Pop Had An Entirely Different Meaning Before 1955: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.12
Let It RollShow Notes
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Bob Stanley to discuss “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music, A History” - the prequel to his own earlier book, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé”.
That one started in 1955 and ran forward through the rock and roll era. This one goes back and asks what the word “pop” meant before rock and roll took the name away from it.
The answer is that it meant almost everything. Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, dance bands and crooners, the Broadway song and the novelty side, the whole commercial apparatus of a business that was already enormous before anyone thought to call it a youth market. Stanley argues that this music has been orphaned twice over - too early for the rock histories, too popular for the jazz histories - and that the gap has swallowed some of the best records ever made.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter and calling the series Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End.
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