Cornell dean offers an entertaining mix of sociology and rock 'n' roll

By Richard P. Carpenter, Globe Staff, 9/22/2003

All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America
By Glenn C. Altschuler
Oxford University, 240 pp., illustrated, $26

What a different time it was. In the early 1950s, popular music was dominated by performers such as Patti Page and Perry Como singing sweetly about doggies in the window and prisoners of love, respectively. People, even youngsters, more often than not wore coats and ties or skirts and dresses, reserving jeans for cleaning out the garage. Conversation was polite, and sex was . . . well, a taboo subject. On the surface at least, many American families resembled the characters in the treacly TV show "Leave It to Beaver."

Then along came rock 'n' roll.

It came from juke joints and street corners and hillbilly hoedowns and revival meetings. It was black, and it was white. It sprang from the young and was for the young. And partly because of it, America would never, ever be the same.

"All Shook Up," by Glenn C. Altschuler, places the music in its cultural context by detailing the rise of rock 'n' roll, the efforts to stop it, and the backgrounds of the key players, from Little Richard to Frankie Lymon to Buddy Holly to, oh yes, a young truck driver named Elvis.

The story is told in prose that, if not always as vibrant as its subject, is eminently readable -- a significant achievement considering that the author is also serving up a slice of sociology (the book is part of the Oxford series "Pivotal Moments in American History"). But it's not until Page 127 that Altschuler, a professor and dean at Cornell, drops in a phrase like "cognitive dissonance."

He traces the beginnings of rock to the years after World War II when the "massive migration of African Americans from South to North and farm to city" was reflected in the sounds and words of rhythm and blues, once called race music. The themes were earthy, the language humorous, and the content often sexy. Wynonie "Mr. Blues" Harris "made a career of bellowing about sex," and Big Joe Turner found love "nothin' but a lot of misery." This was some distance from, say, Kitty Kallen singing, "If I Give My Heart to You."

The same was true of the sounds coming out of the Sun Records studios in Memphis, where producer Sam Phillips recorded songs by black men such as the Prisonaires and Little Junior Parker and white men such as Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the performer who fused the white and black sounds while putting on quite a show: Elvis Aron Presley. Disc jockeys began to play the new music, and one of them, Alan Freed, gave it a name, rock 'n' roll, although, as Altschuler notes, Freed hardly invented the phrase in an "inspirational flash," as he later claimed. The term had been around a long time as "a black euphemism for sexual intercourse." Teenagers, who after World War II began to become members of an "increasingly self-contained . . . universe," tuned in to the music, identified with it, made it their own, and spent money on it.

It would be nice to accept Phillips's claim that he and Elvis "knocked the [expletive] out of the color line," but a whole lot of shaking was going on apart from the music. The emergence of rock 'n' roll, Altschuler writes, "coincided with great ferment in the movement to grant civil rights to African Americans." In 1954, the doctrine of "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites was struck down by the Supreme Court, to be followed by such events as lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom marches. Phillips, the author says, "was, perhaps, closer to the mark in asserting that . . . `we hit things a little bit, don't you think.' " They, and many others, certainly hit things hard enough so that rock 'n' roll, with its nudging of black and white youths closer together, became a target for segregationists.

It became a target for many parents, too, as they saw control of their youngsters slipping away, shuddered at the sexiness of the music, and believed that songs like Bill Haley's anthemic "Rock Around the Clock" bred juvenile delinquency. (Altschuler is wise enough not to dismiss the delinquency claim altogether, noting that although the vast majority of young fans remained orderly, "rhythm and blues did release inhibitions and reduce respect for authority in enough teenagers to give credibility to charges that the music produced licentious behavior.") The generational battle was on, and, perhaps not surprisingly, there are a few references to Boston-area organizations joining the drive to ban the music or at least tone it down.

And tone it down they did. With the protests and the realization that "bleaching" the music could be profitable, the hard-edged rockers were suddenly in competition with such pretty boys as Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and the lyrics became stunningly vapid. The approach of the end of the decade found "Elvis in the Army, Buddy Holly dead, Little Richard in the ministry, and Chuck Berry in jail." But after the lull, there was a revival, and rock 'n' roll, with its swagger and sass, is with us still, and it may well be true that, as Danny and the Juniors sang, it will never die.

Weighty issues such as race, sexuality, and generational battles aside, much of the fun of the book is in the anecdotes: A mortified Little Richard faces the wall as he recites the original bawdy lyrics of "Tutti Frutti" to a woman songwriter hired to clean up those words. Fats Domino racks up phone bills of $200 a month to talk to his beloved wife, Rosemary. "American Bandstand" host Dick Clark somehow emerges unscathed from the payola scandal of the '50s despite having fingers in many musical interests. Pat Boone pontificates in a book of virtually all but useless advice for teenagers. A young Jerry Lee Lewis pounds out "My God Is Real" boogie-woogie-style at church services. Such stories more than make up for a stretch that tells more about the war between music licensers ASCAP and BMI than some of us may care to know, even if that fight was relevant to the struggle to keep rock 'n' roll off the radio.

It is refreshing, too, to learn that the experts of a half-century ago were no better at predicting cultural trends than are today's authorities. Altschuler cites a banner headline in the music industry publication Cash Box: "Rock and Roll May Be the Great Unifying Force!"