly records, it sold well enough for labels to produce these records, but compared to mainstream pop records, hillbilly records were a small blip in sales. There was no disguising the fact that hillbilly was a record company’s classification of poorer, less educated rural Americans.

Just look at the biggest selling artists of the late 1940s and early 1950s... These were the big sellers, the industry leaders, the big stars. It’s hard to visualize today, because now the industry is exactly the opposite, but during this era, really white music for really white people sold lots and lots of records. Even when truly hip African American artists like Nat King Cole scored a mainstream hit, it was always the whitest sounding thing they had ever made, a pander to the suburbanites who bought pleasant sounding recordings.

To come up with an answer for when Rock & Roll began, I believe it depends on several factors. I think to determine the beginning of Rock & Roll, you’ve got to have all three of the factors listed below.

First, I believe there must be a co mingling of black and white cultures, especially when music moved from the back alley blues clubs and the country music barns into the mainstream.


The Flamingos - A Kiss from Your Lips
  • Released in: December 1956
  • Recorded in: 1955–1956
  • Genre: Rock

"The Flamingos are an American doo wop group formed in Chicago in 1953. The band became popular in mid to late 1950s and are have since been hailed as one of the finest and most influential vocal groups in pop and doo wop music history."

See previous Song of the Day 

Labels:
Location: United States

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day 
Post a Comment
Read more