9. The Vietnam War and American Music

Abstract

July 1954. On Sunday July 4, French forces abandoned the town of Phuly to advancing Vietminh insurgents. Though the town had previously been considered a key point in the communications between Hanoi and the lower Red River delta, Premier Pierre Mendes-France declared that the pullback had strengthened the French military situation. On July 5, at Sam Phillips's studio in Memphis a young white man recorded That's All Right (Mama), a song written and recorded in the forties by a black bluesman, Arthur Big Boy Crudup. On July 10, after the record was first broadcast on WHBQ, the radio station's switchboard was jammed with callers. That evening the record was played over and over; rock and roll as we know it was on the air, and Elvis Presley on his way to stardom. The same day, having been informed that the French had recognized an independent sovereign State of in a secret treaty signed with Emperor Bao Dai, Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist Vietnamese nationalist, agreed to form a government. On July 18, in Geneva, Tran Van Do, Foreign Minister of the French-created state, rejected drafts of a Final Declaration that allowed the country to be partitioned into two separate zones. On July 19, That's All Right (Mama) was officially released; eventually it became a regional hit, reaching number one in the Memphis Country and Western charts. On July 20, French delegates signed a cease-fire agreement with delegates representing Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The agreement required all troops to withdraw to opposite sides of a provisional military demarcation line; troop levels were to be frozen, and elections were to be held in the summer of 1956. May 1956. Three hundred and fifty U.S. Military personnel were sent to Vietnam. The number one record at the time was Heartbreak Hotel, Elvis's first for RCA, where Phillips had sold him for $35,000. During the Vietnam war, RCA's Department of Defense contracts averaged $300 million a year (Chapple and

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