 Hello, and welcome to the Drum History Podcast. My name is Bart Van Der Zee, and today is a cool episode because I am joined by the amazing Daniel Glass, who is an absolute expert on so many things in drumming. But today, we're lucky enough to have him for the 40s and 50s transition period of Rhythm of Blues and Early Rock. Daniel, what's going on, man? How are you? I'm great, Bart. Thank you for having me aboard your podcast, and congratulations on its existence and its success. Excellent. Thank you. Well, I think it's really cool to have a guy like you who is doing so much. I mean, you are a busy dude. So even on that note, I'm honored to be able to get an hour of your time to talk to me. And I really think this topic is super cool, and you're very knowledgeable about it. You have a book about it, which is The Commandments of Early Rhythm and Blues that you wrote with Zorro. So that's our kind of manual for today that we're going to be working out of. Excellent. Yeah. And I have to just say that this book just celebrated its 10th anniversary. And, you know, we talked about kind of paving the way when I started doing all this work, which was really about 20 years ago now, which is kind of terrifying and hard to believe. But in the late 90s, you know, I often felt like somebody who is like standing out on a sand dune in the middle of the fire, a desert jumping up and down going, Hey, you guys, it's like a really cool story to be told with all this stuff. Yeah. You know, interviewing these older drummers and, you know, this and that. And everybody's kind of just ignoring or, you know, putting it down. So it makes it does my heart well to hear, you know, I don't know how old you are. I assume you're probably younger than I am. But somebody saying, you know, you made this topic cool. And that's exactly what my goal has been. This this book we're talking about today, the Commandments of Early Rhythm and Blues Drumming, I was able to write it with a mentor of mine, Zorro, who, you know, I we use this book as he had a previous book just to lay some groundwork. He had a previous book called The Commandments of R&B Drumming. It's called The Commandments of Early Rhythm and Blues Drumming, which, you know, probably is wasn't the smartest thing to have these titles be so similar. But the idea was his book covered 60s soul, 70s funk and sort of 80s and 90s like new jack swing and hip hop drumming. And when I read his book, I really loved it because it is looking out in I think 98 and I was in the middle of my tenure with Royal Crown Review. At that time we were very heavily on the road. So I was just doing a lot of reading on the road and researching and getting into, you know, figuring out how I was going to try to bring my topics of passion to life. And Zorro's book really inspired me. And so I ended up meeting him and it only took 10 years for this book to come out. It came out in 2009. But the book is similar. It's mostly my research and writing, but it's he really shepherded the process forward in terms of how we organized the materials. The book is designed very much like his. And what was cool about his book was it took that 60s, 70s, 80s drumming and made it really fun. And really his vernacular is really kind of just talking to the average person. And just his passion comes through so much in his book. So I tried to do the same thing with this book. And here we are 10 years later. And what I wanted to say is that this book, you know, at the time it came out was the idea is it's a prequel. So his book was 60, 70, 70s, 80s. This was 40s and 50s. The reason why we look and call this a transition period is because jazz had been the primary form of popular music prior to this. And when we think about jazz, I'm not necessarily talking about bebop or straight jazz, but thinking about early 1920s New Orleans jazz and big band swing of the 1930s. And this was jazz was pop music at that time. It was dance music. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, what happened is after World War Two ended in the mid 40s, jazz sort of broke into two distinct camps. The first camp was bebop, which was, you know, primarily African American musicians saying, hey, we don't want to just play for dancers anymore, you know, and we want, you know, there was a lot of racial politics going on in early jazz because of the nature of American society. So, for example, you know, the black bands had fewer opportunities to record and to play good gigs and to get airplay and all these kind of things. Then the white band did. And this was always the case, even though, of course, black musicians were at the forefront of the creation of jazz and swing and big bands and all these things. So in the after World War Two, African Americans had kind of developed a there was something called the great black migration where a lot of African Americans left the South and were able to finally get decent jobs during the war when a lot of white guys went off to fight and it opened up work in the factories for women and African Americans and African American women, actually. And it was a it was a time when finally after World War Two, African Americans had more economic clout to be able to purchase and play the music that they wanted to. And so bebop was kind of all these things coming together and African Americans just say, we're going to create a style of music that's ours, that can't it can't be co-opted. That is more of an artistic run at jazz, right? So that was one of the two camps that sort of big band swing, which had been pop music during the depression and World War Two went in that in that artistic direction. At the same time, most people still wanted to hear something that was going to allow them to dance, which is how I define pop music is music you could dance to, right? So the other camp that emerged is what we're talking about in this book, which is rhythm and blues music. And the idea is that again, this is inspired by African American bands and musicians. The idea was that they didn't want to lose the dance ability and sort of the foottappiness and sing-along ability of big band swing. At the same time, after World War Two, times had changed, the big bands were out, it became too expensive to let 18 people around in a band, whereas in the depression, you could afford to do that. Or World War Two, after the war, economic times had gotten too good. So you had somebody like Louis Jordan, who really, in my opinion, you could call the father of rock and roll, created this style called rhythm and blues. Essentially, he called it jump blues and there were different names for it. It really didn't become rhythm and blues as like a billboard chart until 1949. But in any case, what happens in the 1940s and 50s is that the bands get smaller, electric guitar, and then electric bass get introduced. Electric guitar had already been around since the 30s, but they become more prominent so that you could still get that punch and the gut feeling that you got from 18 musicians, if now you only have five or six or seven, you have three horns instead of 12 or whatever, 10. So Louis Jordan was really kind of the pioneer of this style and he said, he was a good enough alto player that he could have gone on to become a famous bebopper in his own right. But he took a totally different path and said, I wanna play the blues and I wanna make the music jump. And what happened is first, his style of jump blues appealed to black faces that could now actually afford to buy records. So you'd have all of these little independent labels popping up, some of which like chess records in Chicago, for example, specialty records, Atlantic records, believe it or not, started out as an R&B label. Capital records in LA had a lot of R&B when they started out, they all started out as independent record labels that were promoting this kind of music. And at first black people were buying this kind of music and often through like barbershops and train porters, these totally underground methods of distribution, jukeboxes, which was something new at that time. But as we move into the 50s, all of a sudden this new generation of youth that were born after World War II called the baby bloomers started growing up and they decided that they loved rhythm and blues music and that's what led to rock and roll. So what you have in the 1940s and 50s is this cauldron of the evolution of rock as it starts at the end of the big band era. And in my opinion, the reason I wrote this book is because A, it tied perfectly into what Zorro was talking about because it really is the prequel to Zorro's book. And at the same time, it addressed a giant area in the world of drumming that no one had ever talked about, which is that from a drumming perspective, what emerged during this period, like what was key was that shuffles emerged as the predominant groove. And I had played a ton of this kind of music and learned about it in bands. I'd worked with the Royal Crown Review, I worked with the Brite Setzer Orchestra, you know, rockabilly bands, blues bands, R&B bands. And when I say R&B, I'm talking about 1940s, 50s R&B. And there was a big scene for this music, but nobody was talking about it. And there was mass confusion from the drumming perspective so that when you mention the word shuffle, you know, to some people, like the Purdy shuffle is the only thing they understand as a shuffle, which really is not a shuffle. In the traditional sense, it's a half-time funk feel that it has shuffling capabilities, but it's really a rock groove. Because the kick and snare on one and three and backbeats on two and four. Whereas the shuffles that, you know, and when somebody would say, well, probably like a Muddy Waters thing or a BB King thing or a Stevie Ray Vaughn thing, most people have a really hard time playing those kind of shuffles. So what's been cool, and I'll end vital, very long-winded answer with this, is that in the 10 years since this book came out, what's been amazing is that now it's actually selling more on a regular basis than it did when it came out 10 years ago. And A, this is dudes like my jumping up and down on my Sam Dune and people finally coming over and going, yeah, you know, you're right, this is pretty cool. But, you know, realizing that there is like this community all over the world of people who love what I like to call, you know, this roots kind of music. And if you play blues, if you play rockabilly, if you play R&B music, if you play in a classic rock band where you have to, you know, classic rock bands didn't just fall out of the sky. All those classic rock bands of the British invasion, everything, this is what they were listening to. So if you wanna play like Bonham, you need to understand Bonham's connection to Little Richard. If you wanna play like Ringo, you gotta understand that Ringo and those guys grew up in the 1950s listening to all this American music they were hearing on Voice of America. You know, in my opinion, and this is what I loved about Zora's book, I don't try to separate, if I'm talking about shuffles, I wanna put them into context, you know. So the book's 152 pages. And the reason it is, is because during those two decades, like that's when, you know, sun records in the creation of the center of rockabilly emerged, that's when Texas blues, you know, emerged. That's when Chicago blues emerged, that's when Memphis blues emerged, that's when the West coast scene emerged. That's when, you know, like I said, Atlantic records in New York emerged and you have all that great kind of R&B and early rock. So it's a really amazing, interesting time period. And I think most people, like this music is still all around us. When you play on a wedding band, you're gonna play a Chuck Berry song probably. Absolutely, yeah. Or a little Richard song. You're gonna be playing like all this music and this is partly why I do what I do as well is to say to drummers, look, this isn't some dead thing from the past that you should learn about because it's good to learn your history. You know, I never, I don't even like to use the word history. If you look at most of the stuff I do, I don't use the word history at all. I'm not talking about evolution or tradition or heritage, you know. But this stuff is still all around us. And the thing is, if you know about traditional styles of music and you can learn how to bend your shuffle this way or that, because shuffles are like, it's like a thousand headed Hydra, you know. There's so many ways to play a shuffle. But if you just wrote a book of shuffles and you said, this is this shuffle, this is that shuffle, nobody would have any sense of that richness or diversity. With this book, my goal was to paint a really detailed nuanced picture of what was happening essentially in black pop music during these two decades, which set the tone for everything that we still do today. Whether it's hip hop, whether it's rock, whether it's funk, whether it's punk rock, it disco, I mean, it's like, it doesn't matter, it all came from this. So zooming back in on what we're actually talking about here, which is the 40s and 50s early rhythm and blues period. Let's start it off in your book. It says rhythm and blues, the term was coined in 1949 by Jerry Wexler, right? So take us a little bit before that. So you already have a little bit, but let's kind of zoom in here and figure out what was the climate like before that? What were drummers playing? What were the drum setups like? And then take it through there. Again, it's a fascinating story. Jerry Wexler, for people who don't know, ended up becoming in the 1960s, one of the most influential record producers. He produced a lot of Elita Franklin's most famous soul stuff. He would go down and work with Muscle Shoals' rhythm section. And he was, in the 1960s known as a legendary producer, but before that, he worked at Billboard Magazine. And of course, as we know, Billboard Magazine is responsible for categorizing, record sales and creating these charts as a way to define what type of music, how do we define the different types of music? So prior to that, as I sort of had mentioned, like black music was this very weird nebulous thing, it had never been differentiated as something that was separate in its own kind of separate category. But they had to acknowledge after World War II that, okay, black people are buying the music that they love, which of course was the blues. And they were able to buy it as a separate demographic. So what they were listening to was maybe different. And also what they called black music prior to this, they had different names for the charts. And none of them were good. Meaning the worst category as all is they called black music race music, which I don't think was, I mean, it just sounds racist. You know, like right off the bat, like why do you call white music popular music and black music race music? It's just totally ridiculous. It points to the, it's a good sign of the times. So that kind of paints the picture of this is not friendly times for these musicians. There is all this kind of, and it still goes on to some degree, but I think it's certainly greatly minimized, cultural appropriation. So for example, you know, when people get, you know, got pissed in the 1980s when vanilla ice, right? And it was kind of a white rapper. Sold more records than the rappers that he was copying. It was sort of that thing. And you had like Pat Lillard record, Lillard Richard song that he would sell more copies because he got the promotion, right? So, you know, and this had been going on for a long time. So Jerry Wexler, another term that they would use was like, CP as sounds, you know, sepia of course is a nice way of saying black cat music was another term, you know, which, you know, it's cool because cat's a cool word, but it didn't really capture the essence of the music. And Jerry Wexler's like, let's call this rhythm and blues. And by rhythm and blues, he essentially was talking about the rhythmic character of the music, which was the shuffle. And it's very interesting because I've, you know, I've interviewed probably 60 different legendary drummers at this point in my process of doing this in the last 20 years. I mean, really I've hung with a lot more of the older guys, but I was very interested in formally doing these interviews, which I did sort of very heavily between like 1999 and 2006 or something. And a lot of the older black R&B drummers or jazz drummers that I talked to, when I would mention this Louis Jordan style of 1940s blues, they would say, oh yeah, rhythm music. And they called it rhythm music. And they called the type of drumming that would do rhythm drumming. And at first I didn't understand what that meant, but what that meant was a heavier sense of shuffle. So let's look at the, like what I talked about in the book were certain big bands, black big bands, who began to really emphasize hand claps on two and four or a strong shuffle beat. The two sort of biggest examples are Lucky Millender and Lionel Hampton. And of course we know Lionel Hampton was a vibraphone player, but he was also a great drummer and was, he was an entertainer. He was a little bit like Louis Jordan in that, his big band, he played a lot of great jazz and he would play a lot of great jazz. But what he's mostly kind of known for was the, you know, keeping that dance ability factor, that good time, groovy showmanship for sure. Like it's a show, it's entertainment. It's not like we're gonna stop performing for the crowd and just play virtuosic lines. Now there's nothing wrong with that. Like that's the direction that bebop went into. Although bebop did start out as a dance music and if you look at Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s, he was playing really relatable, fun, sing-along kind of bebop that also had technical virtuosity. But you know, I don't want to make too many generalizations but there's just a lot of stuff happening. So in any case, somebody like Louis Jordan came along and he really emphasized the shuffle and the reason, like I said before, is they were trying to fill up the space of a big band. Because of course, if you were used to an 18-piece big band filling up this huge room, you know, they would play five, six, seven thousand people, these dance halls that they had back in the 30s in the swing era. Well now, you know, how are you gonna fill up that same space with only six or seven people? So you crank up the electric guitar and then the electric bass by 1949 and you let the drummer play some heavy grooves. And at first, if you listen to the music of Louis Jordan, his original 1940s recordings, it's a beautiful shuffle feel but often played with brushes and with no backbeat. And that's today when somebody says jump blues, that's kind of what they're referring to. So if you're gonna play a Louis Jordan song in a band, then you don't wanna play a big wap and smack and backbeat, you know, right off the bat. Maybe in the chorus section or maybe at the very end of the tune. But that just, there was still too many technical issues where if a drummer played loud, either they would step all over the acoustic instruments or they would, you know, mess up the recording gear because the signal was too powerful, right? It was too intense. And so in any case, by the time we get to 48, 49, the time that Jerry Wexler said, let's call this rhythm of blues music. You have, I talk about in the book, one particular song, which is Good Rockin' Tonight. Okay, now a lot of people know this song from Elvis. Elvis did this song, Have You Heard the News? There's a Good Rockin' Tonight, right? Well, this song had a long history. Lucky Millender did it with Sister Rosetta Sarp singing, it was more of a gospel thing. Have you heard the news, you know, that idea of a preacher? Have you heard the news? There's good news tonight, right? Totally started as a gospel thing. So Sister Rosetta Sarp was like, she was like a singing evangelist, she was a great guitar player. She was the singer in Lucky Millender's band, but they were walking the line, they were making secular music that was borrowed from gospel music. That's another aspect of rhythm of blues that I talk about in the book. So anyway, by the 1940s, this song, Good Rockin' Tonight, there's three versions I talk about in the book. The first version is by the guy who essentially wrote the song or his version of the song, that guy named Roy Brown. Now, if you listen to Roy Brown's version, I like to put these back to back. If you listen to Roy Brown's version, which is from 1948, it sounds like the music that came before, meaning it sounds like a big band tune. And the drummer's playing a shuffle, but he's doing it in kind of a, just dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, guh-dun. Piano's playing like a boogie woogie thing, dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, guh-dun, right? You hear it look kind of like a horn section, sounds like a jazz horn section. And Roy Brown's style of singing, is very like, uh, uh, the news, there's a good little rock of the night, like it's smooth, you know? Six months later, 1949, a guy named Wynony Harris comes out with the same song, basically a cover of the Roy Brown song. His version sounds like the music of the future, meaning that as soon as the tune kicks in, you begin to hear really heavy hand claps on two and four, which as I said was a gospel thing, that rock and roll just kind of took and made one of its fundamental elements. The drummer's most likely also playing a heavy two and four, along with the hand claps. But regardless of whether it's drums or not, it's one of the first records where you hear heavy backbeat, who start to finish in a song. Wynony Harris is singing in a much raunchier, dirtier, you might say rock and roll kind of way that people like Little Richard and others down the road would copy. We're talking about Robert Platt. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we think of him as a screamer, Steven Tyler, you know, the fact of a man singing in a really high, almost woman-like range, that that was ended up becoming something today, we just think of as like really macho. You know, ah, that kind of thing. All that comes from this period. You can even trace that back to the 1930s, to blues shouters. They were called blues shouters. And they sang in this kind of hollering preacher-like way, sometimes in a falsetto. So, you know, this, this period is where all this stuff is coming together. And by the way, this period is also, you know, where the drummers like Earl Palmer started listening to these shuffles and realizing that, of course, Earl Palmer, we could have a whole show just about Earl Palmer, but I talk a lot about him in this book because this is the period where he really established all the pioneering things that he did behind the drum set that would define what rock drumming is during these years. So he was listening to Little Richard's left hand when Little Richard was playing some of these tunes and he realized that Little Richard's wasn't, he was playing a boogie-woogie, dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum, you know, but he was playing it so aggressively that it sounded more like dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum, you know? So Earl Palmer responded by straightening out what he was playing in the cymbal pattern with his left hand. And the same could be said about what was going on up in Chess Records when Chuck Berry started straightening out his guitar, you know, thing. And, you know, down in some records in Memphis where Jan Van Eaton, the drummer there, was listening to all these other records and going, well, why don't I straighten out what I'm doing? Maybe not even intentionally, but suddenly the whole world starts to straighten out the eighth note and then, you know, all these young white kids who are listening to this music go, I love this man, play more of this. So all of a sudden the industry, now you have drummers like Bobby Morris who lived in Las Vegas who was playing with Louis Prima who was also very important in the early years of rock and roll. They were playing kind of straight up swing with a backbeat, but then these guys at Capitol Records, you know, and Bobby Morris, he's put out this book that I would love to talk about a little bit. I'm actually gonna have him on my podcast as a guest, but they literally were flying him from Las Vegas in the early fifties now, flying him from Las Vegas into LA to play on all these Capitol Records. You know, once rock became popular, they just started pumping out tons of this kind of straight eighth backbeat music to keep up with the demand that this new generation of kids, who by the way grew up in post-war and are the first generation to be called teenagers because they have their own money to be able to buy music to say like. So the, you know, we think that if you're in teenagers and around forever, it was invented in the forties and really pushed in the fifties by ad executives, mad men, you know, Madison Avenue executives, who basically created a demographic because the first time young people between the ages 13 and 18 had enough money to be able to buy their own music, right? So it's this fascinating kind of like, you know, things that people do because of technological things, the technology gets better, now we could do different things. Now let's change music and give it a better name that doesn't sound so threatening racially. You know, now this new generation comes along and they wanna buy it, whereas this other generation earlier had finally been able to buy their own music and you know, it's just a fascinating tale. Yeah, it's like a rite of passage to be able to buy your own music and feel like you discovered it on your own and say this is mine, which leads me to the question of, well, more of a statement. I have to imagine that the parents of these young white kids in this period in the fifties, forties, fifties, they're not loving that their kids are listening to this new, let's call it threatening kind of music. That has to be something where mom and dad are like, I don't like this. And then the same thing would happen with rock and roll. It's precisely why the kids were listening to it. Exactly, yeah. You know, because it was their own kind of music. It was really danceable. Rhythm of Blues is insanely danceable as is rock and roll, as is all pop music, you know, like we mentioned earlier. But also it was black music and that was something that probably their parents did approve of. So they were like, great, I'm gonna go there. And if we move forward a little bit now into the fifties where rock and roll really emerged as its own unique style, it was for the first time, both white and black artists were being celebrated by this audience, by this audience of young teenagers. And that is a very unique moment in a way. And I think, again, today, those lines are a little less drastic because music, you know, if we think about it from the perspective of the corporate side, it has always been segregated like so many other things in our society. So we have, you know, black music and we have white music. And so when say, like when rock emerged at first, it was both black and white for this key few years. So I tell them we get to the sixties, now black music, okay, we've got Motown, we've got Stacks, we've got all that. No, we call that soul and white music, we're gonna call rock and roll. And so again, let's separate these things. But during this kind of key period of the, you know, sort of the early first half of the 1950s, you could say, as rock was dawning, it was amazing. And one of the things that I tried to dispel the rumors of, you know, not rumors, but stereotypes of early rock is that it was somehow like the malt shop and girls in little skirts, you know, happy days. And oh, it was so nostalgic. And it was so like, you know, an easier, happier time. BS, like early rock was, it was tumultuous. If you think about Elvis, who emerged, of course, as the first superstar of early rock, like first, I mean, it was so wacky that white Americans got their first taste of rock through the song Rock Around the Clock, which was Bill Haley. Haley was like 10 years older than his audience. And he looked like an uncle, you know? He had like a skin color, but his band was, they were still wearing like Louis Jordan, like, you know, tartan jackets, matching tartan tuxedos. And, you know, and so that served a function that only for a short period of time. When the, you know, everything came together and Elvis emerged, Elvis brought the whole package together. And Elvis was like, he was really smart because he sang ballads, lots of ballads for the girls. So the girls loved him, but he also put on fricking leather and was a badass. And, you know, they, I mean, people probably don't remember this so much, but when he went on the Ed Sullivan show, they only showed him from the waist up. You didn't see his waist because his dance moves were so sexualized, you know? So there was huge backlash against the early years of rock. And I like to talk about like 55 to 59, you know, this was dangerous music. This was the devil's music. This was N word music, you know, to white America, to parents, it didn't, it was not easily accepted. It was like punk rock. If you think about punk rock in the 70s, if you went outside with a mohawk and a pierced nose and a leather jacket that said Anarchy, with anarchy symbol on it, you got your ass beat, you know? You put your life on the line by loving this music, right? Whereas today you go to Hot Topic and you can buy a Green Day record and you're about as mainstream as it gets and your parents are not gonna get up your case. However, today if you're listening to like, or even 10 years ago, if you're listening to like, you know, Flipknot or, you know, Underground Death Metal or whatever, then you know that you were playing that role or a few years earlier, Marilyn Manson. Oh my God, Marilyn Manson is the devil and Marilyn Manson made Columbine happen. It's ruining her music. The same, you could trace back to like, people dancing the waltz in the 1700s and there's a lot of writings about the youth and they're totally destituting and blah, blah, blah. So this like goes on and on and on. But early rock and roll is, there's so much amazing early rock and I talk a lot about that in this book as well. Both black and white, but mostly the black artists that were doing this kind of stuff. People like both Digley, Chuck Berry. But I do talk about people like Louis Prima and I talk about the lounge scene. There was so many interesting things happening in the 40s and 50s that all played into the evolution of this music and each one of them has its own brand of shuffling. Like there's so much you can learn from all these different components. So for example, there's like, I think 12 play along tunes in the book and each one looks at a different aspect of this music starting in the 40s and going through into the 50s. And you've got the Louis Prima shuffle, you've got the Chuck Berry feel, you've got the Muddy Water feel, you've got the Louis Jordan 1940s feel. It's just, obviously you can hear my excitement and passion about this stuff, but to me it's just like, it's such an amazing time period and it really set the blueprint for everything that came after that. Cause if you think about the British invasion, now we jump forward to the mid 60s. See, and we have to talk, if we have two minutes more to talk about what happened, we were talking about the first generation of rockers, right? So this rock really took off say between 54 and like 59. Okay, so that was the period now where white kids are discovering it and the term rock and roll kind of supplants the term rhythm and blues. Where did the term rock and roll come from? Well, rock and roll is a, just like rock and roll is a term for sex, like we rock and roll all night. And you can go back to 1922, there's a blues song, 1920s blues song, which by the way was another period. We think about the 60s, the 20s were like the 60s. People were, you know, the roaring 20s. Women were discovering their power and people were just like growing and self-actualizing and society changed dramatically. So part of that era was people got into black music then. So 1920s blues was like a lot of it is just downright filthy. So there's a song by Trixie Smith called My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll. Gee, what's that about? Yeah. And that was a big hit. And it was kind of funny because along the way, like rhythm and blues, the same rhythm and blues period, remember it was originally wasn't kid music, it was adult music. So you have songs like 60 minute man, you know? And that, you know, the trombone John with that long, big, long sliding thing. These were hits in the black community. That's dirty. Because it was adult music. That's dirty. But if you think about like, well, Good Rockin' Tonight. Sorry, let me finish that. Good Rockin' Tonight was kind of like a sexy song. Elvis did a version of Good Rockin' Tonight. It was his second hit in 1954. And he was influenced by both Roy Brown and Wynoni Harris. And suddenly that song becomes something that the white community grabs onto. So just to finish that idea, I'm sorry, I'm blathering. Oh man, no, you're good. Some of the directions. But the song Good Rockin' Tonight is going from 1948, the original version of Roy Brown to 1949, the more R&B version, Wynoni Harris, to 1954 and the quote unquote rock version because it was Elvis. You see the progression that this one sung. And, you know, within three versions of one song, you could see how they sort of did dance when it became rock and roll. It's a great microcosm. My thought in what I'm hearing this is that I almost think that this currently happens is media and film and TV in those days, which we would now consider reruns in old movies, portrays it as like when I think of like American graffiti or something and the music you hear in that, it's not really giving credit to all of the people who actually paved the way and you're not hearing the fundamental things that build up to it, which kind of makes sense. You're not gonna hear every piece of history and all the historical music. Well, to its credit, American graffiti, the movie did a pretty good job of that. It's more happy days. Yeah, that's a better point. The television show that came out of American graffiti that really like watered the whole thing down and sort of whitewashed the 50s or what was happening in the 50s. American graffiti, there's a lot of great black R&B music. Wolfman Jack, he was a very famous disc jockey in the 60s and 70s really. He was probably like along with Dick Clark, the most famous disc jockey America. He played a lot of black music. So what I wanted to say, and I would agree with you, yes, that as time moves forward, people take elements and pieces of a certain era and it becomes less and less about the nuance and more and more about just like, okay, these are three things that people can identify an era with. Yeah, you can idolize those things. Often. Yeah, and sadly that stereotype can be a negative stereotype because people today will be like, well, the 50s, that was so square. I'm into pool music. I'm into whatever it may be. And one of the things I show at the beginning of this book is how I show modern covers of old R&B tunes and how you might think that, like Led Zeppelin's a great example. They played all these blues tunes. I can't quit you, baby, from their first album. But I'm like, man, Bonham is so heavy. That's just the direct cover of an Otis Rush song. And whole lot of love is a direct ripoff of a muddy, I think it's a muddy water song. It's a literally direct, the lemon song, direct ripoff. They just renamed it and changed some of the lyrics and maybe they added some of their own stuff. But the first four Beatles records, it's all covers of Rockabilly, early rock and roll, doo-wop, girl groups. If you listen to the first four Beatles records, aren't that many original? No, absolutely, yeah. They were just expressing what they loved. But just to go back to this idea of like rock being controversial, R&B being controversial, it was controversial because it was real. It was all these kids felt the rawness of the music. First of all, the production was not slick big band music or Doris Dayer just passed away yesterday and not to put her down. But like she was huge in the 50s because she made wholesome music with violins. Or if you've listened to Pat Boone's cover of Little Richard's 2D Free, it was watered down. And kids are always looking for something real and authentic that isn't just a shiny product. Or we hope, we hope the kids are. The cool kids are, right? The cool kids are, yeah. Because music to them is real and they can see through kind of the BS. So that early rock and roll was like, it was like this tumultuous period. And what happened in 1959, that's when you have the day the music died, right? Which is that Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Richie Bells were all killed in the famous playing crash. But also around that time, a whole bunch of bad things happened to all the early rock and rollers. Elvis went into the army. Patriotic duty. He actually gave up his insanely popular musical career and went into the army for two years, which we don't even think about that today, but that was an amazing thing. But he was out of the spotlight for two years. Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, two other huge early rock and rolls were in a really bad car accident when they were on tour in England. Eddie Cochran was killed, Gene Vincent was crippled and had injured for the rest of his life. Carl Perkins, who had a big hit, was one of the early, he had the original version of Blu-Swayed Shoes. He was one of the, we associate him with Rockabilly, as he'd do Elvis and Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison. He was in a very bad car accident. I've interviewed his drummer, W.S. Holland many times. We talked about that whole thing. So he was lying in a hospital bed when in 1956, when Elvis took off and he had to watch Elvis sing his song, Blu-Swayed Shoes, on the Perry Comercial major thing. So his career was derailed and he was never reached the same heights of popularity. Little Richard got disenchanted with the music and joined the ministry. And we know Little Richard would go in and out of being a minister the rest of his life. Jerry Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin and was blackballed. Chuck Berry, who was always a rough and tumble character, was arrested on some kind of assault charges and stuff. And so all of these early rock and rollers were either killed or discredited or left the biz. And what happened is between 1959 or 1960 and 1964 is that good rock went underground. And that's when you have like Jerry Lewis movies and you have Sandra Dee and you have Beach Blanket Bingo and you have, you know, the Bobby, Bobby Vinton and you know, when, you know, Fabian and these sort of stars that were manufactured by the industry to appeal to the masses. And that's, you know, so for those years, rock was like a very underground thing. That's when Dick Dale and surf rock emerged. Instrumental rock, what's his name? Link Ray, bumble. Amazing instrumental rock tunes. There's a great book called The Golden History of Instrumental Rock and it starts kind of during this period. And of course, you know, the Beach Boys come out during the period. It's not completely, you know, but the Beach Boys were very square. They were very palatable. They weren't dangerous at all. They took a lot of these elements and made them that. But it took, my whole point I'm going to here is it took the British invasion. All these bands in England, young people in England who had grown up in war-torn England, their baby boom generation wasn't a boom. They were suffering because they, England had been destroyed by German bombing. And so, you know, the only way they could, yeah, Pete Townsend talked about it in his book and Jimmy Page and, you know, Led Zeppelin and the Stones and the Beatles. I mean, they all grew up in this time, especially like if you were in London, it was very dark. Nobody had anything. The only instruments they could afford were very cheap guitars. And they made their own instruments. Out of that emerge what was called the Skiffle movement, right? Skiffle was kind of a British version of American blues and American folk music. And so as these people grew up into the fifties and the very early sixties, they worshiped the American music that was coming over. They worshiped Elvis, they worshiped Buddy Holly. The reason the Beatles are called the Beatles is because they were naming the band after the Crickets. You know, Buddy Holly's Crickets. Paul McCartney made an entire documentary which is amazing, which is called The Real Buddy Holly Story. And he made that in the eighties and you could probably find it on Netflix. It's a great documentary where he talks all about how Buddy Holly was his number one influence, how he played guitar like Buddy Holly, how they named the Beatles after the Crickets. He goes to Clovis, New Mexico where Buddy Holly was and he goes to all the important Buddy Holly places. And this is freakin' Paul McCartney, you know? So, you know, the Stones, all they wanted to be was the chess records guys. They wanted to be Muddy Waters. Like they were a straight up blues band. So it took until 1964 with all these British bands trying to ate the stuff that had gone away in America and then bringing it back to America, that finally then laid the groundwork for like all of modern rock, you know? So in my opinion, that's sort of when the transition period that I talked about in this book, 40s and 50s comes to a close and rock that we sort of, the singer-songwriter oriented rock and you know, it goes forward today. But in chapter four of this book, I talk about the influence of blues and R&B and all the artists that so much of their music was still based on this, you know? So if we think about a band like Journey, okay? So Journey, Steve Perry, ah, Steve Perry, the greatest rock singer, classic rock, yay, 70s and 80s. Well, Steve Perry was trying to sound like Sam Cook. And if you put Sam Cook and Steve Perry up against each other, they were basically, Steve Perry is literally trying to have the same quality to his voice as Sam Cook. So without Sam Cook, there wouldn't have been a Steve Perry. I think that's true about so many different things. Without X, you can't have Y. And what's blowing my mind about this right now is just the first off the 1959 when there was so many tragedies and accidents and people marrying their cousins and getting blacklisted. There's a definitive, the sun has set on that and now it's rising on another kind of music, which I think we continue to see today of maybe the pop music that we hear on the radio right now. Like you hear 90s songs and you go, oh my gosh, that's so 90s, but I just remember hearing back on the radio then and it's, this is current music. That's the way it goes. And one thing that's sticking out to me too is the use of, it's almost like, no matter what's happening on the top level, like the, we'll call it the pop level, there is the quote unquote DIY, the more raw, the thing that the kids like to listen to again because it's in some way, everyone wants to revolt a little bit against what's popular and say, oh yeah, that's cool or I don't like that, I like this. I like the, I like Muddy Waters, I like this. I don't like, and even now you can say, I think it's cool for people to really enjoy this older kind of blues and the R&B and know the history to differentiate themselves, going back to what you said in the beginning and just understand that and respect all of the history that is involved with it in all music. My own history is exactly reflective of this. In other words, I go around talking about older styles of music, right? Well, I didn't grow up in the 20s, I didn't grow up in the 40s, I didn't grow up in the 50s. I didn't even, I grew up in the 70s, right? So when I, and I wasn't into all this music, it's not like my parents were playing it or I grew up playing in bands like this at all. My first band was a Black Sabbath cover band. Awesome, yes. And I still love Black Sabbath to this day. Me too. And I played in Led Zeppelin bands, I played in Pink Floyd bands when I was in college in the 80s, like I had a very, very tangential relationship with earlier music. It wasn't until I got to LA in the 90s and I went to music school and I was, you know, trying to become a freelance musician, to be employable. And by the way, my very first tour was with the Blues Act. Again, just because I was trying to play all different kinds of stuff and good thing to remember, I worked with that act for about a month and then they, we did a tour up and down the West Coast. I thought everything was groovy. And then they went out to Texas and she's like, yeah, your shuffle's just not that strong. This is a woman blues guitar player named Debbie Davies and I was basically let go. And my shuffle wasn't that strong. So isn't it ironic that I then joined a band called Royal Crown Review, which is all about blues music, rhythm and blues, swing, rockabilly, all these styles. And I really developed my shuffle to where today I, that's what I'm kind of known for. I'm sort of an expert on shuffles. I'm the shuffle guy. At least if you know me through this book, what I'm trying to say is that my own journey through this stuff is exactly like what you're talking about. That I began to realize how interesting this was, how much this music is all around us today. And began to sort of outline in my own mind, sort of the story that I was gonna tell with this music. And it started with this idea of this book with Zorro. And then it began to just grow farther and farther backward. I was doing a lot of clinics at that time about the revolution that was one thing I wanted to do because Zorro was a big clinician. And the more my clinics went on and on, the longer the story got, the farther back I went, the more I was filling in stuff. So eventually my clinics were like three hours long. And I was just exhausting myself. But what I noticed is that people dug it. Nobody left. People sat there for three hours and then came up and said, this is an amazing thing. How come nobody's talking about this? So that's sort of where the Century Project was born, where I kinda cover this hundred year period, 1865 to 1965, end of the Civil War to the British invasion. And then all of my other products sort of are within that umbrella. That's a great place to wrap this all up, which first off, unbelievable history. Thank you so much for giving us this insight onto this. And I think the whole goal of this is to get people interested in doing the research on their end and then they can learn it and build on it. But you have a multitude of amazing, as you said, products, your videos, your podcast, all of this stuff. So to quickly go through it, I highly recommend everyone checks out, as Daniel just said, the Century Project, which that along with the 100 Years of Drumming, which is also called a Century of Drumming Evolution, the Vic Firth video, just, I recommend people find Daniel on YouTube or anywhere you watch videos and just find some of these. And you can just see and hear the man himself talk about this stuff more in depth. And I have literally just spent hours watching through it early on in what I was doing with the Drum History podcast and just absorbing as much as I can from a legend such as yourself. Well, thanks, man. The Century Project is a DVD that took, it's a, I know, oh, DVD now, people know by DVD, you can buy it as a digital download. So it's a project that encompasses 100 years of the evolution of drumming and the way we play drums. And it puts it all into historical context. And so if you imagine like a drum clinic meets a vintage drum show, meets a Ken Burns documentary. Yeah, really. We have like, I think at least 12 drum sets that we use in the course of that going from the very earliest all the way up to a more modern kit. And it isn't just about the gear, it's about how and why we play it the way we do and when all these parts came in. It sort of tells a big picture story. And that's sort of a great place where people can kind of get to know me right off the bat. Absolutely. And then there is a series of videos I did. I put out a poster with Vic Firth a few years ago that they would send out to music stores and their clinic packs. I don't know if I hope that poster is still being produced. But the idea was that poster featured 16 events along the way in that hundred year history. And that was on the poster, but we made a video to go with each of those 16 events. So there's a 16 part series produced by Vic Firth where we talk about that. But for those who have watched the series, I think a lot of people confuse that, that that is the Century Project. That is just scratching the surface of what we get into in the Century Project. So I hope that people enjoy that series and I encourage people to watch it. It's free obviously on YouTube. They can start at the intro, go through all 16 parts. It's had probably closing on two million views now. So it's been pretty successful. But they can learn a lot about sort of touch on these different points. Some of what we talked about today, Beatles, Louis Prima and Bruce Jordan and all these different eras and what was happening. When did the hi-hat show up? When did the tom-toms show up? Because I'm interested in it from a gear perspective as well. And I mean, I just, to wrap it up, I would say if you're listening to this podcast, you obviously like the history of drums and drumming. And to me, you absolutely have to know and enjoy everything Daniel does. I mean, it is, it's completely parallel. Everything supplements. I mean, it's all just for the greater good of learning about drumming. So to get a good view of everything, start out by going to danielglass.com. That's D-A-N-I-E-L-G-L-A-S-S.com. And there you can get, you can just go into Daniel's world basically and get a good feel for everything. And if people are into this history stuff, my podcast, The Daner Glass Show, which is part of Drummers resource, which is a podcast network in a way run by Nick Rossini. If they go to my website, there's a podcast tab and that breaks out all of my podcast episodes. So they don't have to scroll through the whole Drummers resource timeline and try to find my stuff that will link you directly to those podcasts. And I talk about a ton of different kinds of aspects of drumming and history and music. And there's a two-parter on John Bonham. There's a two-parter on Earl Palmer. There's a two-parter about Chincupa and Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall. So a lot of that kind of stuff, we really get in depth and I go on and on and on. And I should also mention one other thing, which is gonna make you laugh because we've been talking about drum history the whole time. And I do a lot of gigging in New York. I mentioned I worked over 200 gigs for the last two or three years, mostly in New York. But I'm actually on the road these days with an act. And this, again, is about my love and desire for being very diverse. I've been working for the last year with one of the real housewives of New York. I know, yeah, that's so cool. Completely different. And her band, it's a great five-piece band. Again, I got this gig through my association with the Birdland thing and the Birdland Trio where the core of the band that backs her up. But she has three dance club hits, which are sort of EDM-ish. And we put like a real kind of a funky disco funk spin on it. But it's, and then she has guest and we call it all different kinds of music, but it's like something that people don't normally associate with me. And I'm having a blast doing it. It's so much fun. And she is her cabaret show, which she calls it a cabaret show and sort of a really diverse eclectic mix. She does some singing, but she also reads from the diary of this Q&A with the audience and she has Broadway singers and comedians and her guests. And it's actually just a crazy thing. It's totally taken off. And so we're, if you go to my website, all my tour dates are up there along with all the gigs I do in New York. We've been sold out to Chicago Theater a few weeks ago. It's 3,700 people and we're in Cleveland. We're going to Atlanta a couple of weeks, Atlanta and Tampa. And it's off the chain right now. And who would have thunk it because I can't find a fan of the show, but it's been great working with her. She's fantastic. And it's, you never know. And the more prepared you are to be employable, then you will be employed. And that's the name of the game to me. Absolutely. That's the name of the game. Just staying involved. And again, everyone go to danielglass.com to find out more information and see what he's doing. Cause this man is constantly on the move and has a thousand different things going on. So Daniel, thank you my friend for being here. And I look forward to whatever you're up to next. I'll keep in touch. And again, I think if anyone is listening to my podcast and wants to talk to Daniel, I'm sure he's happy to talk to you and you can reach out and find him through his website. Yep. I'm accessible. Sometimes it takes me a while to get back, but I've heard from people and I'm still jumping around out here going, hey, you guys should check this stuff out. I feel like I'll be doing that forever, you know? That's great. And thank you, Bart, for having me and congratulations on this endeavor. And I'm sure it's going to be successful for you. And I think the more people talking about these issues and some of the guests you've had on have been great and have their specialties in their own realm of what they're talking about. So I wish you all the luck and I'm sure we'll be doing some hanging in the future. Absolutely. Awesome. All right, thanks, Daniel. Talk to you later, man. All right. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at drumhistory and please share, rate and leave a review. And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.