Electronic Archival Practices in the Invention of Popular Music
What kind of knowledge can an archive provide? How does an electronic archive differ from an alphabetic one? For our purposes, let us consider audio recordings as electronic texts, and collections of these texts as electronic archives.
Interpretation is part of the apparatus of alphabetic literacy. It is possible to produce different versions of Hamlet because the text allows them. Each interpretation emphasizes parts of the text, while suppressing others. One actor may play Hamlet as a vengeful character, out to get the murderer of his father, while another might play Hamlet as a man bent on purging the kingdom of evil. The text allows both interpretations, yet the meaning of the play differs considerably upon seeing one interpretation or the other. The interpreter becomes an “artist” when his or her work is recognized as being both “individual” (it bears his or her stylistic “signature”), while remaining faithful to the tradition of performance that has developed around the particular piece being performed. Similarly, a classical musician can stress one or another reading of a written score.
Rock music is fundamentally electronic; it is not part of the apparatus of alphabetic literacy. Rock musicians do not employ interpretation the way that classical (literate) musicians do. Rather, they act upon a text, such as a familiar song, in forbidden ways. Rather than maintain the letter of the text, they add to it with new material, subtract from it what the songwriters might have considered essential (see the case of “Hound Dog”) and do things to it that by any standards of interpretation would be incomprehensible. Their acts of defiance to the text are part of what makes rock exciting and dangerous (when it is exciting and dangerous). What Elvis and Sam Phillips did to “Blue Moon of Kentucky” hardly relates at all to what Bill Monroe had done with it. Elvis’ performance abandons bluegrass, abandons the waltz time, and abandons the wistful sense of the lyric. Many people thought his recording was akin to blasphemy, since Monroe was the founder and demi-god of bluegrass music. Yet Monroe liked Elvis’ version so much that he recorded another version of his own modeled on Elvis’.
How did rock musicians use the recorded archive? By internalizing it and forgetting it.
The songs that Elvis recorded at Sun had been written by other artists and most were available on commercial recordings before Elvis recorded his versions. The magical energy created by Sam Phillips, Elvis, and his two bandmates, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, arose in part because they did not check their version against the original. Rather, Elvis barely remembered the songs and would create his version almost from scratch, sometimes forgetting lyrics and pieces of the song. As the song developed under the encouragement of Phillips, it got further and further away from the original version. On one famous occasion, when Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had transformed Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” from a maudlin waltz to something with a driving 4-beat rhythm, Phillips said to them, “Hell, that’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout.” In this instance, the original recording was a reference point for something new rather than a structure to which Elvis owed his allegiance. Later in Elvis’ career, notably with his RCA recordings, Elvis would listen to the tapes of the original songs in the studio and try to duplicate the singing by the demo artist as much as possible. Most music scholars consider the RCA recordings far less interesting than the Sun recordings, in part because they lack the elements of discovery and surprise that the Sun records convey.
Archivists play a crucial role in the invention process by providing the source material from which inventors find analogies, materials, and contrasts for their own projects. In the section that follows, I examine a key archivist in pop music – Dewey Phillips. Dewey Phillips was a DJ on WHBQ radio in Memphis from 1949 until 1958, during the years when Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Little Milton, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King all recorded at Sun.
Archivists are more than simply collectors; they are also exhibitors. An archivist practices a form of “show and tell,” rather like a museum curator or a librarian. Dewey Phillips pioneered new ways to collect as well as new ways to exhibit his finds. Dewey Phillips collected vast amounts of material and he sought to elevate the value of what had previously been devalued stuff – the music of “losers” (the blues and hillbilly). He provided a “contrast” to the prevailing modes of presentation by breaking with prevailing standards of programming. His goals went beyond the success of his own shows – he wanted to inspire artists to invent new forms and to inject new energy into tired forms. He wanted to introduce political and educational concerns, such as racial integration, into media that had been considered merely entertainment.
Dewey Phillips provided histories of recorded music that summarized the first fifty years of this media. His work enabled artists to become more reflective about their media. He played everything he believed was worth hearing until that point and called for something new to happen. When artists heard the archives, they were able to form new perspective and to do something creative.
“Think about Elvis listening to Dewey Phillips on the radio, just like me. He’s six, seven years older, but basically he’s in the same place: This white kid fascinated by a black thing that was forbidden. And there was this crazy guy on the radio giving it to you and telling you it’s a hit. People lose sight of that. They see Dewey and his role in reverse. The only time you hear about Dewey, they say he’s the guy who played Elvis on the radio for the first time. Well, what they assume when they say that is that he didn’t know who Elvis was. And he did know Elvis, and not only did he know Elvis, Elvis, of course, knew him. And many of Elvis’s ideas had been formed by listening to Dewey. Where the hell else did he hear the black records? Elvis Presley was in awe of Dewey Phillips, as he should have been. And as he was of Sam. And while he was in awe of those men, he performed magic.”
(Jim Dickinson, from For the Record: Sun Records, An Oral History
John Floyd, Ed. Dave Marsh p. 35)
Robert Gordon, in his book, It Came From Memphis, devotes a chapter to Dewey Phillips. In it, he describes the enormity of Dewey Phillips’ impact.
“Daddy-O Dewey. He is best known as the first disc jockey to play Elvis Presley, but the legacy of Dewey Phillips is every attempt by a white Memphis kid to play black music, from the first generation of rock and roll right through Stax Records. His listeners learned not to distinguish between races or genres. He demonstrated that the boundaries of “normal” were arbitrary and heralded a freedom that society shunned. Many took heart in the realization that they might be able, like Dewey, to parlay their own particular brand of weirdness, oddity, or eccentricity into a career. Nowhere else in society was such noncomformist thought publicly condoned.” (p. 15)
Jim Dickinson, a legendary Memphis musician who began his career as a session musician at Sun, recalls hearing Dewey Phillips’ show on the radio;
“It was ten years before I figured out that this stuff I heard on Dewey Phillips’ show wasn’t popular music. I certainly didn’t realize that he was playing things that nobody else played. Like ‘Red Hot’ by Billy Lee Riley – I didn’t realize that wasn’t a hit until I moved to Texas for college. He’d play Little Richard, then he’d play Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He’d play a country song, he’d play a rock song, he’d play a blues song. And the mindset I learned, listening to that music, is what has enabled me to make a living in the music business.” (p. 16)
According to Don Nix, a member of the Mar-Keys, a white band who played the black circuit in 1961;
“I was fourteen and I didn’t realize that Dewey wasn’t being heard all over America. I thought everybody in every town had a disc jockey that in one night, three hours, you could hear anything you wanted to hear. . . . He played Little Walter and Johnny Ace, but also Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Jimmy Reed. I listened to WDIA too, but not as much, because WDIA played only one kind of music. Dewey played it all.” (p. 17)
A good archivist provides material that artists would not or could not have found by themselves. Furthermore, archivists provide perspectives on this material that throw new light on it. The archivist presents historical patterns to artists that they come to learn as “traditions.” Additionally, the archivist demands that artists answer the question “what next?” for themselves.
