Pop Culture

The First Pop Song?

Limelight, May 2004

IBefore we listen to the latest batch of pop songs, let's ask the pertinent question: Where did it all start?

            A Generation-X listener might be tempted to say "Rock Around the Clock". It wasn't even the first commercially successful rock 'n' roll song -- that was probably the forgotten "Sh-Boom", a hit the previous year for both the Chords and the Crew Cuts -- but its great success is known as the dawn of the rock 'n' roll era. For a teenager in the eighties, this was the beginning of pop music. Top 40 radio ignored anything that happened before Bill Haley. When a station claimed to play "the greatest songs of all time", we could safely assume that "all time" began in 1955.

            As Haley becomes more archaic, the "dawn" has shifted -- to the Beatles' "She Loves You", or even later. Which doesn't really answer the question: What was the first pop song? The history of music has plenty of room for that most egalitarian form of music. The three-minute pieces that grab our attention with their simplicity, the melody and lyrics that we can memorise until they echo in our heads. The best ones can live on for decades. Stardust, Hey Jude, even Singin' in the Rain, have challenged the disposable quality of pop music.

            So what was the first? It all depends on your definition of "pop music". For that reason, there are too many possible answers to that question. Here are 10 of them...

1. Summer is Icumen In (c.1239)

In medieval times, courts employed minstrels to sing sagas or legends, as much for information as for entertainment. The "jongleurs" would bring these songs on the road, spreading songs through the villages. However, musical notation (in the west, at least) was invented for church music around 1020, to make sure that every parish was chanting the same tune. In the early days, most notated music was songs of praise (the songs of Pierre Abelard, Saint Hildegard and even King Richard I).

            Possibly the first major piece of non-spiritual music to find its way to mass circulation was Summer is Icumen In, which predates the printing press by at least 150 years. After Gutenberg's invention came to England, however, it was published in all its glory. Here was a song in six parts (unheard-of at the time), sung in an endless "round". Rather than praising God, it simply extolled the joys of summer, like so many later pop songs. "Summer is icumen in," it began. "lhude sing cuccu." (Or "Summer has arrived, loud sing the cuckoo" -- the medieval equivalent of "Summertime and the living is easy.") How popular was the song in its time? Popular enough to be the first pop song?

2. Greensleeves (c.1580)

A few centuries before it was cheapened by endless Mr Whippy vans and reruns of the "Lassie" television series, this was possibly the first widely-heard song in the English language, a love ballad with a melody as perfect and lyrics as powerful as "Yesterday" or "As Time Goes By". Strangely, it probably began life as a vigorous dance tune. It is often attributed to Henry VIII, but although he was an accomplished musician, and even took credit for a few songs (including the jolly "Pastime with good companye"), it is unlikely that he can claim this one. The words were first published around 1580 (probably some years after they were written), and it was one of the first songs to be printed as sheet music, in 1652.

3. A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go (c.1580)

This very different song has lasted as long as Greensleeves, and (like so many early songs) has a simplicity which has regulated it to children's singalongs. Its lyrics are nonsense, obviously not written for worship or information, but for  pure entertainment value. (In fact, it is possibly a racial slur, referring to Elizabeth I's French suitor, the Duke of Anjou.) A "pop song" by almost any definition.

4. Home, Sweet Home (1823)

Written by John Howard Payne, the simple lyrics and hummable melody (based on Sicilian Air) made this opera song a hit with the masses. Some 80 years later, it was one of the first songs to win major success on the gramaphone, famously performed by at least three of the earliest recording stars: Dame Nellie Melba, Italian "Queen of Song" Adelina Patti, and "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind.

            When gramaphone records were invented, popular songs were slow to catch on. This is surprising, because they were ideally suited: early discs could hold only a few minutes of music. Nonetheless, as late as 1910, over three-quarters of records sold were classical. Still, recorded music allowed a greater audience for music than ever before, no longer limited to households with a pianist or a sight-reading vocalist.

            By 1904, Melba had special mauve label to distiguish her recordings from the black labels of the peasants. Not to be outdone, Patti had a pink label. When her recordings were released, shops would post signs on their windows saying "Patti is Singing Here Today". Though both were divas (opera was at the height of popularity), they also recorded Payne's simple ode to the home.

5. O, Susanna! (1848)

Americans would probably tell you that they invented pop music - and unfortunately, they have a fair claim. Pennsylvania-born Stephen Collins Foster's songs were inspired by (and are often mistaken for) Negro spirituals, with their smoother and more accessible melodies than the opera-inspired tunes of the time. Though he published his first song, "Open They Lattice, Love", at age 18, O, Susanna! was his first major success. Exactly how successful is difficult to say, because song piracy was an issue even in the mid-19th century. Over 20 editions of the sheet music, mostly illegal, were spread all over US within three years. Still, the publisher made $10,000. (As a mere writer, Foster himself was given $100 for his troubles.)

6. Old Folks at Home (1851)

How popular is "popular"? In 1852, Old Folks at Home had unprecedented sales of 130,000 (in legal copies), back when 10,000 was considered a good sale and 50,000 a major hit. Like "Home Sweet Home", Old Folks at Home was a sentimental ballad of homelessness. During the Civil War, it was sung by soldiers on both sides (in the same way that Lilli Marlene proved a universal hit with both sides during World War II). Foster still didn't become wealthy from his success. Before the war was over, he had died in New York at age 38, a probable suicide.

7. After the Ball (1892)

The success of After the Ball was truly astonishing. Before it was published, million-selling songs were unheard-of. After the Ball sold five million copies within a year -- as sheet music.

            The secret: a new concept called marketing. Charles K Harris, one of America's first songwriter-publishers, cannily promoted his song. In the US, baritone J. Aldrich Libbey performed it at beer halls and theatres, in return for a share in the royalties. Across the Atlantic, it was a music-hall favourite, thanks to the ever-popular drag king Vesta Tilley. The mournful ballad also established Tin Pan Alley (a group of music publishers clustered around New York's Broadway) as the Mecca of popular songs.

            Despite the detailed story told by the lyrics, the tune itself was fairly simply. Harris, like so many later pop songwriters (Irving Berlin, Lionel Blair, John Lennon and, in his early days, Paul McCartney), could not even read music. After the Ball is his only song that anyone remembers, but that was enough to make him wealthy.

8. My Gal is a High Born Lady (1896)

The touring minstrel shows of the 19th-century, in which white singers would perform popular songs in blackface, are now dismissed as racism. In a strange way, however, their existence complimented black music. Despite their low social status, African-Americans were considered good musicians, partly due to their "sense of rhythm". Foster's songs, inspired by Negro spirituals, were, appropriately, popularised by minstrel groups. Even After the Ball, inspired more by English ballads, was written for a minstrel show.

            With Barney Fagan's now-forgotten My Gal is a High Born Lady, black (as opposed to black-inspired) music finally filtered into the mainstream, introducing a new, 'boppier' style: ragtime. Scott Joplin, the greatest ragtime songwriter, introduced his Maple Leaf Rag to piano rolls in 1899.

            At the time, the importance of this was not known. Ragtime was the forerunner of jazz, rock and roll, and almost every other major style of popular music in the next century. To an extent, the ragtime composers invented pop music as we know it. A white Jewish composer, Irving Berlin, made his songwriting debut in 1911 by selling four songs in this style, all with "rag" or "ragtime" in the title (including his first hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band). In the same way that bandleaders like Nick LaRocca would take up jazz, and Elvis Presley would become the first rock and roll superstar, a white man was spreading this "black" music to the masses.

9. I'll Never Smile Again (1940)

"When you think of it," suggested David Bowie, "Adolf Hitler was the first pop star." It might sound like more absurdity from the creator of Ziggy Stardust, but Bowie might have had a point. Hitler inspired a combination of idolatry and mass hysteria that has not been equalled - with any statesman, at least. In music, however, he has had several rivals. Frank Sinatra hit the big time as a vocalist with bandleader Tommy Dorsey, his famous crooning inflections were first heard on Dorsey's I'll Never Smile Again, composed by Ruth Lowe. Sinatra was uncredited, but in college surveys, he still displaced his own hero, Bing Crosby, as the most outstanding male vocalist.

            In October 1944, as a headliner, it became clear what he had over Crosby. At the so-called 'Columbus Day Riot' in New York, his fans behaved somewhat illogically. Desperate to see him, 25,000 teenagers blocked Times Square. Shop windows were smashed, the ticket booth was destroyed, and many fans were too busy screaming or fainting to know whether his singing was any good. Sinatra himself would modestly blame this behaviour on the loneliness of the war years, but it would be repeated in peacetime by fans of the Beatles, the Bay City Rollers and Guns N Roses. Arguably, such madness is a crucial element of pop music, separating its followers from the more reserved groupies of classical or jazz music. Perhaps (as Irving Berlin suggested) it is the audience, rather than the melody, which makes the pop song.

            I'll Never Smile Again has another claim: it was the first number one song in Billboard magazine's "Music Popularity Chart", the model for the countless pop sales charts that have ruled the music industry ever since.

10. To Know Him is to Love Him (1958)

An unusual candidate for the "first" pop song, but as I said, it depends on your definition. Though the word "pop" as an abbreviation for popular was first used as early as 1926 (and adopted by popular orchestras like the Boston Pops), the term "pop song" did not become widely-used until after the birth of "pop art" in 1957, when it was vaguely used to describe any youth-oriented music that WASN'T rock and roll.

            "Rock and roll" described everything from the frenetic energy of Little Richard to the upbeat hymns of Pat Boone. To Know Him is to Love Him, however, was so "anti-rock" that it couldn't fit in the same box. It was haunting and soothing, and its writer-producer, 17-year-old Phil Spector, introduced his 'wall of sound' style - packing musicians into a small studio, making a sound that could not be reproduced in live performance - which opposed the raw, danceable energy of rock music. Also, while rock music rebelled against the older generations, this was a love song for Spector's father (disguised, by Annette Bard's vocals, as a romantic teenage song).

            Spector would become one of pop music's most successful producers, often entering into the rock and roll genre with songs like Da Doo Ron Ron and Rock and Rock High School. Recently, he was arrested for murder - a blow to his substantial ego, no doubt. But if desperate to impress, he can still claim to have invented (or at least, re-invented) the modern pop song.