I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America

Abstract

A seismic transformation occurred in American music from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, argues Albin J. Zak III in I Don’t Sound like Nobody, and sound recording stood at the center of it. During those years, recordings came to occupy a new place in the social and economic relations of American music. Increasingly, popular music artists and record producers made records consciously and deliberately as records, as sonic artifice, rather than trying to fabricate “aural snapshots” of real performances (p. 162). As the ideas and practices that underpinned record making changed, the conception and sound of records became as crucial to the final product as song selection and performance. From Columbia Records's Mitch Miller to Sun Records's Sam Phillips, producers inside and outside the existing cultural establishment challenged musical orthodoxies by embracing record making as a creative, collaborative process. Young record buyers responded enthusiastically, if unpredictably, to those new kinds of records, which, as they proliferated, undermined the older oligopolistic musical order and gave rise to a more decentralized and “democratic” music economy, shaped to an unprecedented degree by fans and small entrepreneurs. A startling number of records were labeled rock and roll, a term with a meaning, Zak shows, that was vague and contested in its early years. Indeed, rock and roll was more a way of making music than it was a coherent idiom, he contends, “more a process transforming the pop mainstream than a concrete musical type” (p. 175). As such, and contrary to myth, the putative music of teen rebellion commingled and coexisted with its “other”—mainstream, Tin Pan Alley–style pop.

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