1955 in Music

A mascara box on the studio floor In May, Chuck Berry drives from St. Louis to Chicago to see Muddy Waters play. After the show, he asks for an autograph and mentions he plays guitar. Waters tells him to go see Leonard Chess over on 47th. Berry walks into Chess Records with blues material, but Chess only gets excited about a hillbilly song sung by a black man, a car-chase number based on Bob Wills' Ida Red. Pianist Johnnie Johnson says Leonard Chess spotted a Maybelline mascara box on the studio floor and said, Well, hell, let's name the damn thing Maybellene, spelling altered to dodge a lawsuit. The record hits number one R&B and number five pop. DJ Alan Freed mysteriously acquires 25% of the writing credit. Neither he nor Chess associate Russ Fratto wrote a note of it. Both credits are removed in 1986.

Fifteen minutes before the session runs out Little Richard has been recording all day at J&M Studio in New Orleans and nothing is working. During a lunch break, he starts pounding a piano and singing a filthy song he performs in clubs. Producer Bumps Blackwell calls in local songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie, who rewrites the explicit lyrics in fifteen minutes. Good booty becomes aw rootie. They cut it in three takes with two minutes left on the clock. The band is Fats Domino's rhythm section. The drummer is Earl Palmer, who plays the snare with a directness that cracks the song away from every R&B shuffle before it. Tutti Frutti sells 200,000 copies in two and a half weeks.

Princeton burns its trash cans Rock Around the Clock flopped as a B-side in 1954. Then director Richard Brooks borrows records from Glenn Ford's son, hears the Comets, and puts the song over the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle. It shoots to number one for eight weeks. Teenagers dance in theater aisles. In England, Teddy Boys rip seats out of the floor. On May 17, Princeton University students hold a competition to blast the record from dorm windows. By midnight they are in the quad, setting fires and chanting. The first rock and roll riot happens at an Ivy League school.

Sixteen Tons and the permanent ban Ed Sullivan sees Bo Diddley perform at the Apollo and books him for the show. Before rehearsal, Sullivan hears Bo playing Tennessee Ernie Ford's Sixteen Tons backstage and asks him to perform that song instead. Halfway through the live broadcast, Bo tells the musical director he's changed his mind and plays Bo Diddley, because people across the country are expecting to hear his hit. Sullivan is furious and bans him from the show permanently. The studio audience cheers. The record is already number one R&B.

Muddy answers Bo In 1954, Willie Dixon writes Hoochie Coochie Man for Muddy Waters. In March 1955, Bo Diddley adapts the riff into I'm a Man. In May, Waters fires back with Mannish Boy: same label, same studio, the mature man reclaiming the title from the younger one. Junior Wells plays harmonica because Little Walter has gone solo. The songwriting credits list all three: Waters, Mel London, and Bo Diddley. Three of the most recorded blues songs in history are an argument between two men about who is more of a man.

A shirtless boy eating ice in the showers Elvis Presley's fifth and final Sun single, Mystery Train backed with I Forgot to Remember to Forget, reaches number one on the national country chart. But it is the live shows that are scaring people. On May 13 in Jacksonville, he tells a screaming crowd he will see them backstage after the show. Girls rush the stage. They chase him into the showers and tear off his clothes. A photograph survives: a thin twenty-year-old, shirtless, eating ice from a soda box. In November, Colonel Tom Parker sells his contract to RCA for 35,000 dollars plus a 5,000 dollar bonus to Elvis. It is the most anyone has ever paid for a singer. Sam Phillips invests the money in Holiday Inn.

Go home and sin Johnny Cash moves to Memphis, sells appliances by day, and plays at night with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant. He walks into Sun Studio and sings gospel songs for Sam Phillips. Phillips tells him to go home and sin, then come back with a song he can sell. Cash returns with Hey Porter. His debut single, Cry! Cry! Cry!, enters the country chart at number fourteen. Phillips names the band the Tennessee Two. In July, Cash records Folsom Prison Blues, its melody borrowed from Gordon Jenkins' Crescent City Blues. The song will reach the country top five.

The cover wars go to Congress Seven of Pat Boone's first eight charted records are covers of R&B songs by Black artists. Georgia Gibbs copies LaVern Baker's Tweedlee Dee note for note and rides it to number two pop. The McGuire Sisters take the Moonglows' Sincerely to number one for ten weeks. Baker petitions Congress to make arrangements legally protected, the same way compositions are. Congressman Charles Diggs opens an investigation. Baker loses: arrangements are ruled derivative, belonging to the composition's copyright holder. But the Platters' Only You becomes the first rock and roll record to outsell its white cover in the top ten. The original artists are building their own audiences.

Written on a potato sack in a housing project Johnny Cash tells Carl Perkins about his Air Force buddy C.V. White from Virginia, who calls his black shoes blue suede shoes and insists nobody step on them. On December 17, Perkins writes the song in a housing project in Jackson, Tennessee, on a brown paper potato sack because he has no other paper. He records it two days later at Sun Studio. Sam Phillips suggests the lyric go, cat, go. It will be released on January 1, 1956, and become the first Sun Records single to sell a million copies.

A song written in a hotel washroom The Platters started as parking lot attendants in Los Angeles. Manager Buck Ram gets them signed to Mercury Records. Their first hit, Only You, climbs to number one R&B and number five pop, staying on the charts for thirty-nine weeks. The vocal gimmick where Tony Williams sings oh-own-ly happened by accident: an unexpected jerk of the car during rehearsal caused the inflection. Ram writes the follow-up, The Great Pretender, in about twenty minutes in the washroom of the Flamingo Hotel. It becomes their first number one pop hit.

Miles plays a twenty-minute filler set and gets a record deal Miles Davis has been mostly absent for years, lost to addiction. George Wein adds him to a jam session at the Newport Jazz Festival to give the stage crew time to change sets between Count Basie and Dave Brubeck. His name is not in the program. The band includes Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, and Connie Kay. Davis opens Round Midnight with a trumpet solo that silences the crowd. The sextet leaves to a standing ovation. Columbia Records signs him. He will form his first great quintet within months.