1951 in Music

A broken amplifier and a ball of newspaper On the drive from Clarksdale to Memphis, a guitarist's amplifier falls out of the trunk. The speaker cone tears. At the studio, the engineer stuffs the torn cone with wadded newspaper and tells the band to play anyway. The result is a fuzzy, distorted guitar tone that has never appeared on a commercial record. The song tops the R&B chart. Every fuzz pedal, every overdriven amp, every wall of distortion in the decades since traces a line back to this moment.

The Moondog howls over the radio A disc jockey in Cleveland launches an R&B show on a clear-channel station reaching the entire Midwest. He howls over intros and pounds on a phone book for percussion. Within months he starts calling the music rock and roll. What he is really doing is simpler and more radical: letting white teenagers hear Black music without a cover version standing between the original and the audience.

Sixty minutes of scandal A bass vocalist delivers spoken-word verses over a tenor's soaring chorus on the year's most scandalous R&B single. The lyrics leave nothing to the imagination. Radio stations ban it. It crosses onto the pop chart anyway, one of the first R&B records to breach that barrier. The audience for this music is bigger than anyone in the industry has admitted.

Electric blues crystallizes in four recordings In Chicago, an amplified harmonica and a slide guitar lock together on a record the guitarist later calls his personal favorite. In Memphis, the most terrifying voice in American music makes its first appearance on tape: six foot three, 275 pounds, singing like something has come loose inside him. In Jackson, Mississippi, the most imitated slide guitar riff in blues history is cut at a radio repair shop with one microphone. And at the Memphis YMCA, a twenty-six-year-old launches a career that will span six decades. Four recordings, four approaches to amplified blues, one calendar year.

Mitch Miller's iron hand The head of A&R at Columbia Records chooses which artists record which songs with which arrangements, and his instincts are devastating. One crooner holds number one for ten weeks. Another walks into a Hollywood studio to record a ballad with a string arrangement so perfect that forty years later his daughter will duet with the original vocal using digital technology he could not have imagined.

The first rock and roll idol, without the rock and roll A pop singer releases something new in mainstream music: emotional to the point of collapse, raw and weeping where the crooners are smooth and controlled. It hits number one on both the pop and R&B charts. Teenagers scream at his concerts. He is, in hindsight, the first rock and roll idol without the rock and roll. The audience is ready for someone to lose control on stage.

Twelve overdubs under a blanket in Queens A guitarist and his wife record a pop hit in their apartment, layering twelve guitar parts and twelve vocal parts through overdubbing. She sings under a blanket to avoid waking the neighbors. It tops the chart for nine weeks. The future of studio recording is being built with a tape machine and a lot of patience.

Four songs in the country top ten at once One country singer matches Nashville's biggest star record for record. At one point he has four songs simultaneously in the country top ten, a feat no artist has matched before or since. His smooth, sliding vocal phrasing will shape country singing for the next half century.

Nashville crosses the pop line A pop singer covers a country songwriter's ballad and takes it to number one on the pop chart. It proves that Nashville songwriting can conquer the mainstream without diluting the source material. The country songwriter loves the cover version and plays it on jukeboxes wherever he finds one. He has less than two years to live.

The Red Scare silences a folk quartet A folk group continues their revival with another top-five hit, but the blacklist is closing in. FBI informants identify two members as Communist Party members. Their label drops them. Radio stations pull their records. The blacklist destroys careers with the same efficiency that a hit record builds them.

A nineteen-year-old gospel voice and a new bass guitar A nineteen-year-old replaces the lead vocalist of a gospel quartet and records his first sides. The voice that will later sing one of the most important protest songs in American history is already fully formed, just pointed at sacred music. Meanwhile, the man who built the first solid-body electric guitar introduces the first commercially successful electric bass. The upright bass has about a decade left.