And listen, the man who is about to say it.
Yeah, let's everybody listen.
Or more than half a century, the sound of soul,
the musical expression of black America had
reverberated around the city limits of
predominantly white Poplarville, USA,
injecting its native tempo and accent with
growing frequency in almost every
instance from the black Dixieland jazz
of New Orleans, which became the white man's
ragtime to the gymnastic and gutsy
rhythm and blues of the black ghettos, which
became the white kids rock and roll.
The people who created the sound had
been relegated to Tin Pan Alley backyard.
Meanwhile, the King of Swing, the first
superstar of rock, Amos and Andy, and
a good many other white performers made most
of the commercial noise in the House
camel. Cigaret present, Benny Goodman swing
for the Tuesday evening rally of everybody
everywhere who gets the lift from the new
pulsating music.
If you're going to
wake up
early
and go,
oh, oh, oh,
oh,
a long time coming.
But I know
it changed the whole car.
By the 60s, a change was coming
out
loud.
It came out of the streets where the civil
rights forces were laying it on the line
where soul was becoming a kind of black
badge of courage.
And it came out of a most unlikely left field
out of the rocking and rolling arrival of
certain British beat groups who made it a point
to credit their sources.
Lou Rawls. It must be respected, man,
because they opened up a whole new
world man.
And for people like myself and many
other blues artists, man, that
had been around a long time, they over the
world came in.
They took what we've got, you know what?
I wanna be in there, what our heritage is being
taken and exposed to the world and, you know,
and how the world has accepted it.
Looking back
on it,
by the end of the 60s, the sound of soul
have not only prevailed, it was conquering
in America. A black rhythm and blues or soul
recordings alone accounted for as much
as 30 percent of the country's pop record
sales.
And when combined with the socco sales power
of the blue eyed Soul Brethren, all
those long haired rockers blues
roots music represented 40 to 60
percent of the total American
record market.
Cash Box magazine says it sold to a tune of
five hundred million dollars annually
in records alone.
John Lee Hooker Blues have got to be so
big and popular it's something that will never
die. Old man really did roll
at long. Oh, I hate
to say so,
but the
say Oh
fuck me.
John Gillman's The Pop Chronicles.