Rock and Roll; Interview with Jerry Wexler [Part 1 of 4]

I don't need to tuck it in. Back to the to me before that it's propensity for. White cabaret fans and jazz fans to buy the records a black. Take it up a notch past that.

OK you know. Rock n Roll seemed to crystallize sometime in the 50s. President. Maybe for a decade or two before as far back let's say as Western Swing which they apparently in age the great year for years was 135 in 1936 and as Wayland Jennings said Western Swing ain't nothing but some country boys playing jazz. Well there was a very strong black element there because the first city of western swing in that they emulated they picked up

so-called race records off the juke boxes and they were doing songs like yes take it easy crazy you got a long way to slide songs and Fats Waller the songs of a group like the Harlem ham fats which was an ad hoc recording group that had no reality in performance. And so western swing I think is one of the real pre-crisis of what. We've come to know is rock n roll which eventually was an amalgam of Certainly a black and white influences. Yeah. Louis Jordan is preeminent because the whole thing was present. Although the German nation was present in Louis Jordan in everything he did

he had the rhythm he had to shuffle rhythms. He had the humor. He had. The the back beat. And plus he had. Miniature vignettes you know and a record had to be under three minutes the Fed on a 78 rpm record. And Louis Jordan would have songs like ain't nobody here but us chickens which certainly has certain rural resident resonance country and western kind of thing. So talk West Virginia now that's country. Cause Caledonian things like that. And Louis Jordan was a dynamite impression Performa and he had tremendous mixed audiences white as well as black in theaters and so on. Other seminal black performers would be people let's say like rubber legs William so used to sing with Count basi Wynonie Harris Roy Brown Wynonie in particular was a

charismatic magical presence because. He. His. His M.O. was hubris. In other words he was so infatuated with himself that. He would appear at the Apollo Theater on a darkened stage and your cash would had a you know a couple of chords or a drum roll and that Wynonie and a darkened stage would announce to the audience the a constituency fools Wynonie is here. Not that kind. Of pre-rock arrogance I think was echoed. Many years later. And. Fortunate. White variations. How shall I say. Pseudo clones. Of these great black artists what we came to see is rock n roll arrogance.

Maybe no names on that right now. You know Bob let me enlarge on that. Let me get back to your own. OK. I mentioned Roy Brown. Who's you know best known record was probably Good Rockin Tonight which is a song which went on a Harris also covered the notion that the rubric the term rock n roll was presented to us by Alan Freed of course is totally wrong because. It appears in many songs for example there's a song by Rod Allen called Get Rhythm in your feet. And the word rock'n'roll appears there. Ella Fitzgerald song Rocket for me where the line is you want to satisfy your soul with the rock and the roll and it goes back to

the 20s with the one performing name wingman on. Who made a record called tarpaper stomp in which the phrase I believe one thousand twenty so. Rocking and rolling which of course was a lingua franca they saw expressions that came from the black world and black musicians having to deal with sexual congress. And so the whole notion of. A. Good time happenings on a Saturday night including. Getting carried away by the rhythm the music may be a little bit of gin. And then the culmination in the bad after all rock n roll finally embraced those ingredients there's not much more to it. Yeah that very notion

that the trade charts the music charts work by categories it bothers some people but it's not because. What determines a particular market or a particular demographic. It's not who plays the music. It's not who sells the music it's who buys the music. Now. So-called rhythm and blues or race music as was called before it became rhythm and blues. Was bought by black people. It's an unfortunate. Truth of merchandising in a free enterprise society that you need to target your audiences. So if you're selling in the country and. You are buying records which are made say originally by that Jeanette recording company in Richmond Indiana for a sub label which was merchant buys merchandise by sea as Roebuck. She has Roebuck

had clients in the country that were black and they were white. Well Sears Roebuck knew how to target. The so called Race Records which they had specially made for them and also the so-called country records for their groups or other categories of course included jazz. And then what you might call a sophisticated supper club music or band music so that. The categories were necessary then and I believe they're necessary today. They're subject to accusations of political incorrectness. But. If say comes the roads I would prescribe these things I'd like to see them my way would be merchandising a catalog that says the very says Epic Records without these categories. Changing real life.

But if I get on focus get me back on you know.