Alright, we continue talking about mainstream pop now. In the first video we talked about how the song is the important thing in period, in the period before 1955. And individual performances of it are done by performers who specialize in performance, but mostly don't write their own songs. Frank Sinatra never wrote a song, Bing Crosby never wrote a song. But nobody held that against them or thought they were inauthentic because that's just the way it is back in those days. A music business dominated by music publishers. So, now the question arises. How did people actually gain access to this music? How did they find out about it? And in order to, to think about that, we have to start by imaging what America was like at the turn of century at about 1900. one thing that was very different about America in those days is that it was much more regional. where what happened in the south, or the southwest, or the west coast, or the industrial north was very different. And you really had no way of knowing immediately what was going on in those other parts of the country unless you actually went there and found out about it. Even newspapers were kind of slow. Of course, there was telegraph and you could sort of find out about things that way. But nevertheless, you kind of had to wait for news to get to you. What that did is it, is it kept regional cultures relatively intact. So, when it comes to talking about styles. When we talk about folk music, we talk about country music, when we talk about blues music, we can talk about styles that are associated with certain cities. People know what Chicago blues is, or Memphis, or Saint Louis, and the reason why those styles were able to stay distinct from each other is because those musicians would move from place to place, but mostly the audiences stayed the same. So we lived in a world where there were many more regional accents. But it didn't take long, with the development of radio, for us to begin to develop what you might think of, as a national culture, especially a national culture for entertainment. And as I gave away just a minute ago, radio, and the development of radio, played a tremendously important role, in establishing a kind of a national culture across America, where people in Los Angeles we're able to hear the same kind of music that people in New York were hearing. And the people down on the farm somewhere in Tennessee could hear the same people, the music that people in the big city, in Detroit or Chicago, were hearing. That starts to happen with the spread of radio. So what can we say about radio. it's hard to imagine a world before radio. Actually for most of us, it's hard to imagine a world before the internet. Although, I know there was one, I was there. but nevertheless, what would a world before radio be like? Well radio was initially developed by a fellow by the name of Marconi made his first important sort of experiments to show that you could do this thing of sending voices through the air in 1895 the, the, benefit of radio early on Was thought to be, two things, like so many technologies, one of the benefits was thought to be military. Alright, there's a great benefit in being able to sort of reach your troops out on the battlefield, and be able to talk to them instantaneously without having to send messengers back and forth, right? So that's a real that it's amazing how many of the technologies that were developed in the 20th century, were first developed as military technologies, or space technologies. putting a man on the moon, we gained a lot of microchip technology that would have, that, that made the Internet possible. The other thing that it was handy for, radio was, that is talking to ships at sea. So if you've got a ship that's way out at sea and you want to be able to communicate with it, radio is a very, very handy way of being able to do that. in fact, radio really started to make its first big impact in 1912 when the Titanic sank, and it was possible to send radio transmissions of what was happening on the Titanic, back to New York via a kind of radio telegraph system. You know, that dit-dit-ta-dit, dit-dit, dit-ta-dit, that kind of thing. And the guy sitting Right at the desk, taking down that information, was a fellow by the name of David Sarnoff. David Sarnoff, it turns out, went on to have a career running RCA and developing the NBC radio network. He became a very, very important figure and was right there from the beginning of this. People were amazed when the Titanic was going down, that they were able to read newspaper reports. It seemed almost in real time to them, this was almost like cable news happening immediately. They were there and it never happened before. And so radio started to get very, very it showed a lot of promise and by 1920, radio stations were popping up around major cities. by 19, by the end of the 1920s, radio networks had begun to pop up in this country and so NBC. And CBS and other networks were able to do things by using telephone wires so they could connect stations up, affiliates they called, in all kinds of different cities, and they could sh, they could play the same programming around to everybody at the same time. So, imagine how impressed people would have been with this, they could be sitting in their home, somewhere in suburban Chicago, and hear the same performance that people in a, in a New York night club were hearing, in real time, as it was actually happening, through the air, on their radio set. Fantastic, right. So these, these networks get going by connecting up all of these stations, these affiliate stations and then by connecting in certain stations that were called super stations. Super stations could broadcast a very, very powerful signal, especially after the Sun went down that could reach. Whole regions of the country. So, by putting these superstations and these, and these these network affiliate stations connected by telephone lines together, you could reach from coast to coast. Fantastic, who could imagine that, that, that radio could now reach a whole country at the same time. And when you do that, when everybody's listening to the same music, at the same time. It means that there, you're starting to break down regional differences. So what happens in popular music is, through radio, it establishes a national audience. And what's on radio at this time? Well, you've got soap operas. The Guiding Light was one of the early soap operas there. Comedies, Amos and Andy. Thought it would be seen as really really politically incorrect by today's standards. Amos and Andy was was the one of the sort of great comedy shows of its day. Adventure shows like the Lone Ranger and Superman. Variety shows, like one famous one that was hosted by Bing Crosby. And, of course, music, lots of music. Lots of musicians playing music over the radio airwaves. So if you were one of these song publishers. Who wanted to get your song heard. Get it out there so people could hear it, so then they can then, buy the sheet music at the local 5 and dime and bring it home and play it on their home piano. What you want to do is get that song on the radio. So the radio and the publishing business were in a sort of were, were working hand in glove. To promote popular music in addition to the other kinds of things that radio was doing. Now you can also say that movies help provide a national audience because once a movie's made the wizard of oz for example everybody in every theater across the country is seeing exactly the same movie. And of course, people in the publishing business wanted to get their move, their songs placed in movies. Well there was actually a bit of a debate about that because some people thought well if the song is placed in the movie won't that kind of wear it out, won't it have the she-, same shelf life as the movie itself, like after the movie's no longer popular, the song will no longer be popular. You don't want that if you're in a publishing business, you want to song that's what they call an evergreen. It just continues to be used and used and used because every time it's used you make a little bit on money. So movies are important but they don't really happen in real time. Now the important thing we have to think about is that this fantastic music, this fantastic radio network develops a national audience for music. But after the second world war, David Sonanoff, who I mentioned before, gets this idea. If people will listen to music through the air, think how much they would like to have music in pictures through the air. So at the end of the second world war, he takes all of R-, well, a lot of RCA's research and development money and puts it into television. Television's going to be the next Big thing. Which leaves radio, after a few years, really as a kind of an also ran. But we have all these fantastic radio stations that have been developed over the course of the '30s and '40s with all kinds of equipment. What's going to happen to those stations? Well, when we start talking about rhythm and blues, and country and western music. We'll talk about what happens to those radio stations. After they've been, well, not really abandoned, but at least partially abandoned by some of the big money which owes it to television. But next, what we need to talk about is what did the music sound like during this period? Who were some of the most important artists in this period of American pop, before 1955?
