1961
Mr Beflry made the astute observation that decades and eras are far from the same thing and that culturally ‘the Sixties’ didn’t start in 1960. Though it will be increasingly hard for those that follow to make that claim, 1961 remains pretty much in that same boat as 1960.
On the surface the charts looked very similar with a mixture of musicals, traditional and doo wop orientated pop dominating. This was not inherently a bad thing as our first track illustrates:
The Shirelles – Dedicated to The One I Love. As lushly sung and beautifully arranged as the Mamas and Papas later version was, it’s somewhat stripped of the rawer youthful yearning of the original. The relatively low volume of music, churn and secondary market of the UK meant that songs could have a long shelf life too with some of our 60’s playlist, like Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, enduring well into 1961.
However, look beyond the surface continuity and you begin to see, in places as diverse as Detroit and Dartford, that seeds were being planted in fertile soil ready for the early shoots of new music to germinate and appear.
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Both of these locations were the scenes of important musical events in 1961 but only
one of them will allow you to get to Plumstead within the half hour
Albums
Conventional rock albums continued to be a thing of the future with more traditional LPs dominating the charts. Musicals continued to be highly popular, including The Sound of Music from which we’ll have a song albeit in a different form. Other big musicals on both sides of the Atlantic included Seven Brides, The Music Man and Calcutta!
Though both Elvis and Cliff Richard(s) had big no 1 albums, they were off the back of another phenomena: the movie soundtrack album. Blue Hawaii and The Young Ones, respectively, were far from the only big movie soundtrack albums as star vehicle movies began to overtake the conventional musical. As classic a song as
Elvis’s - Can’t Help Falling In Love is, it doesn’t sound very rock n roll; but that didn’t stop it being the biggest track from the Blue Hawaii album.
Though not star vehicles, two other big films of '61, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, yielded greats songs that will hopefully get nominated along the way this next fortnight, but again neither resembling rock.
Other traditional music thrived. In the, UK Chris Barber and Acker Bilk - Greatest Hits spent a long time at the top of the album charts as did The Black and White Minstrels too. By and large the UK album scene felt pretty 'safe' and though that's true of the US scene too there were a few more avenues for Americans to explore.
In terms of quality and innovation many of the albums that have endured from 1961 are jazz classics.
John Coltrane was moving out of the shadow of Miles Davis by amongst other things introducing Indian and Eastern influences into his music (long before a certain four piece). The title track from his huge album
My Favourite Things takes a song from the aforementioned Sound of Music and though it starts conventionally enough, as the song progresses turns it into something quite different and hypnotic. Beyond the established jazz idioms, avant-garde jazz continued to make progress too with artists like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor releasing big albums.
Beyond the Musical, film soundtrack and jazz hegemony, the US album charts continued to show more progression than the UK.
Ray Charles had three varied albums out this year, though in a great illustration of the continuing separation of album and single his biggest hit of the year
Hit The Road Jack, didn’t appear on any of them.
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Watch Ray Charles Live at the Antibes Jazz festival to hear
some great songs and confirm all your worst prejudices about jazz fans
One emergent couple who had a hit that
was on their album were
Ike and Tina Turner, I Idolize You was a hit from their debut album The Soul of Ike and Tina Turner but was then eclipsed later in the year by their Grammy nominated
It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.
Inspired by her older friends Sam Cooke and Ray Charles and by a her sisters boyfriend (a young man named Marvin Gaye) the 18 year old Aretha Franklin turned down offers from both Cooke's RCA label and Berry Gordy to record her first album with Columbia. Joan Baez released her Volume II album to some acclaim, and though mostly still singing traditional songs she continued to set herself up for a stellar career.
The UK wasn't totally stuck in the album mud though. Originally put together as Cliff's backing group, The Shadows decided it was time to step out of the errm shadows with their '61 debut album The Shadows, the singles from which set them on the way to being the 5th biggest ever UK singles band. They also set an early template for the 4 piece instrument wielding band.
Singles
Though rock and soul were making limited impression on the album front, when it came to singles the story was a little different especially with Soul / RnB which was beginning to hit its straps, especially in the US.
The
Mar-Keys song
Last Night was the first national release from a Memphis based regional record label called Satellite. Unfortunately, there was already a Californian record label with the same name, so the label owners Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton went down the easy route and just rechristened their company with the first two letters of each of their surnames and a legendary soul label was born. The Mar-Key’s young guitarist was called Steve Cropper and though the Mar-Keys name would become something of a footnote, he stuck around at Stax and the next year in our musical journey we’ll see him join forces with another great to form the nucleus of arguably the greatest ever house band.
Little does he know it but this young man (Steve Cropper)
will go on to play on many of the great records of the 1960s
Though he had not yet found his way to Stax, a young man called Otis Redding had moved on from working the Chitlin’ Circuit (which through the 30s into the 60s was a network of venues that allowed black performers to earn a living in a still segregated and often-hostile environment) to start recording some initial tracks.
Meanwhile over in Detroit the less cool of the two great emerging soul labels was doing ok as well! Berry Gordy Jnr took over a couple more buildings on West Grand Boulevard as he built Hitsville USA. On the musical front Mary Wells had early Motown hits where you could still hear the influence of doo wop. Hits on the Tamla label included
The Marvelettes – Please Mr Postman, a song that would not become a hit in the UK for a number of years and then (as mentioned in another thread) like many others would be sung by a white artist.
In fact, though Ray Charles and Sam Cooke made dents in the UK charts it remained mostly the white American artists like Elvis, The Everly’s, Neil Sedaka and Booby Vee who were cutting over in the UK at this point.
Alongside these imports more young homegrown stars began to appear too including Adam Faith, and the ludicrously voiced
Helen Shapiro. Listen to
Walking Back to Happiness and register that you are listening to a 14-year-old schoolgirl, it's pretty insane. By the age of 15 she’d had 5 top ten hits and two number ones making Elvis and Cliff look like a pair of wasters who had just dossed around on the sofa in their mid-teens.
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Stop Press: Mysterious force uses Hackney schoolgirl to host thirtysomething woman's voice
Mr B made the point novelty songs were not
always a thing of shame and they were common throughout the sixties but '61 was actually relatively slim pickings certainly for higher quality ones. Charlie Drake managed the quite mystifying feat of having a hit not only in the UK but in the US too with My Boomerang Won’t Come Back. Meanwhile, coming from the other direction, Baby Sittin’ Boogie by Buzz Clifford showed that the Crazy Frog generation did not invent nonsense gibbering as a form of entertainment.
In the wider world the Cold War got a little bit colder with the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion setting up the following years Cuban Missile Crisis. Culturally, that failure dented America’s post WWII internal and external image as an almost infallible superpower, which in turn helped spark the dissention that would come in part to define 60’s culture. American prestige took a further blow when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, prompting JFK to announce the intention to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Meanwhile on the ground, the Civil Rights Movement continued to gather pace but was still a way from achieving its objectives.
Closer to home, Pan-Africanism saw many more countries declare independence from the UK which itself applied to join the EEC but was turned downed as a result of De Gaulle's veto which he would again exercise in the late 60s.
By 1961 75% of UK houses had a TV and this increasingly shaped both how we entertained ourselves and how our music stars needed to present themselves to be part of that entertainment. Films like A Taste of Honey, presaged changing morality and willingness to discuss things that hitherto had been off limits.
Soon some of these events and shifts will spill over into societal/cultural change that will impact the music we are listening too. Along with the gradual erosion of the class system, who could make music and what they could make it about was beginning to change. This was not wholly visible yet and the charts were still not yet representative of the 60’s as we typically understand them now but nonetheless the seeds of the musical new world order were being sown. Back from Hamburg a certain band had changed their name to the one they would become world famous with, and Lunchtime at the Cavern with The Beatles became a thing. One lunchtime Brian Epstein came to see them and after convincing them that being scruffy buggers wasn't the way forward signed them up. Meanwhile two kids called Mick and Keith were establishing their shared love of music on that Dartford train platform.
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Lads the leathers are going to have to go. Oh and can I have a word please Pete?
But these are points for the future, for the time being in the UK we would need to be content with a few early soul classics like the newly solo
Ben E King’s Stand by Me and a continuation of doo wop influenced pop. Hmmm…I wonder what UK #1 from May 61 I can finish with to illustrate this? Ah I have just the thing.
