Forget everything you think you know about pop

There is an origin myth of pop in which Elvis Presley’s explosive arrival as the first rock’n’roll idol in 1956 represents the Big Bang, the cosmic birth of a brand new music fixated on youth culture. Then, with the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, the parameters of popular music became superheated, expanding in all possible directions at a phenomenal rate, establishing pop as perhaps the most pervasive and significant art form of our times.

Bob Stanley has already taken issue with that narrative, in his hefty 2017 book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop, which dated the birth of pop earlier – to 1952. Stanley has skin in this particular game, having been both journalist (writing for NME, Smash Hits and the Face) and musician, co-founder of alt pop outfit Saint Etienne, who since the 1990s have enjoyed enough popularity to suggest Stanley’s scholarly side line is a genuine labour of love. Now he has followed Yeah Yeah Yeah with something even more dauntingly ambitious – a prehistory of pop.

His 636-page Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop delights in demonstrating the ways popular song and dance music have exercised a profound grip on western culture since becoming a mass-market business in the late Victorian age, proliferating with incredible fecundity in response to technological developments and societal change throughout the 20th century. “Popular music wasn’t invented with the gramophone” notes Stanley, evoking a time when the medium of song dissemination was sheet music and pianos, once ubiquitous in every household and public space.

In 1900, popular music incorporated hymns, folk song, musical hall, vaudeville, minstrelsy, parlour music, operetta and marching bands. But the development of new styles and trends with a rapid turnover was dramatically accelerated when German-born inventor Emil Berliner’s ‘78 revolutions-per-minute flat 10-inch discs supplanted Thomas Edison’s cumbersome wax cylinders on the new-fangled recording machines in 1901, the same year the first use of the word ‘pop’ appeared in an advert in British theatrical paper The Stage.

Stanley guides us through the transference of musical power from Britain to America, with the developments of ragtime, Dixieland, blues, jazz, Barbershop quartets and the ultramodern syncopated sounds of swing, the triumphs of Broadway and Hollywood musicals built around songcraft so brilliant it still resonates today, and the rise of solo singing superstars, culminating in the postwar sophistication of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, set against the more raw and energetic black grooves of rhythm and blues.

He crams his enormously entertaining tale with fascinating characters and telling anecdotes, recalling such lost stars as Whispering Jack Smith, whose lungs had been damaged as the result of a German gas attack in the First World War but found his limited five-note range was perfect for the new medium of radio, introducing an intimacy at odds with the stentorian delivery of Al Jolson and singers of the pre-microphone era.

Fellow crooner Rudy Vallee effectively invented the public address system in the 1929, hooking up a home-made amplifier with a stack of radios to project his vocals, calling it an “electronic megaphone.” His soft and sensual singing style inspired a wave of sexual hysteria and official opprobrium that should be familiar to any fan of contemporary pop.

Older music fans considered it ‘girlish’ for grown men to sing tender words of love. The Atlantic Monthly drily commented that ‘jazz is vastly more calamitous than was the material havoc wrought by the World War”. Congress was badgered about censoring music on radio and record, whilst a BBC memo of 1933 decried this “particularly odious form of singing” and advocated “a general policy of the elimination of crooning” which “should be obliterated straight away.”

Amongst the young offenders was pipe-smoking multi-million selling Bing Crosby, who recorded nearly 400 hit singles, an achievement no one – not Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson or Ed Sheeran – has come remotely close to matching, and probably no one ever will.

Without belabouring comparisons, Stanley has fun spotting the early appearances of supposedly modern pop trends – new dance crazes, fresh outrages – in his perky footnotes on the afterlife of songs. In 1917, as America joined the European conflict, brashly patriotic Tin Pan Alley war song Over There became the number one sheet music hit, popularised by light opera singer Ernest Caruso. “Almost a century later,” Stanley notes, “it would become ubiquitous in Britain as the jingle for the GoCompare ad.”

His knowledge and enthusiasm for the great composers of what came to be known as the American Songbook shines through, as he explains how “the most significant song in the development of American pop” was Alexander’s Ragtime Band, written by a scrawny 22-year-old Irving Berlin. More than a quarter century later, Berlin would write White Christmas, the best-selling record of all time, with sales figures unlikely ever to be surpassed.

Time zones overlap as pop plays a constant game of push-and-pull with its own past, and there are chapters focussed on pivotal figures including Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, who Stanley describes as “the fulcrum” of his book, who “understood and assimilated the past” and “dictated the immediate future”, while “the various phases of his career – pin-up boy vocalist, album-oriented adult singer, late-period duets – are still a blueprint for artists in the 21st century.” More problematic is Al Jolson, the first superstar of 20th century pop, whose blackface minstrelsy feels difficult to assimilate into the story, or forgive.

Blatant racism is a constant nagging subtext. Black artists were effectively segregated and patronised, their innovations and accomplishments mercilessly exploited whilst white musicians achieved success with imitations of black style. Even Benny Goodman built his orchestral swing on arrangements by pioneering black pianist Fletcher Henderson, who had simply not been able to get enough work to keep his own orchestra together. As Stanley’s prehistory ends, Elvis Presley emerges as the symbolic young godhead of a new pop order, but now the reader sees just how much of his thrilling sound had been prefigured in the 1930s and 1940s by black artists such as Count Basie to Muddy Waters.

Let’s Do It is an essential book for lovers of popular music, an erudite, funny account of how something so ephemeral has had such a lasting impact. Since delving into its pages, I keep seeing reminders of the past in pop’s present, where the two biggest selling British stars of today – Ed Sheeran and Adele – trade in the same essentials of singalong melodies, big voices and bundles of charisma that drove the music business at the turn of the last century. The song that gives this book its title was composed by Cole Porter in 1928. Nearly a hundred years on, he would have surely been delighted to know we are still doing it, still falling in love to the sound of pop.

Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop by Bob Stanley (Faber); available from the Telegraph bookshop for ￡19.99