With “Let’s Do It”, his new book, Bob Stanley attempts to fill in the gap between Stephen Foster, a popular songwriter, and the arrival of Elvis and the Beatles
Faber and Faber; 636 pages; £25. To be published in America by Pegasus in September; $35, a comprehensive, fun and digressive history of popular music in the second half of the 20th century, was published in 2013 by Bob Stanley, a music writer and member of veteran pop band Saint Etienne. In a new book the author says that he “was constantly aware that pop music didn’t begin with the Beatles in 1963, or Elvis in 1956, or even with the first seven-inch singles in 1949”.
With “Let’s Do It”, Mr Stanley attempts to fill in the gap between Foster and the arrival of Elvis and the Beatles. It was a busy period, encompassing the rise and fall of ragtime, as well as vaudeville, blues, musicals, hillbilly, R’n’B, swing, jazz, crooning, bebop, film soundtracks and many other styles and fads.
, created the seven-inch single in 1949, it colour-coded the vinyl by genre, making them look like “children’s records, small bright discs of coloured plastic”, which helped to accelerate the convergence of pop and youth culture. Some African-American performers were shrewd at navigating the industry. Big Bill Broonzy, a bluesman, had a repertoire of “hard, loud, electric party music” for black audiences, but put on his old dungarees and sang folk songs from the 1920s when he performed for white patrons. According to Mr Stanley, Broonzy “understood how pop worked, and he knew on which side his bread was buttered”.
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