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In 1917 a white New Orleans band that was not the original anything and could not spell its own genre put out a record that sounded, in Peter Doggett’s words, like “a gang of crazed instrumentalists fighting for supremacy.” Within ten years the microphone had made it possible to sing in a whisper, radio had put that whisper in millions of private rooms, and the loudest music in America had become the most intimate.
Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now to conclude season 3 of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.
It starts with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who got to record first because the Black New Orleans bands they copied turned the chance down rather than give their secrets away, and whose “Livery Stable Blues” hit Britain the way the Sex Pistols would sixty years later. Then the taming: Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grofe’s arrangements and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Gershwin nearly forgot to write and which the critics of both camps thought was a perversion of the music they loved.
Then the machine that changed singing. Electrical recording let a vocalist lean in to the microphone instead of shouting over the band, and the crooner was born - Rudy Vallee, who had needed a megaphone to be heard, and Bing Crosby, who Artie Shaw called “the first hip white person born in the United States.” Peter, who grew up thinking Crosby was the squarest man alive, explains why he changed his mind. Also: why the ukulele was everywhere in the 1920s, the Prince of Wales sitting in on drums with London jazz bands, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s refusal to sound like American radio, and George Formby’s banned and filthy ukulele songs - which George Harrison loved to the end of his life.
After the paywall: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and the Depression, which wiped out the record business and left radio standing; the coming of sound to the movies and what The Jazz Singer looks like now; the only film footage of Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers, and why it exists at all; and a seven-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. in “Rufus Jones for President.”
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “Livery Stable Blues,” Original Dixieland Jazz Band
* “Rhapsody in Blue,” Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra - a George
Gershwin composition
* “With My Little Ukulele in My Hand,” George Formby
* “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Bing Crosby
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
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