Old Pop Music...

It's Fats Domino's fault.

I was totally fine with my 'development of rock music' playlist that started with 1950 and jumped right into the rock explosion of the mid-50s. It was going great. Sure, I did some AI research and found that I was missing a few important songs and had some in my list that weren't really feeding that rock DNA I was looking for. But that's fine; that's why we do research in the first place.

Then I found out that Fats Domino's The Fat Man, one of the seminal songs that fed the rock piano lineage of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elton John was not a 1950 song...it was recorded in December of 1949. Which meant, by the arcane rules of my playlist, that it had to be moved out and replaced. Okay, that happens, no big deal. Except I made the mistake of asking the AI if The Fat Man was foundational enough that I needed to keep it. Turns out...it is.

So, what to do? I couldn't leave it in 1950, which meant I had to add some 40s music to my playlist. And there's plenty of it that leads into the rock music we're familiar with. But those lines of evolution didn't start there. I went back to the 1930s defiantly, but I already knew with that sinking feeling in my heart that I wasn't going to stop there. I was going to go back before the swing era, before jump blues, before Duke Ellington's jazz...even before the beginnings of jazz music itself, all the way back to the early ragtime and blues music that really got things started. I wasn't at the embryonic stage of rock music; I was now at the sperm-and-egg stage.

So, I started a playlist that begins with Scott Joplin's earliest compositions and included a smattering of pop music, blues, and other stuff that I expected would bring us into the later music that gave us jazz, swing, and early rhythm and blues, the key components of rock n' roll's DNA. My cut-off for the non-Joplin music was 1900; for my sanity's sake, I couldn't go any earlier than that. Joplin did have a few compositions that predate 1900, so I did include them because I wasn't leaving Maple Leaf Rag off this list. The first million-seller sheet music in history? Hell, no. 1899 is fine.

Anyway, after curating a representative list with the help of the Google AI, I got all the music downloaded. One song in particular was a bit frustrating; the quality of the recording is terrible, and I couldn't find a newer version of it where the sound wasn't overwhelmed by the crackling noises of the cylinder recording I was listening to.

Tonight, I started listening to that 1900-1909 playlist. And after about eight songs, I came to that one particular song: Ma Tiger Lily. It's a 1900 song sung by a man named Arthur Collins (he was really popular back then). And right in the first verse, I stopped washing the dishes and had to listen more closely, because I could not believe what I was hearing. And then I understood exactly why this record doesn't have any modern recordings. Because anyone who tried recording it with those lyrics would be canceled faster than a Disney live-action project. No, I'm not going to post the lyrics, not even a sample of them. It's that bad. If you want to look them up, that's your own choice. I'm not even linking to them. You have been warned.

I mean, sure, I've heard these words before, but not to music (rap doesn't count as music). It's just really, really weird to hear those words with an upbeat, happy tune. And this was a novelty tune, music people danced to (the Cake-Walk, in this case).

It will be interesting to see if I run into more songs of this type; as my friendly AI told me, songs like this died out and didn't really lead into the DNA strands of rock n' roll. Hopefully there won't be too many more, especially ones that sound like that.