INTERRUPTED MELODY: THE 1956 ATTACK ON NAT "KING" COLE

Alabama Heritage, Winter 2004 by Sprayberry, Gary S

Carter's crusade to stamp out rhythm-and-blues and rock music was certainly not a novel idea. Across the nation, critics had emerged from every fold to cast derision and scorn upon such performers as Elvis Presley, the Drifters, and Carl Perkins, labeling their music "smutty" and "decadent." They blamed rock-and-roll music, along with certain youth-oriented films, such as Blackboard jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, for the rise in postwar teenage delinquency. "We consider the situation to be as serious as an invasion of the enemy in war time," wrote one nervous parent. "If we cannot stop the wicked men who are poisoning our children's minds, what chance is there for mankind to survive longer than one generation, or half of one?"

Essentially, the backlash against rock music and youth culture in general could be boiled down to two issues: sex and power. This was particularly true in the South, where men like Carter exhibited a near-pathological concern over interracial sex and the safety of the womenfolk. Rock-and-roll and its suggestive lyrics, they asserted, were dissolving the line between the two races and "bringing the white girl [closer] to the negro male." Garter wrote, "This we can gauge only by the everyday happenings, and observances of negroes on the street. You have seen it, the fleeting leer, the look that stays an instant longer . . . the savagery, now, almost to the surface."

The threat of interracial coupling and miscegenation became the focal point around which much of the antirock-and-roll campaign seemed to revolve in the South. But it was not the single, solidifying issue that drove men to violence and led groups like the NACG to crusade against rock music. What boiled their blood had less to do with sex than it did with their own declining status in the world. The generation that had fought and won the second World War-a group that included Garter and many of his followers-expected to return to the same country they had left at the beginning of the conflict. But the war, much to their dismay, had permanently altered southern society-reconfiguring families, rearranging social and cultural patterns.

Veterans returned to the States to find their wives working in steel mills, driving buses, and doing things that would have seemed incomprehensible in 1940. Wartime spending had pulled the economy out of a depression and put more cash in the pockets of working men and women, meaning that families could now afford to build a home, purchase a new car, and enjoy more leisure time. Consequently, the children who came of age in the 1950s were more attuned to the outside world than their predecessors, and seemed less inclined to follow their parents' leads.

Not only were they the first generation to grow up within the glow of a television screen-they now had greater access to newspapers, glossy magazines, radios, movie theaters, and the latest recordings of Elvis Presley. Simply put, the kids of the 1950s had more of everything-more information, more independence, more consumer choices, and more influences. And because of this, they came under intense scrutiny and criticism from their parents.