THE ARTS | Reshaping ideas, expressing identity
29 July 2008
Doo-Wop
R&B vocal harmony groups blended black church and secular traditions
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
Another important thread in the tapestry of postwar rhythm & blues was vocal harmony groups. (Although this tradition is today sometimes called “doo-wop,” the earliest performers did not use this term.) During the postwar era, young singers trained in the black church began to record secular material. Many of these vocal groups were made up of secondary school kids from the black neighborhoods of cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., and interviews with the singers indicate that these groups served a number of functions: a means of musical expression, an alternative or adjunct to urban gangs, and a route to popularity. Few members of these groups initially saw singing as a way to make a living; this perception changed rapidly after the first vocal R&B groups achieved commercial success.
The vocal harmony group most responsible for moving away from the pop-oriented sound of the Mills Brothers and creating a new, harder-edged sound more closely linked to black gospel music, was the Dominoes, led by vocal coach Billy Ward, a strict disciplinarian and savvy entrepreneur. In 1950 Ward started rehearsing with a number of his most promising students and a 17-year-old tenor singer named Clyde McPhatter, whom he hired away from a gospel group. The Dominoes’ first big hit was “Sixty Minute Man.” But it was the Dominoes’ next big hit, “Have Mercy Baby,” that pushed vocal-group R&B firmly in the direction of a harder-edged, more explicitly emotional sound. “Have Mercy Baby” was the first record to combine the 12-bar blues form and the driving beat of dance-oriented rhythm & blues with the intensely emotional flavor of black gospel singing. The song’s commercial success was due to the passionate performance of Clyde McPhatter. McPhatter, the son of a Baptist preacher and a church organist, was like many other R&B musicians insofar as the black church played a major role in shaping his musical sensibility. While in formal terms “Have Mercy Baby” is a 12-bar blues, it is essentially a gospel performance dressed up in R&B clothing. With a few changes in the lyrics, McPhatter’s performance would have been perfectly at home in a black Baptist church anywhere in America.
To be sure, this mixing of church music with popular music was controversial in some quarters, and McPhatter and later gospel-based R&B singers faced occasional opposition from some church leaders. But in retrospect the postwar confluence of the sacred and secular aspects of black music, and its commercial exploitation by the music business, seem inevitable. Although it did not appear on the pop music charts, “Have Mercy Baby” attracted an audience among many white teenagers, who were drawn by its rocking beat and emotional directness. In addition, the Dominoes were featured on some of the earliest rock ’n’ roll tours, which typically attracted a racially mixed audience. Although McPhatter soon left the Dominoes to form a new group called the Drifters, the impact of his rendition of “Have Mercy Baby” was profound and lasting – the record is a direct predecessor of the soul music movement of the 1960s, and of the recordings of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
