The Beatles – photo by John Zimmerman

The BeatlesPhoto by John ZimmermanMarch 21, 1964

Photographer John Zimmerman was one of the best. His lens caught famous politicians and newsmakers, and even strange new groups from Britain. But this 1964 photo of the Fab Four is a classic. The cover promised “a probing analysis of their incredible power to evoke frenzied emotions among the young.” Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. What do you expect from stuffy old editors who worked Eight Days a Week? To simplify: the Beatles just made us feel Glad All Over. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Sonny and Cher – photo by Jerry Schatzberg

Sonny and CherPhoto by Jerry SchatzbergApril 23, 1966

Another classic! Cher is looking hot and Sonny is looking, well, not the least bit Republican. Always up-to-date on the latest lingo, the editors informed us that Sonny and Cher were “what’s happening, baby”. Cher was known for her mod fashions, but here’s a description of Sonny backstage at the Hollywood Palladium: “Although the musicians were wearing tuxedos, Sonny had on a yellow turtleneck sweater, a white, double-breasted pirates’ jacket with wide lapels, epaulets and yellow puffs for buttons. His trousers were white, tight, and ornamented with a wide, silver-buckled, brown-leather belt, and black boots completed the outfit.” You can’t get more hip than that. That description, by the way, was from the author of the article, Peter Bogdanovich.

Roger Miller – photo by Maurie Rosen

Roger MillerPhoto by Maurie RosenFebruary 12, 1966

It wasn’t just rock and roll. There was a “big boom in country music”. Anybody over fifty remembers the “King of the Road”. From “Engine Engine No. 9” to wishing you had a “Do Wacka Do” (okay, you had to be there), Roger Miller was big time. What is country music? “It’s soul in a rhinestone suit”, the article said, “honesty with amplifiers, a new ‘uptown’ sound that city folks like—and it’s back in the big time again.” Remember “A White Sport Coat” by Marty Robbins? The Carter Family? Sonny James? This was “that new sound from Nashville”. But no one could do “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” like Roger Miller.

The Mamas and the Papas – photo by Dan Wynn

Mamas and the PapasPhoto by Don WynnMarch 25, 1967

“Monday, Monday,” “Calfornia Dreamin’,” “I Saw Her Again” – the hits just kept coming for the Mamas and the Papas, proving they weren’t just hippies – they were hippies with talent. But they were on the wild side. A guy in one audience stood up and shouted, “Cass, Cass, I love you.” Cass “peered into the audience from the footlights. ‘Dynamite! Where are you staying?’” The article by William Kloman stated that once “the Mamas and the Papas instigated a riot, mainly to test their theory that it could be done scientifically. John got a black eye for his efforts, and they have since tried to keep their audiences under control.” Mama Cass (whose voice on “Dream a Little Dream of Me” I will always remember) died of a heart attack in 1974, John passed away in 2001 and Denny in 2007. Happily, lovely Michelle is still with us.

Frank and Nancy Sinatra – Supremes photo

Frank and Nancy SinatraSupremes PhotoJuly 15, 1967

“It has been 15 years now since rock ‘n roll was laughed off as just another fad,” the Alfred G. Aronowitz article states. “Frank Sinatra called it ‘the martial music of every sideburned deliquent on the face of the earth.’ The police in Atlanta, Ga., ruled that teen-agers couldn’t dance to it without written parental consent. Roman Catholic leaders in Boston called for a boycott of it, to be enforced by a censor. And the head of the White Citizens Coucil in Alabama saw it as part of a Negro plot to ‘mongrelize America.’” Welcome to the 60’s, folks. The diversity in music was a sign of the jumbled times: Herb Alpert, The Supremes, The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, Petula Clark. 27-year-old Nancy Sinatra, “has already collected three gold singles, which is two more than Frank Sinatra ever got in his entire 26-year career.” And then Frank and his little girl have a smash love duet, “Something Stupid.” Something Crazy was going on.

Bob Dylan – photo by Elliott Landy

Bob DylanPhoto by Elliot LandyNovember 2, 1968

Okay, I confess: once, hearing a guy on a radio program dedicate a Bob Dylan song to our troops, my response was “haven’t they suffered enough?” Not a fan of the voice – sorry. This 1968 article covered “the royal family” of pop. From Hendrix to Buck Owens, Joplin to Merle Haggard, B.B. King to the Beach Boys. And oh yes, the Stones, Simon & Garfunkel and Johnny Cash. Then, “Enter the King, Bob Dylan”. Author Alfred G. Aronowitz makes Dylan’s lyrics sound almost biblical, “….the mysterious Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” he says, is “a parable of friendship and temptation.” And “the moral of one of his songs, he recites, is that no man should be where he does not belong, that each man should help his neighbor, that no one should envy his neighbor’s lot.” But I can’t argue about the unending beauty of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which became something of a civil rights anthem. Indeed, how many roads must a man walk down…

Classic Covers: Music of the Sixties The Saturday Evening Post

In “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download] Zolotow reports on the efforts of Art Satherley, who scouted country music for Columbia Records. In March of 1942, Satherley was auditioning potential recording artists in a Dallas hotel when he met Albert Poindexter.

On that historic morning in March, Satherley, a scholarly and dignified man who speaks with a British accent and looks somewhat like an Oxford professor of Greek history, placed his pince-nez on his nose and patiently listened as Poindexter and his companions dreamily strummed and thrummed and twanged their way through the thirty-five lays of despair. Finally, Satherley selected twelve to be recorded. The best of the twelve, thought Satherley, was a lilting love song called Rosalita. Another of the twelve was a ballad having to do with a husband who is having a wild time in a night club in the company of a blonde when his wife catches him in flagrante delicto, she forthwith drawing a revolver, shooting out the lights and beating him gently about the face. Although he was not particularly impressed by this saga of marital infidelity, Satherley recorded it because he liked its steady, insistent rhythm. He was otherwise unimpressed, however, because he says that in hillbilly circles it is very common to hear songs about men and women who are unfaithful to each other, and who are always shooting it out with guns.

“To be honest about it,” Satherley recently confided, “I never dreamed it would be the hit it turned out. We only released it because we needed a contrast to put on the other side of Rosalita.”

Released in March, 1943, Rosalita was promptly forgotten. Instead, millions of Americans began to walk around advising pistol-packin’ mama to lay that pistol down. By June it became one of the biggest selling records in the history of American recording and by December, 1943, it had sold 1,600,000 copies, and the manufacturer had orders on hand for 500,000 more which he could not fill because of the wartime shortages of labor and shellac…

The Hit Parade for a long time refused to recognize the existence of “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” because the opening line went “Drinkin’ beer in a cabaret,” and the radio networks are not permitted to publicize people who look upon the malt when it is amber. This is a ruling of the Federal Communications Commission. The publishers of Pistol-Packin’ Mama haled the Hit Parade into court, and finally the lyric was altered to read “Singin’ songs in a cabaret,” and Pistol-Packin’ Mama became No. 1 on the Hit Parade…

Satherley has a gloating air of triumph as he recites these and other statistics which prove that hillbilly music has come into its own. After “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” among the biggest recordings of the past twelvemonth have been “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” by Elton Britt and his band, and “No Letter Today,” by Ted Daffan and his Texans, both of which have gone over the million mark. Six large radio stations now have gigantic programs devoted solely to hillbilly music, and WLS broadcasts five solid hours of the National Barn Dance every Saturday, In Nashville, Tennessee, the Grand Ole Op’ry [sic] is aired over WSM for four hours. NBC broadcasts portions of these two programs on a national hookup, and has a third sorghum show entitled The Hook ‘n’ Ladder Follies.

Almost as remarkable are the grosses amassed by hillbilly units which play one-night stands all over the country in county auditoriums, schools, barns and theaters. Obscure performers playing in hamlets like Reeds Ferry, New Hampshire, will draw $5600 in a single night. On the road, hillbilly troupes will consistently outdraw legitimate Broadway plays, symphony concerts, sophisticated comedians and beautiful dancing girls. When a unit, say, like Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys is scheduled to hit a town like Albany, Georgia, farmers will pour into Albany from a 200-mile radius, and night after night Acuff will play to audiences of 4000 in places where Betty Grable or Tommy Dorsey or Bob Hope would only succeed in drawing boll weevils…

A hillbilly unit waiting backstage before a performance. On the road, troupes of this kind have consistently attracted larger audiences than many a big-time Broadway production.

It is no mystery to Satherley, who, for some twenty-five years, has been crusading for hillbilly music among his cynical Broadway friends, Satherley dislikes the term “hillbilly,” and he keeps talking about ” folk music,” “country rustic” or “mountain music.” He says that the explanation of the hillbilly phenomenon is quite simple. He explains that most Americans either live on farms today or came from farms, and that the strains of a hoedown fiddle or a cowboy plaint are their own native folk music and the one they will always respond to, no matter how far they have gone from the farm. He also believes that the congregation of groups of young men in Army camps has much to do with the boom in hillbilly music.

Because much of the hillbilly talent is employed in farming or ranching, Satherley must seek out his talent in the bayous, the canebrakes, the cotton plantations, the tobacco regions…

Although all hillbilly music sounds monotonously alike to the urban eardrum, it includes many types of music.

The qualities Satherley says must always be present in fine hillbilly music are simplicity of language, an emotional depth in the music, sincerity in the rendition, and an indigenous genuineness of dialect and twang, “I would never think of hiring a Mississippi boy to play in a Texas band,” he says, “Any Texan would know right off it was wrong.”

But, above all, sincerity, even if it is awkward unpolished sincerity, is the criterion used to judge the performer. “A true folk singer who is not synthetic can be recognized because he doesn’t ‘do’ a song; he cries it out with his heart and soul,” Satherley says.

After sincerity, Satherley strives to project the meaning of the lyrics. “The person who listens to mountain music wants to hear a story,” Satherley explains. “My singers must get the picture of the words. I’ve got to instill into them a picture of what they are singing about. If they’re singing about a dead person, I impress on them that their best friend is lying dead and ‘you’ll never see him again.’ I tell them, ‘Sing It in the extreme.’ In folk music, we don’t care about trick ways of phrasing or hot licks; we concentrate on the emotions. The country people — these so-called hillbillies — are tremendously sensitive people, with deep emotions. Whereas the sophisticated city person likes these humbug boy-girl love songs, with everything pretty-pretty, the mountaineer is a realist. His songs deal with loneliness, misery, death, murder.”

Read “Hillbilly Boom,”[PDF download].

The Post Discovers Country Music… in 1944 The Saturday Evening Post