A Partial Timeline For "Bop" As A Referent For Music (with information & comments)

Edited by Azizi Powell

Latest revision - December 10, 2023
 
This pancocojams post presents a time line for the English word "bop" as a referent for music.

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and linguistic purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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A PARTIAL TIMELINE FOR "BOP" AS A REFERENT FOR MUSIC
(Additions & corrections are welcome.)

1940s: Bebop (Bop)
From https://www.allmusic.com/style/bop-ma0000002457
"Also known as bebop, Bop was a radical new music that developed gradually in the early '40s and exploded in 1945. The main difference between bop and swing is that the soloists engaged in chordal (rather than melodic) improvisation, often discarding the melody altogether after the first chorus and using the chords as the basis for the solo. Ensembles tended to be unisons, most jazz groups were under seven pieces, and the soloist was free to get as adventurous as possible as long as the overall improvisation fit into the chord structure. Since the virtuoso musicians were getting away from using the melodies as the basis for their solos (leading some listeners to ask "Where's the melody?") and some of the tempos were very fast, bop divorced itself from popular music and a dancing audience, uplifting jazz to an art music but cutting deeply into its potential commercial success. Ironically the once-radical bebop style has become the foundation for all of the innovations that followed and now can be almost thought of as establishment music. Among its key innovators were altoist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, drummer Max Roach, and pianist/composer Thelonious Monk."

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1940s 
From https://goodblacknews.org/2022/04/26/black-lexicon-the-origins-of-bop-listen/ "Black Lexicon: The Origins of “Bop” by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, April 22, 2022
" “Bop” is a slang term most currently used to mean a really good song, but originally used to reference the jazz genre “bebop,” “rebop” or “hard bop.”

Invented in the 1940s and 1950s by musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Christian, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Thelonious Monk – right now you’re listening to the song called “Be-Bop” by Dizzy Gillespie, originally written, recorded and released by him in 1945.

The “bop” style of playing consisted of intricate phrasings and harmonic improvisations over chord melodies of standards as well as original compositions. Dizzy Gillespie even titled his 1979 autobiography To Be or Not to Bop."...

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1940s
From https://www.etymonline.com/word/rebop
"bebop(noun)

1944, from bebop, rebop, bop, nonsense words in jazz lyrics, attested from at least 1928. The style is associated with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie."
-snip-
"Nonsense words in jazz lyrics" refer to "scatting"

bop (n.)

1948, shortening of bebop or rebop. The musical movement had its own lingo, which was in vogue in U.S. early 1950s. "Life" magazine [Sept. 29, 1952] listed examples of bop talk: crazy "new, wonderful, wildly exciting;" gone (adj.) "the tops—superlative of crazy;" cool (adj.) "tasty, pretty;" goof "to blow a wrong note or make a mistake;" hipster "modern version of hepcat;" dig "to understand, appreciate the subtleties of;" stoned "drunk, captivated, ecstatic, sent out of this world;" flip (v.) "to react"
 enthusiastically."
-snip-
The word "Rebop" was used first but was later replaced by the word "Bebop".

**
1940s: songs that have the word "bop" in their titles
From https://www.streetswing.com/music_archive/m1bop.htm 
The earliest songs listed by Swingstreet are "Wham Re-bop-boom-bam" -Four Modernaires (1940) and "Swing To Bop"- Charlie Christian (1941).

These are Jazz songs.

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1945/1946: "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" Rhythm & Blues records
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey!_Ba-Ba-Re-Bop

 "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" is a 1946 song by Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra. The song's lead vocals were performed by Lionel Hampton himself and the recording featured Herbie Fields on alto sax. The song went to number one on the R&B Juke Box chart for sixteen non-consecutive weeks and reached number nine on the national pop charts.[1]

Although the writing of "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" was credited to Hampton and his drummer Curley Hamner, it was essentially a partial rewriting of Helen Humes' 1945 R&B hit "Be-Baba-Leba", which in turn was closely related to "Ee-Bobaliba" by Jim Wynn."...

**
1950s: Hard Bop / 1960s: Post Bop [Jazz music references]
From https://us.napster.com/genre/jazz/bop
Built on a rhythmic foundation of walking bass and a steady cymbal, Bop features extended soloing over a series of chord changes. In the early 1940s, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie revolutionized jazz with their stripped-down aesthetic, fast tempos, and harmonic innovations. By the '50s, post-war atomic fear led the music into the anxious and tough sounds of Hard Bop. Outfits such as Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, who incorporated elements of Gospel and blues into slightly slower tempos. Post Bop groups, such as the Bill Evans Trio and mid-'60s Miles Davis Quintet, reshaped the basic elements of Bebop and Hard Bop."...
-snip-
Click that link for a list of top Bebop recordings.

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2000?: The word "Bop" began to be used in the United States as a general referent for Pop (popular, non-religious) music. "Pop" used here refers to some R&B records and records in other genres that are popular with the United States general public.   

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2000/2001: "Kidz Bop"
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidz_Bop
" “Kidz Bop is a brand of compilation albums performing contemporary popular songs. The series was developed by Razor & Tie co-founders Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam[1] on September 10, 2001.[2] The albums are composed of popular songs that chart high on the Billboard Hot 100 and/or receive heavy airplay from contemporary hit radio stations several months ahead of each album's release. The songs are performed by the Kidz Bop Kids, often with lyrics deemed too explicit or suggestive for younger audiences altered to be more "kid-friendly".[3]"....

**
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidz_Bop_(album)
"Kidz Bop (occasionally known as Kidz Bop 1) is the first album in the Kidz Bop series in which children sing popular songs of the time. The album was certified Gold by the RIAA. Nicholas Scala of New York was involved with the production of the album. The album contains 30 newly recorded songs from the late 1990s and 2000.

[...]

Released: October 9, 2001
Recorded: 2000
-snip-
The use of the word "bop" in this group name/brand name suggests the prior use of the word "bop" as a general referent for popular non-religious records.

**
around 2016 -The first use of "Issa bop (colloquial expression meaning "It's a really good (usually danceable) record,

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SELECTED COMMENTS ABOUT THE WORD "BOP" USED FOR AS A REFERENT FOR RECORDS THAT SOMEONE CONSIDERS TO BE GOOD

From https://gagadaily.com/forums/topic/180447-its-a-bop-i-cant-take-it/ BOP: "It's a bop" I can't take it
Started March 17, 2016 by Bonkers in Gaga Thoughts

(Pancocojams Editor: This is the earliest online discussion that I've found for the latest contemporary music meaning of the word "bop". I've added numbers for these comments for referencing purposes only.)

1. Bonkers, Posted March 17, 2016
"I'm sorry to inform you that no one sounds good calling a good song "a bop". :gaycat: It sounds like something that would be vocal fried by one of the Kardashians. "

[...]

2. Dorothy Gale, Posted March 17, 2016
"I love bops. To me, bops are the kinds of songs you can play on loop, and are usually pop."

[...]

3. Bonkers, Posted March 17, 2016
"Maybe call it "great song" or "jam" maybe? But here's the deal, record yourself saying it, or ask one of your friends to say it."

[...]

4. CustomGiuseppe, Posted March 17, 2016
"A bop is a song that is not necissarily of good quality or deep substance but you'd bop and move your body to it if it was playing in a mall or a grocery store"

[...]

5. StrawberryBlond, Posted March 17, 2016
"I'm totally with you on that one! The word "bop" used to refer to an upbeat song you could dance too, usually pop. But now it seems to have become a gay slang term that simply means "a good song." And it's annoyingly inaccurate. Even ballads get called bops now. What part of a slow song could possibly make you associate it with the word "bop?" Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is a bop. Hello is not. It's not hard to work out why."
-snip-
I added italics to highlight these sentences.

[...]

6. CyanLights
"This, its not the* awful of a word but its beyond over used and extremely incorrectly. Its annoying when i see reviews of albums on here and other sites and everyone claims that the songs are bops and i listen to the album, and there are no "bops" to be heard. Its not that heard** of a concept."
-snip-
*I think “the” in the first sentence of that comment is a typo for “that”.
**I think the second use of the word “heard” in the last sentence of that comment is a typo for “hard”.

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June 19, 2016 - Earliest [?] urbandictionary.com entry for the latest contemporary music meaning of "bop"
From https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bop
"bopmusic
used to reference a good song; to say that a song is really good
Situation 1: SHINee's 'View' is such a bop
Situation 2: EXO's song 'Artificial Love' from their new album EX'ACT is a bop!
#music#shinee#exo#kpop#k-pop"
by exothekings June 19, 2016
-snip-
The wording "a bop" appears to be used a lot.

These words appear to me to be a shortened form of a positive opinion of a song (for instance: "That's a good bop" or some other complimentary adjective that is implied before the noun "bop".

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August 13, 2017: another early entry for "bop" from urbandictionary.com
TOP DEFINITION
"issa bop
Slang for it's a really great song.
The kind that makes you want to dance or makes you really happy.
Can be used sarcastically.
You should listen to Strip that down by Liam Payne cause Issa bop.
(Ironically) Lol, just heard Friday by Rebecca Black, issa bop."

by Rubik' Cube August 13, 2017"
-snip-
"Issa" - African American Vernacular English originated word meaning "it's a".

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December 14, 2017: another early entry for "bop" from urbandictionary.com
From https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=A%20bop
1. "A bop
A song that will always be good, legendary
"Yo man have you ever heard 'get low' by the ying yang twins?"
"Yeah man that will always be a bop"
by Maple syrup69 December 14, 2017"

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Added March 2019 : Selected comments that include the word "bop" from Samm Henshaw - Church (Lyric Video) ft. EARTHGANG; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHIN2JRSMuU

[Numbers added for referencing purposes only]
1. Bruhh Brahh
"Finally found my bop song for lazy Sunday morning ☀ ☁⛪"

**
2. allyssa figueroa
"this is such a bop AHHHHHHH ON REPEAT"

**
3. Jimhawking OutlawStar
"I needed this! Thanks for another bop."

**
4. Shep
"20 seconds in and it's already a bop"

**
5. Titus
"This was such a fun little bop! 🔥😂 I was jammin bro!"

**
6. Destiny Lourenco
"Keep making music! I need bops to look forward to, you just made my day:)"

**
7. spicy lamb sauce
"This is one AWESOME BOP!!! The vibes throughout the whole song are so good and wholesome. 😊🌻

**
8. Earl Muñoz
"soulful bop"
-snip-
This discussion thread also include a few comments that used the word "bop" as a verb (probably meaning "to dance"). For example:
Lennon Drake, March 2019
"Thank you for making music that is so much fun to bop to!! ❤️"

In addition, this discussion thread included comments that also refer to this song as a "banger", "track", or "jam". Here are three examples:
a) RK
"STARTING MY YEAR WITH THIS BANGER"

**
b) Mark Plunkett #JVLOGS
"This right here is a bangger i love it so much good morning wake up wake"

and
c) Fosa
"traaaacccckkkkkk!!!!!!!!!"
-snip-
I believe the words "banger" and "track" [written in an elongated form" are synonyms for "bop".  

For another viewpoint on this, click https://junkee.com/banger-bops-slaps-definition/177204 "A Very Serious Investigation Into The Difference Between ‘Bops’, ‘Bangers’, And What ‘Slaps’ by JARED RICHARDS 9 OCTOBER 2018.

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Online Article Excerpt: "Jazz- A People's Music?" by Charlie Hore And Excerpts From The Wikipedia Article About Bebop Jazz

Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post presents a long excerpt from an online article entitled "Jazz- A People's Music" by Charlie Hore, with special focus on the Bebop school of Jazz.

The Addendum to this post presents excerpts from the Wikipedia article about Bebop Jazz.

The content of this post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to Charlie Hore for this writing this article about American Jazz and thanks to the authors of the featured Wikipedia article.

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EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE "JAZZ- A PEOPLE'S MUSIC"
From http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj61/hore.htm
Issue 61 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Winter 1993 Copyright © International Socialism

Jazz--a people's music?
by CHARLIE HORE
"Introduction
Jazz music has become one of the 20th century's most important and enduring art forms. Yet it survives today in a paradoxical state. On the one hand, the audience for jazz is now larger and more diverse, both socially and geographically, than ever before. Millions of people who don't see themselves as jazz fans regularly listen to live jazz, and most people who regularly buy records or CDs own some jazz. Pubs and bars which feature live music will often have jazz one night, rock the next, and folk the night after; and much the same audience will turn up to hear all three.

On the other hand, jazz as a constantly innovative and evolving artform is in decline, and has been for the last 20 years. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, there were no fundamental developments in the music on the scale of bebop or 1960s 'new jazz'. During that period not one new musician emerged who even remotely approached the stature of figures like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or John Coltrane.1 This is in no way intended to denigrate the many fine artists playing today; it is rather to state the simple fact that jazz has lost its position at the leading edge of musical development to other musical forms.

The point of this article is to attempt an explanation of this decline by looking at the ways in which jazz and other forms of black music grew out of the black American experience,2 and how these musical forms have changed as a result of changes in black lives and experiences.
Trotsky argued, in Literature and Revolution, that:

... art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why... New artistic needs or demands for new literary and artistic points of view are stimulated by economics, through the development of a new class... Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of stimuli which originate outside of art.3

I want to argue that this method can be extended to the formation of black American culture, in the very specific circumstances of slavery and post-emancipation institutionalised racism. In and of America, yet shut out from American society proper, blacks created a culture (in the widest sense of a way of life) which drew both from African cultures and the European ways of life forced on them. As Leroi Jones put it, in his seminal Blues People,

... the ugly fact that the Africans were forced into an alien world where none of the references or cultural shapes of any familiar human attitudes were available is the determinant of the kind of existence they had to eke out here: not only slavery itself but the particular circumstance in which it existed. The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the stepculture produced the American Negro... the development of African music to American Negro music (a new music) represents to me this whole process in microcosm.4

Just as black religions took the forms of Christianity and evolved into something neither European nor African, but rather a black American synthesis of the two, so black music developed as a synthesis of the many musical forms and traditions available. This gave black musical traditions from their earliest days both a dynamism and an ability to absorb new influences, which helps to explain why black American music has been among the most creative and the most influential musical forms of this century.

From this it follows that jazz cannot be understood in isolation from other forms of American black music. The lines drawn between jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues and other forms are largely ones imposed by white critics.5 The only real distinction recognised by musicians and their audiences for much of this century was that between sacred and secular music. Even here the number of artists who have moved between one and the other suggests that this was a highly permeable boundary.6

New Orleans and beyond
The rise of jazz, as a distinct branch of black music, reflected profound changes in black life at the turn of the century. It was an urban music, centred on New Orleans, New York and Kansas City, not the Mississippi Delta or the Alabama cottonfields. It was played by musicians who aimed to make a living from it (unlike the vast majority of blues or gospel singers). And it was a music made for the poor, derided as not respectable by the vast majority of the black middle classes. It arose, in other words, out of a new black working class with money to spend on entertainment who wanted (or were ready to listen to) something different to the music of the countryside they had left behind.

It's in that sense that the term 'a people's music' fitted jazz in its earliest years. It changed and developed as black workers' lives changed, because it was a music rooted in the black working class ghettos, drawing its inspirations from everyday black life.

[...]

Many influences went into the making of jazz, including many elements of European classical and folk music, the former brought by middle class blacks denied entry into the world of concert music. But it was rooted above all in the blues. Blues was a loose and flexible folk form that became codified into the 'traditional' 12 bar blues in the early years of this century. More than other black musical forms it kept crucial elements from African music, in particular the 'blue notes'--pitches which lie between the notes of the classical European scale. While other influences have come and gone, blues has been the seminal influence on jazz since its inception.

Contrary to various claims, no one 'invented' jazz. It emerged at around the same time in a number of different places. But from the early years of this century New Orleans was its crucial seed bed, as the largest and fastest growing city in the south with innumerable opportunities for working musicians--bars, brothels and marching bands among others.

The music quickly spread far and wide as the conditions that had produced jazz came into being in other, northern, cities. Hobsbawm estimated that on the eve of the Depression there were some 60,000 jazz bands and almost 200,000 professional musicians.9 Its spread followed the first great black migration from the south, which began around 1916 (as jobs opened up due to the war) and continued without interruption until the Depression.

The newborn recording industry greatly facilitated jazz's expansion. Record sales leapt from 27 million in 1914 to 100 million in 1921,10 and continued to rise throughout the 1920s. Although most of the music which fuelled the 'Jazz Age' was made by whites watering down the music to the point where a white audience would find it palatable, by the mid-1920s the record companies had discovered a substantial black audience. 'Race' labels were founded, advertised only in black papers and sold only in black areas, which sold massive numbers both of blues and jazz records.

And as the music spread, it developed and changed greatly. Listening to Louis Armstrong playing with King Oliver in 1923, and his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens in Chicago in 1927, is almost to listen to two different people. The later music is crisper, faster, more complex and inventive, and clearly represents a challenging of boundaries, a search for different things to do both with the instrument and with other musicians. The distinctive 'New Orleans' style died away quite quickly, although it underwent innumerable revivals, usually by whites reacting against newer developments in jazz.

One of the crucial defining characteristics of jazz is its search for the new. As a music of individual and collective self expression, which stresses each player working out a personal voice and style, it has always striven to deepen its language and move beyond previous boundaries. That development has always been collective, musicians learning with and from each other. A constant tension has thus run through the history of jazz between its function as dance music and its drive to innovate, which has led different schools to go both away from and back to mass audiences.

That drive for self expression and exploration makes jazz pre-eminently a music that voices both emotions and ideas. There's no space here to address the question of how music does this (and I'm far from qualified to attempt a definitive answer), but one point is important. Although early jazz grew up as entertainment, as a music to relax to and escape from the frustrations of everyday life, it necessarily reflected in its tone, language and emotions what it was that its audience wanted to escape from. It became both an expression of alienation and of attempts to overcome it.

Jazz history is conventionally written about as a series of schools--New Orleans, big band, swing, bebop and so on. As a rough template, this does capture the sense of progression in jazz, but it should be noted that this is a very imperfect way of describing jazz's diverse history. All the 'schools' were named by white critics, not the musicians themselves, and they never simply followed a linear progression--as one came into being, the previous one died. Rather, different schools survived side by side. And many of the most important musicians--Art Tatum, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, for example--cannot easily be fitted into that framework.

Kansas City to bebop
The Depression of the late 1920s dealt jazz a mortal blow, as unemployment and poverty hit black workers even harder than whites. Dance halls closed down, records stopped selling and promotors stopped booking tours. Black music didn't disappear (sales of Bessie Smith's records kept the giant Columbia Records solvent through the late 1920s)11 but there wasn't enough work for even a small fraction of the musicians who had been playing in jazz's heyday. There were exceptions, and the major one was Kansas City, which was to produce an enormous number of the most influential musicians of the 1930s and 1940s, among them Lester Young, Ben Webster, Count Basie and Charlie Parker.

The reasons for this were very largely economic. Kansas City had long been the dominant business and entertainment centre for a massive area of the south west. As such it had been a major jazz centre, second only to New Orleans, since the First World War. It also had the dubious distinction of being run by one of the most corrupt political machines ever, that of Boss Prendergast, who ran Kansas City as though Prohibition simply didn't exist. One of the side effects of Prohibition was that in many cities the mob effectively ran the town hall; in Kansas City the town hall was the mob. This produced a massive entertainment district full of opportunities for musicians, and one which, as the depression deepened, pulled in musicians from all the surrounding states.12

The Kansas City musicians developed a particular big band style (swing) which emphasised both strongly rhythmical ensemble playing, and a fast and fluent solo expertise. Their crucial technical innovation was that the drummers laid down the underlying beat on the hi-hat, rather than the bass drum as previously, thus making for a looser, suppler and more 'swinging' (that indefinable but essential quality) form of music. 'Cutting sessions' in which musicians tried to outplay and outlast one another, while others looked on and learnt, were regular events in the clubs late at night, and immensely important training sessions. In effect, they worked as a hothouse of musical development and innovation.13

Swing was popularised through eastern tours, in particular by the Count Basie band, from the mid-1930s onwards, and it became the popular music of the day with astonishing rapidity. By 1939 fully 85 percent of all records sold were of swing bands.14 The music's explosive popularity was due above all to the American economy's recovery from the Depression, creating once again a mass audience with the money to pay for popular entertainment, but it was fuelled by two developments which enormously increased the potential audience: radio and the jukebox.

Although radio networks had been expanding since the mid-1920s, it was only after the depression that radios became cheap enough for most workers to buy (in 1926 a mere 5 million homes had radios).15 The jukebox similarly caught on in the same period--by 1937 there were some 150,000 jukeboxes across the USA.16

Although swing had been entirely a black development, it quickly attracted a host of white imitators. Some--Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and Tommy Dorsey for example--were genuinely excited by what they saw as a new, vibrant music, and their playing demonstrated a real ability to learn from black innovations (though Goodman was the only white band leader who actually employed black musicians). The majority were simply jumping on a bandwagon. Good or bad, it was the white bands who made the real money out of the swing boom. It wasn't the first time that a black music had been popularised by whites (ragtime), or the first time that white imitators had taken over and sanitised jazz. But it was the first time that big money had been involved.

Revulsion against this white takeover was one of the key factors behind the rise of bebop, the most political form of jazz up to this point. The young musicians who pioneered bebop--Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian--had ended up in New York after going through various of the big bands. They wanted, as one of them put it, to 'play something that they can't steal.17

Bebop was marked by two crucial technical innovations. One was rhythmic--taking the underlying beat from the hi-hat to the cymbals, allowing them to play in a faster and more rhythmically diverse style than the previous generation. The other was Charlie Parker's discovery of a completely new set of harmonies to play on conventional chord changes. The combination of the two made bebop the most profound revolution in jazz since Armstrong in the 1920s, and arguably a more important one. It also marked a definitive break with all previous jazz schools--practically no one from any of the older schools ever learned to play bebop.

Bebop's ranks were filled by refugees from the big bands, as America's entry into the Second World War tore many of them apart. Many bands lost key players to the armed forces, while blackouts, petrol rationing and the draft similarly closed many of the biggest dance halls. The smaller bebop bands were cheaper to book and to record (particularly as they played original material, whose copyright could be bought cheaply in the studio). The big bands' decline helped to create a niche for bebop to flourish in.

The politics of bebop
Bebop both prefigured and was shaped by radical changes in black lives during the war. The exodus from the south began again, in even bigger numbers, as jobs opened up in the defence industries of the north, the midwest and California, and almost a million blacks were drafted into the armed forces. For the American ruling class, the Second World War was an all-out war, and they had to fully utilise spare black and female labour, both in defence industries and the armed forces. Leroi Jones noted, for instance, that 'while the number of Negroes [in the armed forces] more than doubled, the number of commissioned officers increased almost eight times.18

The contradiction between the rhetoric of a 'war for democracy' and blacks' centrality to the war effort, and the racism they found in the defence plants and the armed forces produced both a burning resentment against racism, and a confidence and determination that it could be fought. The war years saw the massive March on Washington movement, mass black and white union demonstrations against racism in industry, and innumerable confrontations between black soldiers and racists. This pressure from below forced Roosevelt in 1941 to formally ban segregation throughout the armed forces and industry. Though never fully implemented, it was a symbolic victory of immense importance.19

Most importantly of all, as the Chicago and New York race riots of 1943-44 dramatically showed, blacks were willing to fight back. Bebop was powered by, and spoke to, that new spirit of defiance. When Charlie Parker titled one of his most famous recordings Now's The Time, it was taken to mean just that: now's the time to end racism, '...so I have been assured by every black musician with whom I have ever discussed the question', Frank Kofsky asserted (though Parker himself never said as much).20

Both as a music and in the stances taken by the individual musicians, it reflected that new confidence and self assertiveness: more than any previous form, it stressed the individual soloist, his ideas and his feelings. And in going back to the blues as the roots of jazz, it stressed that this was a black music. As Ross Russell put it:

For urban black people of his generation, Charlie [Parker] was a genuine culture hero. The revolutionary nature of his music was explicit. He had rephrased Negro music without altering its essential truth and purity. Implicit in his lifestyle was defiance of the white establishment... every episode in the cumulative legend of the Bird, however ineffectual and childish, was seen as a blow struck against the forces of oppression. In the mid-1940s there was no Martin Luther King Jr., no Malcolm X... In a sense Charlie was a fore-runner of those militant figures of the political arena. He was completely non-political, in fact never in his lifetime so much as cast a ballot... Charlie Parker was the first angry black man in music.21

Leaving aside the hyperbole, and the equation of 'political' with voting, this is a useful summary of the strengths and weaknesses of bebop as revolt. For while it's true that bebop articulated both the anger and the confidence of many urban blacks, for the musicians their opposition was expressed in purely personal ways: not acting by the rules, putting on the squares. (When Charlie Parker met Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris nightclub in 1949, his opening line was, 'I'm very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much.' Sartre's reply is not recorded.)22

That stance limited bebop's audience. Bebop was very much a musicians' music, one which made no concessions to the audience: those who were hip would dig, the squares would not. And their definition of 'squares' extended beyond most of the white world to include those blacks (including most older jazz musicians) who found bebop too challenging or too difficult. Louis Armstrong, for instance, famously dismissed it as 'Chinese music'.

Material reasons also limited bebop's audience. The American Federation of Musicians imposed a recording ban in 1942, to get musicians paid proper royalties for radio and jukebox plays. The 'strike' (in reality imposed entirely from above) ended in partial victory in 1944, when the last big record labels signed new contracts. Yet despite the ban, the value of record sales leapt from $50 million in 1941 to $109 million in 1945,23 as the companies reissued their backlist to stay afloat. As a result, two key years in bebop's evolution went unheard by the vast majority of blacks.

Yet the recording ban wasn't the primary reason why bebop remained a minority black taste, probably having as large a white audience as black. Far more important were two new strands of black music that arose during the war, aimed specifically at the new black working class: Chicago rhythm and blues, and the 'jump' music of bandleaders such as Cab Calloway, Wyonie Harris and Louis Jordan. (The 'jump' bands had been around since the late 1930s, but achieved their greatest popularity during the 1940s.) Although they were among the most popular jazz based bands ever, they are rarely given the importance they deserve in jazz histories.24

Both forms stressed showmanship and entertainment, and were played explicitly as dance music, which bebop was not. And both were assiduously promoted by the independent black record labels and radio stations which mushroomed in the immediate post-war years. Both were also seminal to the later rise of rock'n'roll, but that's another story.

Neither rhythm and blues nor jump music were ever explicitly political, in the sense of expressing opposition in their lyrics, but their brash and confident styles gave expression to the new moods, attitudes and expectations which had grown among blacks during the war years, and did so in a far more accessible manner than bebop. There was no necessary opposition between the two: many people happily listened both to Charlie Parker and to Muddy Waters, but the point matters because we can't understand developments in jazz without understanding what else was happening in black music at the time. Jazz was a form of black musical expression, but not always the most important or the most popular one.

It has often been argued that jazz never had a mass black audience, blues and rhythm and blues being always far more popular. There is no way of proving or disproving this for the 1920s and 1930s, when live performances and later radio were the main ways in which music was heard, but in any case it misses the point that for much of this period there was no great distinction between the two. The argument also confuses 'mass' and 'majority'--the jazz audience was probably never a majority of urban blacks, but that doesn't mean that it didn't have a substantial audience. From the later 1940s onwards, however, there was a real divergence among musicians: practically none of the Chicago bluesmen had any jazz background, and very few jazz musicians ever played with them. Although that same divergence began to appear among audiences, it remained the case that jazz retained a large black audience, even if smaller than that for rhythm and blues, until the mid-1960s.”….
-snip-
This article continues with comments about "hard bop", "cool jazz", "new jazz", "soul and popular music" and more.
-snip-
Here are a few notes from this article:
"This article grew out of a talk given at Marxism 92. Particular thanks are due to Teresa O'Donnell and Martin Smith for their help in clarifying my ideas, to Mike Hobart for his thought provoking comments on my arguments, and to everyone who participated in the discussion at the meeting.

1. A similar argument is advanced in Nelson George's controversial The Death of Rhythm and Blues (London, 1989) although his book focuses almost entirely on soul and rythm and blues. His basic argument (crudely, that black artists sold their souls to adapt to the tastes of a more lucrative white audience) is questionable, but the book is one of the most interesting critical evaluations of black music in recent years.

2. I'm only going to discuss jazz in America, both for reasons of space, and also because I'd argue that almost all other 'national' jazz traditions are essentially derived from American jazz (the important exception being South Africa, which requires a separate article to do it justice).



4. L Jones, Blues People (New York, 1963) pp7-8 (emphases in original). This is the book to read on the social roots of black music, particularly important for his insistence on the diversity of African cultures, a valuable antidote to the essentialist arguments of more recent 'Africanist' writers. For more detailed descriptions of how this black American culture was created, see E Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York, 1976) and L Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York, 1977).

5. Think of the music of Cab Calloway, for instance. Is it blues, or jazz, or rhythm and blues? Putting the question like that shows the artificiality of the boundaries.

6. Although there's no space here to develop the argument, it is important to stress that gospel music has had a far greater influence on the development of black American music generally acknowledged in most of the histories."...

****
ADDENDUM- EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ABOUT BEBOP
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebop
"Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early to mid-1940s in the United States, which features songs characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody.

Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians expanded the creative possibilities of jazz beyond the popular, dance-oriented swing style with a new "musician's music" that was not as danceable and demanded close listening.[1] As bebop was not intended for dancing, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies. Bebop groups used rhythm sections in a way that expanded their role. Whereas the key ensemble of the swing era was the big band of up to fourteen pieces playing in an ensemble-based style, the classic bebop group was a small combo that consisted of saxophone (alto or tenor), trumpet, piano, double bass, and drums playing music in which the ensemble played a supportive role for soloists. Rather than play heavily arranged music, bebop musicians typically played the melody of a song (called the "head") with the accompaniment of the rhythm section, followed by a section in which each of the performers improvised a solo, then returned to the melody at the end of the song.

Some of the most influential bebop artists, who were typically composer-performers, are: tenor sax players Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, and James Moody; alto sax player Charlie Parker; trumpeters Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and Dizzy Gillespie; pianists Bud Powell, Mary Lou Williams, and Thelonious Monk; electric guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummers Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, and Art Blakey.

Etymology

"In spite of the explanations of the origins of these words, players actually did sing the words "bebop" and "rebop" to an early bop phrase as shown in the following example."[2] About this sound Play (help·info)
The term "bebop" is derived from nonsense syllables (vocables) used in scat singing; the first known example of "bebop" being used was in McKinney's Cotton Pickers' "Four or Five Times", recorded in 1928.[3] It appears again in a 1936 recording of "I'se a Muggin'" by Jack Teagarden.[3] A variation, "rebop", appears in several 1939 recordings.[3] The first, known print appearance also occurred in 1939, but the term was little-used subsequently until applied to the music now associated with it in the mid-1940s.[3]

Some researchers speculate that it was a term used by Charlie Christian because it sounded like something he hummed along with his playing.[4] Dizzy Gillespie stated that the audiences coined the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless tunes to his players and the press ultimately picked it up, using it as an official term: "People, when they'd wanna ask for those numbers and didn't know the name, would ask for bebop."[5] Another theory is that it derives from the cry of "Arriba! Arriba!" used by Latin American bandleaders of the period to encourage their bands.[6] At times, the terms "bebop" and "rebop" were used interchangeably. By 1945, the use of "bebop"/"rebop" as nonsense syllables was widespread in R&B music, for instance Lionel Hampton's "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop"..[citation needed]

History
Bebop grew out of the culmination of trends that had been occurring within swing music since the mid-1930s: less explicit timekeeping by the drummer, with the primary rhythmic pulse moving from the bass drum to the high hat cymbal; a changing role for the piano away from rhythmic density towards accents and fills; less ornate horn section arrangements, trending towards riffs and more support for the underlying rhythm; more emphasis on and freedom for soloists; and increasing harmonic sophistication in arrangements used by some bands. The path towards rhythmically streamlined, solo-oriented swing was blazed by the territory bands of the southwest with Kansas City as their musical capital; their music was based on blues and other simple chord changes, riff-based in its approach to melodic lines and solo accompaniment, and expressing an approach adding melody and harmony to swing rather than the other way around. Ability to play sustained, high energy, and creative solos was highly valued for this newer style and the basis of intense competition. Swing-era jam sessions and "cutting contests" in Kansas City became legendary. The Kansas City approach to swing was epitomized by the Count Basie Orchestra, which came to national prominence in 1937.

One young admirer of the Basie orchestra in Kansas City was a teenage alto saxophone player named Charlie Parker. He was especially enthralled by their tenor saxophone player Lester Young, who played long flowing melodic lines that wove in and out of the chordal structure of the tune but somehow always made musical sense. Young was equally daring with his rhythm and phrasing as with his approach to harmonic structures in his solos. He would frequently repeat simple two or three note figures, with shifting rhythmic accents expressed by volume, articulation, or tone. His phrasing was far removed from the two or four bar phrases that horn players had used until then. They would often be extended to an odd number of measures, overlapping the musical stanzas suggested by the harmonic structure. He would take a breath in the middle of a phrase, using the pause, or "free space," as a creative device. The overall effect was that his solos were something floating above the rest of the music, rather than something springing from it at intervals suggested by the ensemble sound. When the Basie orchestra burst onto the national scene with its 1937 recordings and nationally broadcast New York engagements, it gained a national following, with legions of saxophone players striving to imitate Young, drummers striving to imitate Jo Jones, piano players striving to imitate Basie, and trumpet players striving to imitate Buck Clayton. Parker played along with the new Basie recordings on a Victrola until he could play Young's solos note for note.[7]

In the late 1930s the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra were exposing the music world to harmonically sophisticated musical arrangements by Billy Strayhorn and Sy Oliver, respectively, which implied chords as much as they spelled them out. That understatement of harmonically sophisticated chords would soon be used by young musicians exploring the new musical language of bebop.[citation needed]

The brilliant technique and harmonic sophistication of pianist Art Tatum would inspire young musicians including Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. In his early days in New York, Parker held a job washing dishes at an establishment where Tatum had a regular gig.[8]"...

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Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Visitor comments are welcome.

Radio Disc Jockeys' Use Of Black Originated Jive Talk

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part II of a three part series on African American radio disc jockeys (DJs).

Part II provides a definition of the term "jive talk" and presents excerpts from various books and other online sources about the use of African American jive talk (Black jive talk) by pioneer Black radio DJs and White radio DJs and by other Black radio DJs.

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-early-history-of-african-american.html for Part I. Part I presents excerpts from various books and other online sources about the early history of African American radio (Black radio).

The Addendum to Part I features biographical information about three African American disc jockeys from the 1930 through the 1960s.

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/10/legendary-black-radio-dj-frankie.html for Part III of this series. Part III provides information about legendary Black DJ Frankie Crocker and includes some examples of his sayings. Part III also features two YouTube sound files of Frankie Crocker's shows.

The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

Please share any radio DJ jive talk (banter) that you remember with the decade, radio station, city, and the DJ's name if you recall it. Thanks!

****
DEFINITION OF "JIVE"
Definition #1 (noun)
From http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jive
- the jargon of hipsters
- a special jargon of difficult or slang terms
-snip-
In the 1930s Cab Calloway and other African American Jazz musicians used "jive" to refer to the slang that terms that they created or adapted.
Click http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/09/25/are-you-hep-to-the-jive-the-cab-calloway-hepster-dictionary/ "Are You Hep to the Jive? The Cab Calloway Hepster Dictionary" by Brett & Kate McKay September 25, 2008 for a list of "jive" terms and their meanings.
-snip-

In the context of radio disc jockeys, talking jive refers to a certain way of talking, a certain way of using words, and playing with words. In that context, a person who jive talks is a verbal wordsmith, i.e. a person who is skillful in the use of spoken words. A person who talks jive uses African American Vernacular English (Black slang and grammatical constructs), and constructs that talk in the form of a short rhyme. Many of these sentences contain internal rhyming words or near rhymes. For example, (from Excerpt #3 below) "Stick around, don't be no clown. Listen to what I'm puttin' down. This is Hooty-Tooty, the bandit's booty." Jive talk is often self-confident and self-promoting. Also, people who talk jive often talk fast, but their manner of delivery is also "smooth".

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Definition #2 (adjective)
Another definition of the word "jive" is (adjective) "glib, deceptive, or foolish talk". [www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jive].

Also, read this definition of "jive turkey" from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jive%20turkey
"Jive Turkey was a derogatory slang word in African American Vernacular English (Ebonics), used to refer to someone who was unreliable, made empty promises, or who was full of bluster. Several funk groups in the late 1960s and 1970s used the term, particularly the Ohio Players in songs such as "Jive Turkey" on the album Skin Tight from 1974. The insult became widely known in the 1980s, particularly via television comedies (e.g., The Jeffersons). The term has been used by later television characters (e.g., Homer Simpson) in order to demonstrate that they are out of touch with modern youth trends, culture, and language. The term was also used in the film Semi-Pro starring Will Ferrell and in Weird Science starring Kelly LeBrock 1985. "Jive turkey" also garnered attention in the movie Trading Places. Jive turkey, however, was already falling into disuse when it was spoken by "hip" television characters in the 1970s, such as George Jefferson. Jive turkey is also a quick step dance in Germany in the 1930s."
That Billy Madison sure is a jive turkey!
#unreliable #jive turkey #liar #jive #turkey"

by nlc82 November 21, 2011
-snip-

These adjectival meanings for the word "jive" aren't pertinent to this post about radio disc jockeys use of "jive talk."

****
EXCERPTS ABOUT RADIO DJS' JIVE TALK
These excerpts are presented in no particular order. I've assigned numbers for referencing purposes only.
Most of these excerpts are transcribed from Google books. The transcriptions are given without footnotes or other citations excerpt for the book title, author, and page number (if given). No hyperlink is given for those transcriptions. However, a link is given for more information about that featured book.

Additional quotes from a number of these sources given below can be found in Part I of this pancocojams series.

Excerpt #1
From Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties by Scott Saul
[Google book]

Click http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018532&content=reviews for more information about this book.

[Pancocojams editor: This beginning sentence refers to bebop music]

Page 39
"The jive of Calloway, Gibson, and Gailliard was exported in the late forties to an even larger mass audience by hep-talking DJs-some white and some black- who found their niche in urban locales across the country. Between 1946 and 1954, the number of small and independent radio stations mushroomed as the FCC broke up the domination of radio by newspaper publishers....

[DJs] engaged in imaginary dialogue with listeners out there, using the second person address; and they fielded listener phone calls, and played requests.

Jive was the language of this new invisible intimacy. Participation in a racial ventriloquism that descended from the minstrel show but had several new kinks, white listeners bonded with black DJs, black listeners bonded with white DJs, and -most commonly as R&B segued into rock ‘n’ roll- white listeners bonded with white DJs like Alan Freed, who specialized in “talking black”. In every part of the United States, DJs brought irreverent black rapping and rhyming games into their dialogue with listeners (much of which centered around promotions of their own show or of the products advertised on it. In Austin, Texas, Albert Lavada Durst-better known as Dr. Hepcat-became the city’s first Black DJ in 1947 and found fame for his Rosewood Ramble, a show where he peppered R&B, jazz, and blues music with a surreal patter perfected in an earlier career

Page 40
as a Negro League announcer.

In New Orleans, white owned radio stations refused to hire a black DJ, but one station did hire Vernon Winslow, a black journalist and professor, to teach its DJs the art of jive and to write and direct a show called Jam, Jive, and Gumbo which had a black-sounding DJ nicknamed Poppa Stoppa. Once in the door, Winslow broke the larger barrier at New Orleans’ WJMR: a few years later, in 1949, he landed his own show as “Doctor Daddy-O” and remained on the air until the 1980s.

After nearly one million black southerners migrated to the North during World War II in search of factory work, the airwaves of cities such as Chicago and New York were thick with the banter of jive. In Chicago, Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie, after serving as a bartender of the El Grotto Supper Club, became an announcer for the club’s radio in 1948. His bartending gig was then subsumed by a thirty-nine year carrier as one of Chicago’s most prominent black radio personalities, a DJ who addressed the programming abyss between the white pop favored on the radio and the R&B audience on the Southside.”…

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Excerpt #2:
From African Americans and US Popular Culture by Kevern Verney [Google Books]

Click https://www.amazon.com/African-Americans-Popular-Culture-Introductions/dp/0415275288 for more information about this book.
"In contrast to earlier black presenters, who had adopted the style of white presenters, the new DJs emphasized their African American identity. They discussed issues of interest to black listeners. In a style pioneered by presenter Al Benson in Chicago, Black DJs spoke in “jive talk”, streetwise language and pronunciation that comprised the daily speech of black communities. Commonly known as ‘rhyming and signifying’, this involved speaking in rhyming sentences and engaging in verbal banter using ghetto slang. A means of conveying information in a way that made it incomprehensible to most whites, the practice had its origins in the speech pattern of ante-bellum slaves.

....

Page 1954
In the 1950s white ‘crossover’ DJs began to take advantage of the popularity of black presenters. In what historian William Barlow has described as ‘racial ventriloquy’, whit broadcasters like ‘John R’ Richbourg in Nashville, Tennessee, Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed in Cleveland, Ohio and Robert ‘Wolfman’ Jack, broadcasting to the United States from Mexico, adopted African American speaking styles, Well versed in African American culture and playing R&B records, they consciously developed a black style persona"....

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Excerpt #3:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEGO_(AM)
"City: Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Broadcast area: Piedmont Triad
Branding: Classic Hits WTOB
Frequency: 980 kHz
First air date: October 28, 1950 (as WAAA)

WAAA was owned by white businessman Roger Page when it first began broadcasting in 1950. This was rare at this time in the Deep South that a white owner would own and operate a mainly black radio station.
On the afternoon of October 28, 1950 Larry L. Williams, an African-American, signed on WAAA. The first program broadcast was a football game between Morgan State University and A & T State University. The game was announced from the stadium by Togo West, Sr. (principal of Atkins High School) while Larry L. Williams conducted station operations.

On the morning of October 29, 1950 Williams signed on WAAA for the first full day of broadcasting[3] as the second radio station in the state (after WGIV in 1947) specifically targeting an African American audience.

WAAA was believed to be the third black radio station in the United States,[6] preceded by WDIA in Memphis and WERD in Atlanta.[7] WAAA was also the first black-owned station in North Carolina.[8]

Prior to becoming the General Manager of WAAA, Larry L. Williams gave play-by-play action of the Winston-Salem State University football and basketball games; becoming known as the "Voice of the Rams." Larry L. Williams went on to become General Manager of radio stations in Alabama, South Carolina, and Charlotte, NC. He returned to his home in Asheville, North Carolina in 2002 to become General Manager of WOXL-FM. Larry L. Williams, a pioneer in radio, retired in 2008 at the age of 90.

Oscar "Daddy-Oh" Alexander was the station's best known DJ. He was described as "a jive-talking hipster who radiated cool while spinning hits from Motown and Stax."[9]
Jazz pianist Keith Byrd, who once lived near him, described Alexander this way:

He had a voice that was like gravel going through molasses. You know what I'm saying? It was smooth and sweet. He was a good spirit, a great character and he played the hottest songs. He was almost like the black Wolfman Jack in this area.[9]

Alexander left the station in 1962 after five years. But he made quite an impression with lines such as these:
It's Hooty-Tooty your host, the one that loves you the most.

It's 24 O'Roolies past 4 Mac Vouchers.

Here in the atmospheric conditions of our universal solar system - it's clear as a bell and hot as - 98 degrees.

Stick around, don't be no clown. Listen to what I'm puttin' down. This is Hooty-Tooty, the bandit's booty.[10]"

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This concludes Part II of this three part series.

Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Examples of DJ Frankie Crocker's jive talk are included in Part III of this series.

For the cultural record, please share any radio DJ jive talk (banter) that you remember with the decade, radio station, city, and the DJ's name if you recall it. Thanks!

Visitor comments are welcome.

The Early History Of African American Radio Disc Jockeys

Edited by Azizi Powell

This is Part I of a three part series on African American radio disc jockeys (DJs).

Part I presents excerpts from various books and other online sources about the early history of African American radio (Black radio).

The Addendum to Part I features biographical information about three African American disc jockeys from the 1930 through the 1960s.

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/10/radio-disc-jockeys-use-of-black.html for Part II of this series. Part II presents excerpts from various books and other online sources about the use of African American jive talk (Black jive talk) by pioneer Black radio DJs and White radio DJs and by other Black radio DJs.

Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/10/legendary-black-radio-dj-frankie.html for Part III of this series. Part III provides information about legendary Black DJ Frankie Crocker and includes some examples of his sayings. Part III also features two YouTube sound files of Frankie Crocker's shows.

The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all the Black pioneer radio disc jockeys, thanks to other influential Black radio DJs in the United States, and thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

****
EXCERPTS ABOUT THE EARLY HISTORY OF BLACK RADIO
These excerpts are presented in no particular order. I've assigned numbers for referencing purposes only.
Most of these excerpts are transcribed from Google books. The transcriptions are given without footnotes or other citations excerpt for the book title, author, and page number (if given). No hyperlink is given for those transcriptions. However, a link is given for more information about that featured book.

Additional quotes from a number of these sources given below can be found in Part II of this pancocojams series.

Excerpt #1
From Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States By Michele Hilmes [Google books]

Click
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Connect-Cultural-History-Broadcasting/dp/0495050369 for information about this book and its author.

Page 174
"In the late 1940s, African Americans finally found a foothold on radio. A few programs and innovative entrepreneurs gave foretaste of things to come. As William Barlow describes in The Voice Over: The Making Of Black Radio (1999), urban radio pioneers like Jack L. Cooper and Al Benson built up their own radio empires in the 1930s and early 1940s by buying time on local radio stations like WGES, in Chicago, finding sponsors eager to sell to the black community, and playing music that they knew that community wanted to hear. In the early 1930s Cooper had originated a prototype of the disc jockey format on Chicago radio station WSBC. Because “race records”-recordings featuring black musicians playing black-oriented music-were not licensed by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), they provided a virtually free form of programming that, if the DJ owned a record store, could provide profits down the line. Cooper’s All Negro Hour became the first DJ program on the air, and he soon added other DJs playing different varieties of music as he built up his Chicago radio business.

Many other local broadcasters, black and white, would adopt some form of the record-based program. But it is Benson’s crucial addition of the distinctive, hip, jive-talking personality in 1945 that inspired the DJ format….Early black DJs prided themselves on their colorful verbal style- referred to as “rhymin’ and signifyin’”-which was also reflected in the unique names they used on air. WDIA’s staff included Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert, A. C. “Moohah” Williams, the Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, and Jean “The Queen” Steinberg. America’s only black-owned station, WERD- Atlanta featured “Joltin” John Howard and “Jocky Jack” Gibson, and “Daddy-O” Daily held forth on WAIT -Chicago.

Soon the familiar process of cultural appropriation began to take place, as white DJs adopted the black style and personas on air. This process was assisted by an ASCAP decision to raise its radio fees, prompting the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to start its own music licensing bureau, called Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI). To compete with the behemoth ASCAP, BMI began looking for new artists and styles to promote. In the right

Page 175
place at the right time was Alan “Moon Dog” Freed, who started out with a R&B program on Cleveland’s WJW in 1951. Adopting black street slang, playing black music, affecting a black accent, Freed was not the first racial ventriloquist to take to the airwaves (his ancestors can be found in Amos n Andy’s creators), but his “crossover” privilege as a white man would allow him to reach a national audience playing what he began calling rock ‘n’ roll music...

Another equally famous racial ventriloquist was Wolfman Jack on the border blaster XERF in Tijuana. Though he was actually Robert Smith from Brooklyn, New York, Wolfman Jack came to personify the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll in southern California (glorified forever in the movie American Graffiti). The Wolfman learned his technique from the black DJ John R. of WLAC-Nashville, who by that time ran a DJ school to teach white adherents how best to sound like black radio jocks. John R. was not the only one to adopt this tactic: Vernon Winslow of New Orleans trained a whole series of white men to take on his original “Poppa Stoppa” personality over WJMR. The station’s white owners would not allow the original Vernon on the air, but instead paid him to produce acceptable black-sounding white substitutes. Later, Winslow rose to fame himself as Doctor Daddy-O on rival WEZZ...

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Excerpt #2
From Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties by Scott Saul
[Google book]

Click http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018532&content=reviews for more information about this book.

Page 39
"In New Orleans, white owned radio stations refused to hire a black DJ, but one station did hire Vernon Winslow, a black journalist and professor, to teach its DJs the art of jive and to write and direct a show called Jam, Jive, and Gumbo which had a black-sounding DJ nicknamed Poppa Stoppa. Once in the door, Winslow broke the larger barrier at New Orleans’ WJMR: a few years later, in 1949, he landed his own show as “Doctor Daddy-O” and remained on the air until the 1980s.

After nearly one million black southerners migrated to the North during World War II in search of factory work, the airwaves of cities such as Chicago and New York were thick with the banter of jive. In Chicago, Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie, after serving as a bartender of the El Grotto Supper Club, became an announcer for the club’s radio in 1948. His bartending gig was then subsumed by a thirty-nine year carrier as one of Chicago’s most prominent black radio personalities, a DJ who addressed the programming abyss between the white pop favored on the radio and the R&B audience on the Southside.”...

****
Excerpt #3
From African Americans and US Popular Culture by Kevern Verney [Google Books]

Click https://www.amazon.com/African-Americans-Popular-Culture-Introductions/dp/0415275288 for more information about this book.

Page 1952
“The rise of Bebop and Rhythm and Blues reflected a growing sense of racial and cultural pride among young African Americans in the 1940s….

Radio underwent a radical transformation as a result of the rise of television. Once the nation’s most popular form of entertainment, from the late 1940s radio audience collapsed…

In order to survive these setbacks radio stations were forced to undertake a rethink of their programming strategy...

An important consequence of that strategy was the emergence of black-appeal radio. Largely ignored by the major radio networks during the golden age of radio in the 1930s, stations now began to seek out black listeners. The reasons for this were commercial rather than more enlightened thinking. The continued migration of African Americans to urban centers in the north and on the west coast meant that many cities in the United States had a large black population living within a small geographical area. This made them an ideal target audience for local radio stations with a limited broadcasting radius.

Moreover, black Americans were one of the groups most likely to be won over by radio. In the 1940s many African Americans were unable to afford the cost of purchasing a television set, but over 90% of urban blacks and 70% of blacks in rural areas, had access to radio. Television entertainment programmes, filled with images of wholesome white families and presenters, also offered little to attract black viewers...

In 1948, the year that national network television was launched, WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee, a city with a 40 per cent black population, became the first radio station to capitalize on the importance of African American listeners. Moving to a black-appeal format the

Page 1953
stations white owners, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, consciously targeted black audiences. By 1949 WDIA had risen from last to first place in radio ratings….The net profits of the station rose from under $2, 000 in 1948 to $100, 000 in 1957, when Pepper and Ferguson sold the station for $1 million dollars.
Other radio stations heeded the message….
In 1949 there were four radio stations in the United States wiih black-appeal formats. This rose to over 200 by 1954 and some 400 by 1956.

An obvious prerequisite of black-appeal radio was the hiring of more black presenters. Also important was the move to a disc jockey format. This was not only inexpensive, but allowed radio stations to win over black listeners by playing the new R&B records which were shunned by television and more conservative radio stations.

Black disc jockeys playing music by Rhythm and Blues artists became increasingly common across the United States during the 1950s. To give themselves a distinctive airtime identity they often adopted a flamboyant persona, with broadcasting names like “Daddie O’ Daylie” in Chicago, “Doctor Hep Cat” in Austin, Texas, and “Jocko Henderson” and “Lord Fauntleroy” in Philadelphia."...

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From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_personality#African_American_disc_jockeys African American disc jockeys
"African American radio DJs emerged in the mid 1930s and late 1940s, mostly in cities with large black populations such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit. Jack L. Cooper was on the air 91⁄2 hours each week on Chicago's WCAP and is credited with being one of the first black radio announcers to broadcast gramophone records, including gospel music and jazz, using his own phonograph.[30]

Other prominent DJs included Al Benson on WGES in Chicago, who was the first popular disc jockey to play urban blues and use "black street slang" in his broadcasts, and Jesse "Spider" Burke on KXLW in Saint Louis, James Early on WROX (AM) in Clarkesdale, as well as Ramon Bruce on WHAT (AM) in Philadelphia. Most major U.S. cities operated a full-time rhythm and blues radio station, and as African Americans traveled the country they would spread the word of their favorite radio personalities.[31]"...

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ADDENDUM- BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ABOUT THREE BLACK RADIO DISC JOCKEYS FROM THE 1930S-1950S
[Pancocojams' Editor's note:
I'm only showcasing the DJs who were featured in that article who were active from the 1930s through the 1960s.
From http://newsone.com/1093115/top-20-radio-jockeys-of-all-time/ Top 20 Black Radio Jockeys Of All Time
Written By smokey fontaine, 2010
2010
"Throughout American history, Black disc jockeys did more than just spin records. They were, for African-American listeners across the country, the important and influential voices and leaders of their communities.

Here are NewsOne’s top 20 Black radio jockeys of all time, picked for their pioneering spirit and influence.

[DJs who made their name before becoming radio personalities have been excluded, but honorable mentions must go to folks like Steve Harvey, Rickey Smiley, and Yolanda Adams].

"1) Jack L. Cooper
Widely considered to be the first African-American radio announcer, Jack L. Cooper’s “All Negro” radio show aired in the 1930s on Chicago’s WSBC. Cooper was succeeded in Black Chicago radio by very important air personalities like Al Benson — who brought the blues and jazz to Chicago on WGES — and his colleague Herb Kent, who made his mark after his move to WVON, where he was a strong voice for progress during the tumultuous Civil Rights movement.

2) Jack “The Rapper” Gibson
Gibson got his start on the very first Black owned radio station, Atlanta’s WERD, in 1949. Embodying the fast talking style for which he was named, Gibson also went on to create one of the first Black radio trades, “Jack The Rapper,” and the infamous Black music convention of the same name.

4) Jocko Henderson
A legendary disc jockey on the airwaves of Philadelphia and New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Douglas Wendell “Jocko” Henderson was a pioneer of the slick-talking, rapid-fire radio patter that influenced Black and White jockeys nationwide and laid a cultural foundation for “rap” music."

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This concludes Part I of this three part series.

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