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Crossover: Sam Katzman's Switchblade Calypso Bop Reefer Madness Swamp Girl or ‘Bad Jazz,’ calypso, beatniks and rock 'n' roll in 1950s teenpix

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

Peter Stanfield
Peter Stanfield
Affiliation:
Film Studies, School of Arts, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7UG, UK E-mail: p.stanfield@kent.ac.uk
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Abstract

This essay challenges the received wisdom that teenpix of the 1950s were dominated by a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll. I argue that this cycle of film production was marked by a diversity of musical genres, styles and types. Not only rock 'n' roll, but rhythm 'n' blues, folk, rockabilly, swing, West Coast jazz, bebop, Latin music such as the mambo, the rhumba, the cha cha chá, and Caribbean calypsos were all heavily featured in these films. This study is carried out through a focus on the temporal arrangements – fads, cycles, trends – that govern serial production and consumption of movies and popular music. Following Philip Ennis' thesis that rock 'n' roll is best defined by its ability to ‘crossover’ musical boundaries – to move, for example, across the pop, country, and rhythm 'n' blues charts – I argue that the film industry chose not to overly limit the music it had on offer and instead provided a varied package, some of which, it expected, would crossover and appeal to diverse and capricious teenage tastes.

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Type
Articles
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Popular Music , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , October 2010 , pp. 437 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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