“As we say in church, I look back on a job well done.” — LaVern Baker

It’s the birthday of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer LaVern Baker.

Her legacy is vast, so vast that it’s under threat of being forgotten. With the birth of a new style of music, a lot of huge forces are at play, forces simultaneously cultural/political/generational. Changing things up is never the job of one person, even though the history books iron things out that way, singling out individuals solely. There are of course individual humans who make a massive difference, who (almost) single-handedly steer everything to go in another direction. (But even there, other forces are at play. The unprecedented unforeseen success of Eminem, for example, and the radical merging of hip-hop and pop took a lot of people by surprise. He wasn’t the first to do it even, it was just the SCALE of his success that made it so notable. The ground was already prepared for something like it to happen. This is not the same as saying it was inevitable. It’s just that on occasion societal forces – economic, social, class – converge in a way where they create a giant void in the center of the culture. I wrote about the void in the culture in my massive Eminem post. Very few entertainers get big enough to fill a void of that size. The same void was present when Elvis came along. To be totally clear: there wasn’t a void in MUSIC in either of those cases. There was a ton going on in music in the 90s, and a ton going on in the late 40s and 50s, the OPPOSITE of a void. In the 50s the void was cultural, and went across generations / class distinctions / racial differences (again, like I said before: you rarely get a void THAT big.) 1950s America was experiencing post-war prosperity sparked with terror of the atom bomb, creating a flourishing yet conformist middle-class, where more and more people had more and more leisure time, which in turn eroded class distinctions helped along by things like standardized technology in electronics/washing machines/indoor plumbing, the spread of radio/television and also the GI Bill, which ushered people (white people, that is) who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college into higher education, the burgeoning civil rights movement spilling out into mainstream consciousness, and also the unique generational phenomenon of massive amounts of teenagers running around with not a lot to do besides looking for fun. There were more teenagers than adults in America. So. I am not a sociologist. But when I’m talking about a void, that’s kind of what I mean.

The 1940s and 50s featured many people who were crucial in developing the new raucous sexually adventurous must-be-danced-to sound: the desire “out there” for something DIFFERENT was reflected by the smart performers who felt the need. So there were people like Fats Domino, Sam Phillips, Wynonie Harris, Ahmet Ertegun, Little Richard, Carl Perkins … I mean, these people were all over the place, geographically and culturally, but they all felt the same restless desire to CHANGE. To open the damn windows and let in something NEW. LaVern Baker felt it too.

LaVern Baker, the granddaughter of a runaway slave, was born in 1929. She grew up in Chicago and her family including a couple of well-known female blues singers. She started performing when she was a teenager, which I think is important. It takes teenagers to feel what teenagers want. Baker was one of those rare people: she felt the void, she had awareness of what was happening “out there” AS it was happening. She entered the blues trend (which wasn’t a trend, at all) byu birth, and then pushed it forward into the Future. Art that won’t change does exist but it remains niche, with a small audience. Rock ‘n roll was not going to be that. Little Richard called himself the “architect of rock ‘n roll” (and who’s gonna argue? Who wants to go toe to toe with Little Richard? I don’t.) Still: there were many architects. Baker was one of them.

Rhythm and blues was its own thing. Although it appealed to kids, it was FOR adults. But there were so many more KIDS in the early 1950s. They wanted to dance, make out, throw each other around. Rhythm and blues wouldn’t cut it. There were other strands of the same genre: jump blues, blues shouters, etc, but they rested mostly in night clubs, deemed too suggestive for radio play (and for kids’ access to it). It didn’t have a chance to spread nationally or to move out of the sub-culture within the culture. In the white world, there was boogie-woogie and big band music, where teenagers threw each other around. (Cross-cultural needs, in other words. This is, again, what a void requires.) These powerful “trends” – jump blues, boogie-woogie, big band dance music, rhythm & blues – were already merging, HAD in fact already merged, but it was about to go mainstream.

Baker was a blues singer from a young age: when she was 17 she was singing in bars and clubs. At first she was a novelty act, called “Little Miss Sharecropper”, where she dressed in raggedy blue jeans and a straw hat. There was pressure on her by club owners to adopt this persona. Baker was an urban Chicago girl. Her life had nothing to do with sharecropping. These were racist stereotypes, and they made Black performers acceptable to the white nightclub audience. (It was also a dead end, artistically.)

Nevertheless, Baker got gigs, got experience. In the 1940s, her family moved to Detroit, which put her in a burgeoning music scene where she didn’t need to pretend to be a sharecropping girl to make people listen. She started recording and touring around the Midwest. 1953 in general was a very important year (I appeared on the Very Good Year podcast to talk about the movies in 1953!) 1953 was when the cultural VOID got too big to ignore. People started pouring into the void, filling it up. (And in July, 1953, a 19-year-old truck driver in Memphis slinked into Sun Records to “record a song for his mother”.) Baker signed with Atlantic. The head honcho at Atlantic was the legendary Ahmet Ertegun, who felt the void “out there”. He was her biggest fan.

She had a minor hit with “Soul on Fire” and then struck gold with her next single, “Tweedle Dee”.

She was singing with the Atlantic house band, a world-class operation: listen to the arrangement, it’s so carefully done to not overwhelm her performance. She’s the star of the track. Her voice is so powerful and flexible: strong as hell but with variety in its shadings. You can hear her playfulness, her humor. She’s got a rasp too, but she can control it. She brings in the rasp as an emotional thing, it’s a vocal choice. The whole thing is thrilling. By no metric on earth is “Tweedle Dee” a great song. It’s barely a good song. But Baker obliterates those critical considerations since she is having so much fun and crushing it so hard!

“Tweedle Dee” reached #4 on the r&b charts (the “race charts”, as they were called), and this launched her on a national level. The song was something like #13 on the POP charts, too. “Tweedle Dee” was that all-important thing: a crossover hit. Crossover hits were almost unheard of in October 1954. White charts and “race” charts were two separate things, by design, but Baker crossed over. The kids – black and white – flipped over it. Elvis was just two months into his career in October 1954. He would be the one who obliterated the crossover “line”, but he was white. He dragged the white world along with him (although “dragged” isn’t the right word, because they all went willingly). But Baker got there first (in fact, Elvis sang “Tweedle Dee” on one of his earliest appearances on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the fall of 1954. It’s a weak showing, for him, but it speaks to how quickly the song infiltrated the national consciousness. Everyone knew it.)

I am so happy Baker performed the number on the Ed Sullivan Show so we can see her in action at the moment she “hit”.

“Tweedle Dee” was a game-changer song. You can hear in it the boogie-woogie big-band influence, but you can also hear in it – and her voice – the deep well of blues influence. Baker wasn’t a teenager by this point, but she brought to her performance a lively sense of humor, a kind of insouciant “I want what I want” vibe, and she is not ashamed or coy. Listen to the lyrics. This was a woman singing about her needs. She’s blatant, she’s greedy (in the best sense): “Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme all the love you got!” This was something the teenagers loved, found revelatory, a break with their parents’ conservative values.

It’s different when a woman sings “Gimme gimme gimme”. It just is. The song is inherently feminist, whether the people at the time would label it “feminist” or not. It brings women in to the story. Boys aren’t the only ones who want fun sexy times. Girls want it too.

Baker had another hit with “Jim Dandy”, another sexually expressive song from a female point of view.

The lyrics are funny. There’s no euphemism. Jim Dandy’s got it going ON and Baker is IN.TO. IT.

She toured Europe, she toured Australia with Bill Haley and Big Joe Turner. She was instrumental in spreading rock ‘n roll to the world. This can’t be measured. She appeared in rock ‘n roll movies (a new exploitation style of cinema), and this made her recognizable to the world.

Now comes the twist in the story and her name is Georgia Gibbs, of “If I Knew Your Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” …. fame? Gibbs loved “Tweedle Dee”, as everyone did, but she put out a cover identical to Baker’s (she even hired the same back-up band and used the same arrangement, literally note for note.). The success of Gibbs’ version wiped out the original, in terms of sales and visibility, even with Baker’s Ed Sullivan Show performance. Baker was pissed. She didn’t mind people covering her songs as long as they put their own spin on it. The era of the singer-songwriter hadn’t happened yet. This was an era when everyone sang everyone else’s songs. There are like 10 versions of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” before Elvis came along. The IMPACT might be different, and there’s unfairness in that, yes, but it’s just a general unfairness. COPYING is different from COVERING. And Georgia Gibbs was a COPIER.

Unlike everyone else who was irritated at being copied (and watching the copiers get more success), Baker was loud about it. Ahmet Ertegun tells just one story:

“We were at the airport, on our way to a record convention. LaVern stopped at one of those machines you get flight insurance from. She was a comedienne, you know, and she had that look in her eyes. She said, ‘In case something happens, do I make my beneficiary Georgia Gibbs?'”

Baker didn’t stop there. She wrote an open letter to Georgia Gibbs:

Dear Georgia, inasmuch as I’ll be flying over quite a stretch of blue water on my forthcoming Australian tour, l am naturally concerned about making the round trip safely and soundly. My thoughts naturally turn to you at this time, and I am enclosing an insurance policy on my life in the amount of $125,000. This should be at least partial compensation for you if I should be killed or injured, and thereby deprive you of the opportunity to copy my songs and arrangements in the future.

She went to bat – taking great risks, and paying the price – for other artists. She was queen of the Open Letter. She wrote another famous open letter to Charles Diggs Jr., the first Black man elected to Congress from Baker’s home state, Michigan, and a champion of civil rights. Baker asked him to strengthen or at least fortify U.S. copyright law to make such copying practices open to litigation.

In her open letter to Diggs, she wrote:

After an investigation of the facts, you might see some wisdom in introducing a law to make it illegal to duplicate another’s work. It’s not that I mind someone singing a song that I wrote or have written for me by someone, but I bitterly resent their arrogance in thefting my music note-for-note.

This made headlines. It brought the issue – with all its racist implications – into the mainstream. No laws were passed against “copying” but it became such an implicit no-no that Georgia Gibbs backed off trying to enter the r&b trend and stayed in her “baked a cake” lane (and, consequently, descended into obscurity). Baker’s loudness about this issue made “copying” so unpopular that radio stations started refusing to play white note-for-note cover versions. Someone as famous and influential as Alan Freed stopped playing copycat versions on his broadcast.

Another important nuance: the white record producers/radio stations were behind the times. They assumed white kids would not buy records made by Black people. Their ideas were outdated. White kids were buying Little Richard and Fats Domino and LaVern Baker records. They heard this music on the radio. They didn’t need to actively seek it out anymore. It was right there on the air. There was no need for duplication by the Georgia Gibbs’ of the world. Baker helped bring awareness of this out into the open.

This is such a huge and important legacy.

I love her 1961 hit “Saved”, which Elvis ended up doing 8 years later on his 1968 comeback special. It’s a gospel rager.

What I love about “Saved” is how openly it admits sin. Smoking, drinking, doing the ‘hoochy-cooch” … there’s humanity in this, having faith is not about being perfect. (Also, it makes sinning sound way too fun to give up. Kind of like how Satan is the most appealing character in Paradise Lost.)

You couldn’t get more mainstream in the late 50s than collaborating with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish boys who were also architects of rock ‘n roll. Baker sang their “Whippersnapper”:

She had hits with all kinds of music, including ballads. In 1965, she did a FUNKY duet with the great Jackie Wilson called “Think Twice”.

They recorded an X-rated version too! Not for public consumption but we have it and it is raucous fun.

Listen to her DOMINATE.

Baker didn’t really have hits after that but she continued working, often mentoring younger singers coming up, promoting them, helping them. She toured Vietnam with the USO and landed in the Philippines where she worked at a military base night club, not just performing, but booking the acts, basically running the place. She gave opportunities to young artists. She picked out talent and nurtured them.

“LaVern Baker looked out for us.” — Renée Minus White of the Chantels

She stayed in the Philippines. The work put her in contact with artists of all generations and she relished the opportunity to help younger people. She fought for the rights of artists, and lived long enough to see the results. She returned to the United States 22 years later. She appeared on Broadway as Bessie Smith. She died in 1997.

Aretha Franklin was the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LaVern Baker was the second.

References:
500 songs podcast
The History of Rock ‘n Roll Song by Song
Hall of Fame article

 
 
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