in a paradoxical twist, there is the obvious connection of “Tutti-Frutti” with the charismatic practice of glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues. Although it would be stretching things a bit to see “Tutti-Frutti” as “sacred” music, it’s not entirely “secular” either—this is, in fact, another way in which the song trangresses boundaries that some would prefer to remain fixed. Especially with the signature “awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” (which is perhaps the antidote to “supercalifragilisticexpialadocious”—or is it the other way around?), there is clearly the sense of something “coming through” from some “other side,” something welling up from unknown depths.
The genius of the song is that all three of these secret languages are inextricably intertwined—and the underground code that is thereby generated is, I would argue, a thread that stretches from the early days of rock and roll to the time of progressive rock. “Tutti-Frutti” is not in the least superficial or shallow, but is instead an invitation to an intense engagement with love (and sex) and mortality. Certainly it is a feast for Freudian analysis and analysis in the terms of contemporary cultural theory—and the fact that the song is also fun to listen and dance to does not negate its significance in the least.
Perhaps, too, out of this complex intertwining, one can map two basic possibilities for rock music, one more “sensual” (or outright sexual), the other more “spiritual.” But even in the case where progressive rock (especially at its most “undanceable”—though I would argue that the critics who focus primarily on danceability simply lack imagination, as both critics and dancers) seems to go almost entirely in the latter direction, as perhaps most outstandingly in the music of Yes, there always remains the element of eros—of the embrace.
Little wonder that this underground, threatening movement has always been countered, at every step, with a “normalizing” movement—the queer Little Richard countered by Pat Boone and the famous (p)Elvis that ultimately shook itself into the U.S. Army and then Las Vegas.
The other key element of the protoprogressive trend—also connected to an underground sensibility as well as countered by “pop” normalizations—was the idea that the music should “go somewhere.” In other words, even in the beginnings of rock music, or before the beginning with Ray Charles and Louis Jordan, there was the idea that this music, which already transgressed boundaries of race, gender, and class, should also reflect new possibilities in its form.
Again the triumvirate of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis is important, but I especially want to highlight the innovations of Mr. Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel, b. 1928). Of the early synthesists of rock, Diddley was, in my view, the most visionary. This is true even when, as was often the case, his music was harmonically simple. Famously, Jerry Lee Lewis said of Diddley, “[i]f he ever gets outta the chord of E he might get dangerous.”10 (The context makes it clear that Lewis said this affectionately.) For that matter, Diddley is even better known for his chugging, “shave and a haircut” rhythm (think of the song, “Bo Diddley,” or “Who Do You Love?” or “Not Fade Away”). Obviously, the lines that one initially expects to extrapolate from Bo Diddley’s music seem to lead more directly to hip-hop than to progressive rock—just as Little Richard’s music and performance approach leads more directly to Prince or Michael Jackson. However, and this is important, both Little Richard and Bo Diddley influence this more recent music by way of the psychedelic blues that were an integral part of the milieu—especially in England—out of which progressive rock developed in the late sixties.
In any case, it is certainly true that Diddley built his innovations on the terra firma of roots rock—but, on top of these roots, Diddley had all sorts of interesting things going on, and the roots themselves seemed to run deeper, toward Africa via the Deep South (specifically, McComb, Mississippi) and New Orleans. If Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard came out of Southern charismatic churches where the religion is intensely physical, Diddley seemed to connect with something else, something, there as well, hidden in the charismatic Christianity of warmer climes (that Southern thing again)—something in the vicinity of the old religions of the Earth, something “pagan,” animistic, akin to voodoo, and haunting.
It is worth noting that the intertwining of Christianity and the old nature religions will also be found in progressive rock. Perhaps the most important examples are Yes’s Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans (e.g., “a dew drop can exalt us like the music of the sun”).11 Admittedly, the intertwining found in this music is probably rooted in more specifically European and British Isles forms of hermeticism, but the link of affinity still has significance. At the very least, it is a question of a “force” that “comes through” (spoken to again quite recently in Yes’s “That, That Is,” as well as in Robert Fripp’s notion that King Crimson forms when there is King Crimson music to be played). I think that every musician who hopes to “go somewhere” with the music understands this subterranean welling-up.
In Diddley’s case, the welling up is also a redemptive force, as his seemingly simple one-note or one-chord meditations also call to mind the field hollers of slaves and poor sharecroppers. Listening to Diddley’s music in preparation for this all-too-brief discussion of it, I was also struck by an interesting parallel. An omnipresent force in this music is the maraca playing of Jerome Green. The maraca is an instrument that goes back to Africa—it is basically a gourd filled with dried seeds or beans. There is something basically unpredictable in the use of maracas, something like a quantum effect at work—regardless of how much rhythmic sense the maraca player has, there’s a limit to how much control can be effected over the falling of those seeds. Not to head too far into the territory of theoretical physics, the point is that the maracas fit well into Diddley’s music because they represent the essence of that music—simplicity and steadiness combined with complexity and unpredictability. A parallel I am thinking of concerns the way that the great African (Nigerian) musician Fela Kuti always has the afuche (a gourd covered with strings of beads, which the player moves by hand over the surface of the gourd) at the center of his music. Fela has a rather large group (twelve or more instrumentalists, seven or eight singers, and seven or eight dancers), but the afuche is always in the front of the stage, in some sense leading the band—or perhaps serving as its soul. In either case—Diddley’s maracas or Fela’s afuche—there is an idea at work, and it is both simple and deep.
Incidentally, the maracas and the afuche are among those “simple” percussion instruments, like the tambourine, that everyone assumes they could easily play—but it ain’t necessarily so.
Diddley also expanded the sonic range on top, with the use of violin and often very angular guitar (visually represented by Diddley’s famous rectangular-shaped instruments, which also evoke another part of the Southern culture of poor people, namely the cigar-box fiddle).
It should be mentioned, too, that Diddley was probably the only early rocker to feature women instrumentalists in his groups (the best known of whom was a guitarist called “The Duchess”).
The underground and innovative (“going somewhere”) aspects of early rock music gave rise to a trend that was both developmental—“progressive”—and outside of the mainstream. Despite claims, from Theodore Gracyk and others (see, e.g., Gracyk, pp. 180–85, on the question of “selling out”), that most of rock music’s “rebelliousness” is just a pose for selling records, certainly there is a sense in which the more developmental and underground aspects of rock music (perhaps even quite apart from what specific musicians thought they were doing) were set against the mainstream. The interesting rock music, whether from the fifties, or the time of progressive rock, or today, is set against pop formulas and pop sensibilities. In some of the early rock music, such as that of Little Richard or Bo Diddley, there is an expansiveness that is both sonic and social. It is quite possible to trace the lines of development, from the early and middle fifties, to the
