Interviewer: One thing that struck me in your book is that you pointed out that black artists did sell records to whites before World War II.
Interviewer: How was the rock and roll explosion in the fifties different?
Wexler: Rock and roll seemed to have, ah, crystalized sometime in the fifties although the rudiments were present maybe for a decade or two before, as far back, let's say, as western swing, which the Periclean Age, the great year or years was 1935 and 1936.
Wexler: And, ah, as Waylon Jennings said, western swing ain't nothing but some country boys playing jazz.
Wexler: Well, there was a very strong black element there because of the diversity of western swing in that they emulated, they picked up so-called race records off the juke boxes.
Wexler: And they were doing songs like "Yes Sir", "Take It Easy Greasy You Got A Long Way To Slide", songs of Fats Waller, songs of a group like the Harlem Hamfats which an ad hoc recording group, they had no reality in performance.
Wexler: And so western swing I think is one of the real precursors of what we've come to know as rock and roll which eventually was an amalgam of certainly of black and white influences.
Interviewer: What particular musicians do you see as being the rock and roll forefathers.
Interviewer: Somebody like Louis Jordan comes to mind.
Wexler: Louis Jordan is preeminent because the whole thing was present, all, the germination was present in Louis Jordan in everything he did: he had the rhythm, he had the shuffle rhythms, he had the humor, he had, ah, the, ah, the back beat and plus he had little miniature vignettes you know, a record had to be under three minutes to fit on a 78 rpm record.
Wexler: And Louis Jordan would have songs like "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" which certainly has certain rural resident, resonance, a country and western kind of thing.
Wexler: "Saw Pork, West Virginia" now that's country of course "Caledonia" and things like that.
Wexler: And Louis Jordan was a dynamite in person performer and he had tremendous mixed audience, white as well as black, in theaters and so on.
Wexler: Other seminal black performers would be people, let's say like Rubber Legs Williams who used to sing with Count Basie, Wyononie Harris, Roy Brown.
Wexler: Wyononie in particular was a charismatic, magical presence because he, his, his MO was hubris, in other words, he was so infatuated with himself that he would appear at the Apollo Theater on a darkened state and the orchestra would hit a, you know, a couple of cords or a drum roll and Wyononie on a darkened stage would announce to the audience, his dear constituency, - fools, Wyononie is here.
Wexler: Now that kind of pre-rock arrogance I think was echoed many years later in, ah, fortunate white, ah, versions, how should I say - pseudo clones of these great black artists in what we came to see as rock and roll arrogance, maybe no names on that right now.
Wexler: You rolling? Okay, I, I mentioned Roy Brown who's, you know, best known record was probably "Good Rockin’ Tonight" which is a song which Wynonie Harris also covered.
Wexler: The notion that the rubric term - rock and roll - was presented to us by Alan Freed of course is totally wrong because it appears in many songs.
Wexler: For example there's a song by Red Allen called "Get Rhythm In Your Feet" and the word rock and roll appears there.
Wexler: There's a Ella Fitzgerald song - "Rock It For Me" where the line appears - "You want to satisfy your soul with the rock and the roll".
Wexler: And it goes back to the twenties with a one arm performer named Wingy Manone who made a record called "Tar Paper Stomp" in which the phrase, I believe 1928.
Wexler: So rocking and rolling which of course were lingua franca.
Wexler: These were expressions that came, you know, from the black world and black musicians having to do with sexual congress.
Wexler: And so the whole notion of good time happenings on a Saturday night including getting carried by the rhythm, the music, maybe a little bitty gin and then the culmination in the bed.
Wexler: After all rock and roll finally embraced those ingredients.
Wexler: There's not much more to it.
Interviewer: It seems difficult for a lot of kids today to conceive of how separate white and black music were.
Interviewer: Can you talk about pre rock and roll, the forties, the fifties, how the charts were divided and what the lines were there?
Wexler: Yeah, ah, the very notion that the trade charts, the music charts worked by categories, ah, it bothered some people but it's not true necessity because what determines a particular market or a particular demographic is not who plays the music, it's not who sells the music, it's who buys the music.
Wexler: Now so-called rhythm and blues or race music as it was called before it became rhythm and blues was bought by black people.
Wexler: It's an unfortunate truth of merchandising in a free enterprise society that you need to target your audiences.
Wexler: So if you're selling in the country and you are buying records which are made, say, originally by the Jeanette Recording Company in Richmond, Indiana for a sub label which was merchant by, merchandised by Sears Roebuck.
Wexler: Sears Roebuck had clients in the country that were black and they were white.
Wexler: Well Sears Roebuck knew how to target the so-called race records which they had specially made for them and also the so-called country records for their groups.
Wexler: The other categories of course included jazz and the what you might call sophisticated supper club music, urbane music.
Wexler: So the categories were necessary then and I believe they're necessary today.
Wexler: They're subject to accusations of political incorrectness but the, ah, the sikhims, the gurus who would prescribe these things, I'd like to see them, how they would me merchandising a catalog, let's say as diverse as Epic Records without these categories.