Steve Sullivan - Encyclopedia of great popular song recordings

Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings

Steve Sullivan

Volumes 3 and 4

Contents

A critics job, when you come right down to it, is based on an ability to summarize complex works. Steve Sullivan is one of the most amazing summarizers Ive met in half a century of doing such work. As realized in the four volumes (so far?) of the Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, his interests span the whole of AngloNorth American pop of the previous century and a quarter.

But it is not the immensity of Sullivans work, its sheer volume, that most impresses me. What Sullivan has going for him is a rarer quality. He understands how such songs and records connect. If you are at all grabbed by the history of this musicthese several dozen styles with their many hundreds of similarities and the even greater amount of their divergencesThe Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings is a Smithsonian of Soul.

There are important differences between the original two volumes and these new volumesSullivan let his mind wander through the majestic mountains of material he had in his minds ear in volumes 1 and 2 somewhat more radically than he does in volumes 3 and 4, which is a way of saying that he has far better command this time out. But the whole of these books create one of the great and most useful catalogs of what happened during the unruly years when the music business took the shape it maintained until digitization blew some of its predicates and assumptions into the oblique fragments were now hearing. Steve Sullivan may very well have a more comprehensive look at even that spectacle of cultural dismembering and reassemblage. I wouldnt bet against him. Here, for instance, is one of the first playlists that Steve sent me:

Rollin Stone (February 1950)Muddy Waters

Mambo No. 5 (March 5, 1950)Perez Prado and His Orchestra

Surely God Is Able (June 1950)Clara Ward and the Ward Singers

By and By (1950)The Soul Stirrers

Blue Light Boogie (August 5, 1950)Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five

Uncle Pen (October 15, 1950)Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys

Sullivan describes each of these records, all of them magnificent, not only as genre or period pieces but also where they came from and where their influence went. And he chose extraordinarily well. Rolling Stone, recorded mere days after I was born, is one of the many brilliant Muddy Waters blues that my mind will carry till it remembers nothing at all. Surely God Is Able is a candidate for the greatest gospel recording of all time and Marion Williams thrilling lead vocal takes it into rocknroll via Little Richards Woooo that so influenced Paul McCartney (especially on She Loves You). With By and By, the Soul Stirrers evoke even more clearly what became a vocal harmony revolution, as it was absorbed by rock and soul. Uncle Pen is a superb example of the ways in which, after creating and cultivating bluegrass, Bill Monroe continued for decades to find new tricks with which to take our breath away. Hardly any other Anglo-American historian would have remembered to place near the center of this exposition a grand example of the mambo and rhumba explosion that was the greatest dance craze between the end of World War II (whose merits are well represented by Blue Light Boogie) and the arising of disco. Louis Jordans Blue Light Boogie showcases the ways in which the surge of the swing bands was absorbed into classic country blues (and vice versa), which became the template for rock and R&B.

Thats my version of that playlist. Steve Sullivan has his own, although he is remarkably adept at not exposing them to the detriment of anyone elses. Therefore, others will have theirs. The value of The Encylopedia of Great Popular Popular Recordings, to me, is precisely this ability to stir up a sense of the greatest period of U.S. popular music, not as a stack of disks lying dormant in a garage or even on a turntable or as digits in a computer program. Steve Sullivan has taken as his charge, reminding us of music that stirred heart, soul, ass and brain. It is for me, as it may be for you, an inspiration.

Dave Marsh, music critic, author, radio host, and
foundational editor of Creem