Musical entities. What is a "hit"?

My dear friend and advisor, Phil Tagg, is as passionate and knowledgeable about music as anyone I have ever met. In recent years he has been busy translating some of his books into today's teaching tool, videos. They are 'edutainment', fun to watch and you learn something in the bargain. A video chapter from his book on the Abba's Fernando, titled The Milksap Montage (Parts 1 & 2), contains a a huge grouping of popular songs from the cultural milieu Fernando sprang from, that share the same, common, harmonic sequence. It is an editing tour de force, nicely grafting all sorts of disparate sounds from one song to the next. But several of the songs, including There Goes My Baby (1959), by The Drifters (one of several entities that had the name), are not represented by the original recordings. This causes my sense of taste all sorts of consternation, and has given me reason to look at why. I understand why Phil would have used the non-original, simply for expediency, his need was for an example of the underlying musical composition, and he probably just googled the title and downloaded the first mp3, or bought a cheapo remake collection at the gas (petrol) station.

The last sixty years of music history has been, arguably, the richest of all times, and many philosophical changes have lagged the changes in the ear. As music performance was ephemeral until the 1880s, there was no entity to consider and value. The only musical entity was the "written" composition ( a set of instructions in how to perform the music). These symbolic instructions create a different performance each time. A fixed, audio recording, is much more consistent (variables such as listening space and playback equipment still existing, although the iPod is, perhaps, changing that :-) ). Musicologists are still mostly concerned with the underlying compositions, but I believe that thinking can lead one astray, today.

What is the difference between a "hit" song and a "hit" record (hit being the term for popularity as reflected by sales and performances, for my purposes, the "top 40" in the commercial charts) and the artistic aspects they share? There Goes My Baby is clearly a song (underlying composition) that finds resonance in human hearts, it was recorded again by several acts, and found great success in the country field, forty years later, by Trisha Yearwood (one could argue that this is because the country listeners, two generations removed and of a culture that tended to ignore the black artists of the fifties, might never have heard the Drifters version), yet the importance of The Drifters recording seems of almost equal value to the song. This importance is based in the creative use of reverb and orchestral arrangement somewhat new for the genre (and from which Phil Spectre would go on to his "wall of sound" style). The mix of The Drifters' Ben E. King's impassioned vocal (he was the writer of the song) set in a dramatic sound scape, brought the record to its own great peak of creation, the underlying composition being just an element. Although sound recordings would not be copyrightable until the 1970s, the still undercredited partners in creation of recordings, the sound recording engineers and the creators of sound manipulation electronics (people such as Bill Putnam, Les Paul, Barry Blesser and Rupert Neve amidst scores of others) were already becoming consequential by the late 40s and 50s.

Many hit musical acts, of the time, after losing their recording contracts with their original labels, would collect some cash by making cheap and cheerful rerecordings of their hits for less then scrupulous record manufacturers. These outfits hoped to, and often succeeded, in selling the fan a copy of the song that wasn't original. If it was only the underlying composition that was important, this would be no harm, and some less discerning types have no trouble with these recordings. For me, they are an abomination, if sometimes curious. It is one of these type of "knock-offs" that Phil has used in his montage. The magic that is a record, can not be recreated. Often the cheap companies would use lesser musicians, studios and engineers then the original recordings, but in several examples, even the same team in the same place can barely succeed in recreation.

I find I have a sense of audio imprint. If I hear a song for the first, many times from one recording, I am biased towards that recording. In the case of songs that are from before my time, the great library of songs from the first half of the twentieth century, I am not so partial, having often heard the songs performed by a variety of different people. I may have my favorite performances, but there isn't a sense of ersatz to the others that I have with post 1945 recordings.

Although Musicology might be slow to grapple with these distinctions, Popular Music Studies, of which Phil Tagg is a founding father, is much more on the case. Although it is far from my sphere of studies, now, I look forward to a year or two when I can start reading up on what they are thinking. If anyone reading this has some knowledge on this, I would love to hear it.