“When music was music.”

• 1953 – Elvis Presley records for the first time
• 1953 – Eddie Fisher becomes ” The Coca-Cola Kid” on the TV show Coke Time, at a salary of one million dollars a year.
• “Crazy Man, Crazy,” recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets, becomes the first rock and roll single to make the “Billboard” national American musical charts.

From the book BOOMERS (How We Changed The World) by Richard A Jordan

Rock ‘n’ Roll, the new beat and the ultimate mixture-back to the Blues, back to Country Western and Rhythm-and-Blues, back to the gospel shouters (listen to the great Mahalia Jackson’s “He Said He Would” and the Soul music of Ray Charles’s “Bye Bye Love” and see how far apart  they are). When R & R came clattering on the scene, accompanied by a riot or two as the kids lost their heads, the purists put it down as another ridiculous musical fad which would consume the know-nothing young briefly and then disappear into limbo. This is being written fifteen years later-and the radio stations with the heftiest audiences play nothing but R & R and another generation is buying the records, while the Big Beat’s intently serious offspring, Folk Rock, also is thriving. Elvis Presley makes four singles a year, and none of them sells less than a million copies. Call it Country Music if you want, but it rocks. And anytime they want to work together again, the late-coming Beatles can still write their own ticket anywhere in the Western world, trailed by the small army they spawned, such as the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and Gerry and the Pacemakers; call it the Liverpool Sound or the Mersey Sound, but it rocks, too. In a word, the Big Beat is still the beat. It outlived the very man who christened it and got it off the ground.

Alan Freed, born in Ohio, son of a clothing store clerk, attended Ohio State University for two years, played the trombone out there and led a band called the Sultans of Swing. He broke into radio in New Castle, Pennsylvania, as the announcer on a longhair program that leaned heavily on Wagner (he said he was hung up on the Ring) with touches of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Then he went to Cleveland, and in 1952, behind a hard sell that  might as well have been fired out of a machine gun, started playing the race records of such little-known singers as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. He borrowed a recurring, sex-orientated phrase for the Rhythm-and-Blues people and called it Rock ‘n’ Roll. For those who might have been a little slow in getting around to it, Bill Haley and His Comets arrived with a thunderbolt style recording of “Rock Around the Clock” which reached for the libido in the plainest terms and proved to be inescapable either in the most remote American hamlet or the farthest reaches of the outside world. – movie built around the song inspired wild disorders wherever it was shown.)

(From the book Fads, Follies and Delusions of the American People by Paul Sann) 1967

This book is not only very informative but a whole lot of fun. Real cool.

“ A club-owner can tell you. It’s not many traveling blues musicians to go around. You got fifteen to twenty good blues artists that got groups working on the road. Freddie King. Albert King. B.B. King. Muddy Waters. Howlin’ Wolf. Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. James Cotton. Bo Diddley. John Lee Hooker. Hound Dog Taylor. Willie Dixon, who’s just started out traveling again. Luther Allison that’s doing fair now. Otis Rush. Jimmy Dawkins. Mighty Joe Young that teams up with Koko Taylor. Jimmy Reed, who’s in and out. Johnny Littlejohn. This girl from California- Big Mam  Thornton got a pretty big band now. Charlie Musselwhite. Paul Butterfield and his blues band. Shakey Horton’s getting him a band together and doing a few gigs now. Lowell Fulson is doing a few things. That’s about all I can recall. So from a club-owner’s point of view, there’s not enough good artists to fill fifty-two weeks- to bring in a winner every week. So clubs use the same artists three of four times a year.”  An interview of Howlin’ Wolf;s former saxophonist Eddie Shaw (1974)

From the book BOOGIE MAN by Charles Shaar Murray
A great story, great read, great writing; about a great artist, this is a great

book, real cool.