Bob Stanley’s first book, 2013’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, looked like a completely insane undertaking: the entire history of pop music – from the first British chart in 1952 to the rise of Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love – in one book. Astonishingly, it worked. It was wide-ranging and learned, opinionated and funny, and justly critically acclaimed. Clearly that success emboldened its author: the prequel, Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop, feels even more ambitious. It attempts to tell the story of pop from the turn of the 20th century, when the term was first used – a 1901 advert in the Stage for a sheet music lending library promised “all the latest Pop. Music” – to the rise of rock’n’roll. It feels vastly broader in scope, by necessity encompassing everything from music hall to Muddy Waters. Because Stanley continues the stories of pre-rock’n’roll stars long after the rise of rock’n’roll – one later chapter is titled Adventures in Beatleland – a book that begins in Victorian London ends, more or less, in the present day: a huge timespan to cover, even in 600 pages.
As with its predecessor, it shouldn’t work, but it does. Yeah Yeah Yeah seemed like the product of a lifetime spent devouring and considering pop, but Let’s Do It is clearly more of a voyage of discovery for its author. An inveterate record collector, Stanley’s writing crackles with the exhilaration of a man who’s encountered a whole new world of vinyl to obsess about. It adds a fresh excitement to some well-worn stories: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra. Never happier than when rescuing a figure from obscurity – whether it’s Jeri Southern, a contemporary of Peggy Lee whose career was undone by stage fright, or Sam Mayo, who billed himself as “The Immobile One” and seems to have been Edwardian England’s equivalent of Morrissey, lugubriously intoning songs called I Feel Very Bad I Do and Things Are Worse in Russia – Stanley can also muster enthusiasm even when he doesn’t particularly like what he hears. He hasn’t got much time for Al Jolson, a “bellowing ham” in blackface, but he can work out what people must have seen in him.
He rattles through anecdotes and potted biographies at a clip that recalls someone hastily ripping one recent purchase off the turntable in order to play you another. He has both a snappy turn of phrase – the real-life model for Betty Boop, Helen Kane, “sang as if her tongue tingled with rumour and gossip” – and a fantastic eye for an obscure, head-turning fact. Down at the Old Bull and Bush – “the very soul of cockney London”, as Stanley puts it – was originally written by two Americans, in New York, as an advert for Budweiser beer. At the height of the second world war, the BBC pulled Vera Lynn off the air for a year, deeming the Forces’ Sweetheart “flabby entertainment”. The Muppets’ Miss Piggy was originally known as Miss Piggy Lee, a porcine tribute to the singer of Fever and Is That All There Is?.
Stanley is admirably unsnobby in his approach. He stands up for the oft-reviled Glenn Miller Orchestra, who even at the height of their fame were derided as too commercial and diluted: in their riff-heavy, solo-free music he hears pop’s postwar future. He is brilliant on the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, authors of the first jazz 78 rpm record, but widely seen as white musicians who got lucky, securing their place in history by dint of the colour of their skin and the fact that trumpeter Freddie Keppard turned down the chance to record before them, believing others would steal his sound. Stanley convincingly argues that they were “the first recognisably modern pop group”, complete with an image, gimmicks, a talent for self-mythologising and a neat line in snappily provocative interview quotes: “Jazz is the assassination, the slaying, the murdering of syncopation,” offered leader Nick LaRocca, punk-ishly, “we are musical anarchists”.
Let’s Do It’s masterstroke in bringing the past to life lies in drawing parallels with the present, or at least more contemporary history. The music industry, it seems, held its audience in contempt long before cynically manufactured pop reared its head: the degree of nose-holding involved in the first recordings of country music – aimed, in the words of Variety magazine, at “poor white trash … with the intelligence of morons” – is quite something to behold. In 1910, a New York Times writer was complaining that music had become too mechanised and soulless, decrying the “factory output” of Tin Pan Alley: at every juncture in musical history since, there’s been someone like him, saying something like that. The moral panic caused by hot jazz in the 1920s is clearly the model for every subsequent moral panic caused by pop: ostensibly about licentious behaviour and intoxication, but tacitly driven by fears about race, class and gender.
Perhaps most strikingly of all, Let’s Do It makes clear that people have always been obsessed with the past. We tend to think of retro-revivalism as an aspect of pop in a postmodern age, but there was a revival of Edwardian Viennese operetta in the mid 1930s, driven by exactly the same forces that have driven every revival since: an older audience distrustful of where music was going coupled with a younger audience seduced by a romantic notion of a past they were too young to remember. The Barbershop quartet, meanwhile, turns out to be a latter-day construct, based on a deliberate misremembering of a supposedly prelapsarian era: clearly a liking for striped blazers wasn’t the only thing they had in common with the mod revivalists of the late 70s.
This is one of the moments in Let’s Do It when the distant past seems more familiar than foreign, although there are plenty of the latter, too. Its 656 pages are a perfect guidebook, filled with smart thinking and the kind of communicable enthusiasm that sends you rushing to the nearest streaming service, eager to hear what all the fuss was about.
• Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop by Bob Stanley is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
