I Read a Book: Let's Do It: The Birth of Pop by Bob Stanley
One of the most ear-opening experiences I've had in a long time
I’m guessing very few of you have ever heard of Reginald Foresythe. Until last week, I’d never heard of Reginald Foresythe. Born in England in 1907, his father was a West African, and his mother an English woman. He was a gay, black English pianist who wound up working with some of the biggest jazz names in the United States in the 30s – Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, and Paul Whiteman.
While still in England, he led a group called The New Music of Reginald Foresythe, which was remarkable. His compositions split the difference between pop, jazz, and classical music. There were reeds but no horns in the instrumentation. Even today, they sound unlike anything else, a left turn down a cul-de-sac of musical history that I’m very glad to have discovered.
Reginald Foresythe is just one of hundreds of musicians and songwriters covered in the nearly 600 pages in Bob Stanley’s Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, published just a few months back. Stanley was the keyboard player in the band Saint Etienne, but honestly, I never actually gave them more than a cursory listen back in the 90s. He also wrote Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music From Bill Haley to Beyonce. That book is now on my wish list.
Stanley is six years younger than I am, but we both were born into a world ruled by rock’n’roll music. It was easy to believe, once we were old enough to look at the origin stories of said world, that if we could pinpoint the beginning of rock’n’roll, we wouldn’t have to worry about knowing anything else. In my case, I eventually discovered jazz, and had to push my origin story back a few decades, but the idea was the same. There was good music – jazz, blues, gospel, country, rock’n’roll, etc. – and there was bad music – the pop world before and outside of the music I knew was good.
Over a lifetime, you get exposed to things that don’t fit your once firm world view. Contradictions come in, and you either figure out how you can love The Music Man (not even mentioned in this book, by the way), Taylor Swift, and the Sex Pistols, or you dig in your heels and try to convince yourself you don’t really like everything you like. Bob Stanley opened his musical mind to an enormously wide range of interests, and I think I’m a believer in his taste. Certainly, the artists I’ve dipped into as a result of reading this book – Dick Haymes, for example, is a pop singer who made a couple of 50s albums that stand with the work of Frank Sinatra as masterful interpretations of Great American Songbook material – have rewarded my time with them quite a bit.
The Birth of Pop, though part of the story, is a strange subtitle for a book that covers seventy years of musical history in two countries – the United States and Stanley’s UK. He opens at the dawn of the 20th Century, when sheet music was the main distributing medium for songs, and when recordings were just starting to become more popular. (As an aside, Stanley points out that in those days, men usually couldn’t be bothered buying music; it was up to women, as the caretakers of the home and the players of the piano, to select what was heard by the family.) He covers the birth of ragtime, the newfound influence of Tin Pan Alley, the American songs of musical theater. Something we could recognize as popular music coalesced over the first decade or two of the century.
I want to emphasize that Bob Stanley is not a dry historian piling up facts and figures, names and dates. He is opinionated at all times, describing what he thinks is good about certain music, pointing out shortcomings in other songs or performers, and thoroughly describing all of it. He is a breezy writer, with a great sense of humor and fun as he goes along. If he can find a way to compare something from 1910 to music from the 1980s, he’ll do it. This book is never even slightly boring. Proof positive is that even when he switches to writing chapters about English music hall and other developments in his native land, I was carried along by the narrative as much as I had been reading about Irving Berlin or Louis Armstrong.
Which brings me to jazz, which plays a key role in pop music history in the first half of the 20th Century. Stanley is not a jazz purist; if anything, he sides with musicians dismayed by the development of bebop and other non-dance approaches in the 40s and 50s. He does, however, have an expansive view of jazz from the 20s and 30s, and is clear-eyed on the ways it first infected pop music and then, for a while, became a dominant force in same.
I knew bits and pieces of the story here, but Bob Stanley has opened my eyes to a wealth of music beyond what I’ve spent my life enjoying. His chapter comparing Billie Holiday and Judy Garland at first struck me as going beyond the pale but has made me think there might be something in Garland that I’ve never really noticed. He holds Peggy Lee up as an equal to Sinatra (which only reinforced my already great admiration for her). I’m not expecting I’ll end up agreeing with everything Stanley likes or dislikes, but it will be a lot of fun exploring the songs and singers and instrumentalists he covers.