“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 (almost) single-handedly steer everything to go in another direction. (But even there, other forces are at play. Nothing operates in a vacuum. The insane unprecedented unforeseen success of Eminem, for example, his radical merging of hip-hop and pop – he wasn’t the first to do it though! it was just the SCALE of his success that made it so notable – his mainstream success was weird, especially because of his very VERY un-mainstream attitude/persona – he was like the Sex Pistols – NOT for prime time viewing – how he then became a global phenomenon, introducing other cultures to hip hop – (I have a friend from India who told me, “Eminem is literally what introduced me to hip hop. It’s the same for most of my friends too. Eminem was the way in.” – all of this had to happen, numbers-wise, in order for hip-hop to basically replace rock ‘n roll as the primary music genre – to BECOME pop culture – HE did that. He was the person who did that. BUT – the ground was already set for something like that to happen. This is not to say it was inevitable. It still might not have happened. It had to be him who did it, for various reasons. And there are still many many people who wish it HADN’T happened. So be it. It did. I love Eminem but he was not inevitable. I think he came along at a brief crossroads moment where there was a VOID in the culture. I wrote about the void in my massive Eminem post. Very few people are big enough, talented enough, to fill a void like that – or sense a void, even. The same void was there when Elvis came along. There wasn’t a void in MUSIC: there was a ton going on in music, fascinating things, the OPPOSITE of a void. The void was in the larger culture, which – in America, at least – was experiencing a flattening-out of post-war prosperity sparked with terror of the atom bomb, more and more people with more and more leisure time, the erosion of class distinctions, informed by things like electronics/washing machines/indoor plumbing/radio/television – giving people more free time, developments like the GI Bill, which ushered people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college into higher education, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and also the generational phenomenon of a massive new demographic of teenagers running around wanting to have fun. There were more teenagers than adults in America. Crazy. All of THAT created a VOID that NEEDED to be filled.)

There were many many people who were crucial in developing the new sound populating the air waves, the raucous sexually adventurous must-be-danced-to sound: the desire “out there” for something DIFFERENT being 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 was born in 1929. Her grandmother was a runaway slave. She grew up in Chicago, and there were a couple of successful female blues singers in her family, from whom she took great inspiration. She started performing when she was a teenager, as sooo many people who changed the world did. It takes teenagers to really feel what teenagers want. Baker was one of those rare people who felt the void, and had awareness of what was happening “out there” AS it was happening. She entered a trend by birth, the blues “trend”, but then expanded it, pushing it forward into the Now, into the Future. Art isn’t meant to be set in stone. 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. I would even venture to say that, although it appealed to kids, it was FOR adults. But there were so many more KIDS “out there” in the early 1950s: something had to be done to satisfy THEM. They wanted to dance, and make out, and throw each other around. Old-school blues wouldn’t allow them to do that. But there were other strands, jump blues, blues shouters, etc. These pretty much rested solely in night clubs, some of it deemed too suggestive for radio play. It didn’t have a chance to spread nationally or to move out of the sub-culture within the culture. Out in the white world, there was boogie-woogie and big band music, where white teenagers were throwing each other around, working up a sweat. This was not music for a “Tennessee Waltz” type courtship. These powerful “trends” – jump blues, boogie-woogie, big band dance music – were already merging, HAD already merged, but it was about to go mainstream.

Baker was a blues singer when she was very young, and when she was 17 she was able to sing 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 and sang the blues. There was pressure on her to adopt this persona by club owners, basically due to the limited success of another performer, Mildred Jorman, who adopted the name “Little Miss Cornshucks”. 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 was more successful as “Little Miss Sharecropper” than Mildred ever was as “Little Miss Cornshucks”. Her family moved to Detroit in the 1940s, which put her in a burgeoning music scene where she didn’t need to pretend to be a simple sharecropping girl to make people sit up and listen. She started recording stuff, which did okay (not nationally, but locally) and she toured around the Midwest. 1953 in general seems to be a very very important year (I appeared on the Very Good Year podcast to talk about the movies in 1953!) 1953 was when the VOID in the culture 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, with her biggest fan Ahmet Ertegun, who also felt the void “out there”.

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

She’s singing with the Atlantic house band, a world-class operation: listen to the arrangement, and how 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 and shadings. You can hear her playfulness, her humor. She’s got that rasp too, but she can control it. She brings in the rasp as an emotional thing, it’s a vocal choice. And it’s 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” launched her nationally. It was #4 on the r&b charts (“race” charts) but it was something like #13 on the POP charts. It was that all-important thing, a crossover hit, which was still 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 to obliterate 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 pretty 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 one of those game-changer songs. 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!” Go, LaVern! 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. It’s inherently feminist, whether the people at the time would label it “feminist” or not. It brings women in to the story. It’s not just BOYS who want fun sexy times. Girls want it too. The whole world exploded with possibilities.

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

The lyrics are funny. There’s no euphemism really. 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 obliterated 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. 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 got 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?'” Meaning: if I die, Gibbs can’t copy me anymore, she’ll need the money. lol 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 a star: everything she did generated publicity. 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 culture. 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 radio stations started refusing to play white note-for-note cover versions, and someone as famous and influential as Alan Freed stopped playing them on his broadcast.

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

This is 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 it, having faith is not about being perfect. Also, though, it makes sinning sound way too fun to give up. Kind of like how, despite all of John Milton’s efforts, Satan is the most appealing character in Paradise Lost.

You couldn’t get more mainstream at the time, the late 50s, than collaborating with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish boys who were also rock ‘n roll architects. 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.

DAMN.

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 then 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. She liked the work. It put her in contact with artists of all generations and she seemed to relish the opportunity to help younger people. She was strong. She fought for the rights of artists, and was able 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

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.