Never mind Elvis — Hank Davis’s book ‘Ducktails, Drive-ins, and Broken Hearts’ is about rock’s also-rans

Leave it to Hank Davis to write a book about 1950s rock music that barely mentions Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis or Bill Haley & His Comets.

In his 38-chapter, 360-page tribute to the lesser lights of the early rock era, the Puslinch, Ont., music writer devotes entire chapters to LaVern Baker, Carl Perkins and Frankie Laine, not to mention Eddie Bell, Sherry Crane and Troy Shondell, while Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley are all mostly MIA.

This, of course, was intentional.

“I believe the most famous people are probably the least interesting,” said transplanted American musician Davis, who has taken Robert Frost’s adage about “the road less travelled” to heart.

“Certainly they’re the least interesting to write about because all the clichés are known. You can do a two-dimensional fluff piece and who cares? No new ground has been broken.

“But if you take somebody who was on the fringes, who almost had a hit record, who has a story nobody has heard, they give you a deeper insight into how the music and record business worked,” he continued.

“They were there. They saw all the behind-the-scenes stuff. They saw what it was like to go out on the road, to feel your record company wasn’t supporting you, with all the regrets and disillusionment.”

Davis understands the mercurial nature of the music business.

Growing up in ’50s New York, the freewheeling 81-year-old became a minor league rockabilly artist, influenced by blues, gospel and country, who cut a half-dozen records as a teenager, got played on radio and appeared on Alan Freed’s TV show.

When it was clear he wouldn’t become the next Elvis — though he does have his own error-strewn allmusic.com entry — he happily pursued a PhD in psychology and, in 1971, became a professor at the University of Guelph, where he specialized in animal behaviour.

But it was the human variety that intrigued him most.

And as he pursued a sideline career as a first-class compiler of archival collections focused on the little guys, also-rans and lovable losers from rock’s early days, he found the role of musical historian fit like a glove.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘Wow, you’re the first guy to talk to me about this s–t in 50 years!’ or ‘Nobody’s ever asked me that before!’” said Davis of his interviews with pop’s discarded back benchers.

“And I thought ‘Good!’ That’s what I want to hear.”

His 1997 book “Small-Town Heroes: Images of Minor League Baseball” took the same from-the-trenches approach, with poignant, funny, revealing vignettes about the fabric of American life,

His new book, “Ducktails, Drive-ins, and Broken Hearts: An Unsweetened Look at ’50s Music,” is more of the same, a treasure trove of the lost, forgotten and misunderstood, shedding light on the dark, forgotten corners of ’50s rock with an investigative precision worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

“Remember the TV show ‘Happy Days?’” asked Davis of the cliche-strewn ’70s sitcom crammed with hula hoops, malt shops and tough guys named Fonzie.

“People romanticized the ’50s: the greasers, the ducktail guys, the ‘West Side Story’ type of stuff. It’s a setting for fiction.”

What Davis does is yank back the curtain to reveal the struggling artists behind it, toiling in near obscurity, their cultural influence greater than their commercial prospects.

“There’s a very practical side,” he said of his approach. “You can talk to the underdogs. If you sat down with Johnny Cash or Elvis, you know you’re going to get canned stories that have been told countless times. There’s nothing new.

“But if you sit down with people like the ones I sat down with, oh man: not only do they have stories, but they haven’t been told and they’re honestly just thrilled that, after 40 years, somebody comes along and gives a damn.”

Case in point: Ella Mae Morse, an early rock influencer who blended jazz, blues and country to score pre-rock hits like “Cow Cow Boogie” (1942) and “The House of Blue Lights” (1946), but found herself cast aside by her record company and quit the business in frustration at 32.

When Davis caught up with her decades later, she was working at Sears, her recording career a distant memory, acutely aware of what she’d lost.

How, wondered Davis, could it have come to this?

“I came within a hair’s breadth of saying that to her,” he confided of the now deceased singer. “And of course, I couldn’t. I didn’t. I don’t think it would have been a kind thing to say.

“Here’s a woman who made a half-dozen movies of the ’40s, who had No. 1 hit records in the ’50s, and she just packed it in, quit, walked away from it when she was 32 years old.

“She couldn’t stand the record business. And even though it had been 30 or 40 years, when I started talking to her, oh, man, it stirred up all this stuff. You could just feel the passionate disappointment about the kind of material they gave her to record.

“She was worth more and she knew it.”

Davis empathized with her, as he does with all his subjects, including golden throat crooner Charlie Rich and, especially, rockabilly cat Carl Perkins, whose 1956 recording of “Blue Suede Shoes” is considered one of rock’s foundational hits, but who is today regarded as little more than a historical footnote.

Well, until Davis came along.

Contacted by a U.S. colleague who had come into possession of some old acetate discs, he discovered that far from being an Elvis also-ran, Perkins had been playing similar material two years before Presley ever set foot in a recording studio.

“All of a sudden there are these extraordinary sides by some guy named Carl Perkins,” recalled Davis. “And you look at the date: 1952. Excuse me? 1956 is when ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ was a hit record. What the hell is this stuff?”

The missing link, as it turns out, one of many Davis dug up while researching his book, proving “the stuff people thought (Sun Records founder) Sam Phillips invented in his studio was in the tap water down in this part of the country years before anybody thought so.”

Musical styles don’t emerge fully formed, with no antecedents, he pointed out. And don’t even think of asking him to pinpoint the “first” rock ’n’ roll record.

“It’s really like asking ‘Where did humans come from?’” mused Davis. “You get a choice between a really simple creationist answer, which is ‘God said “And there were humans!”’ end of discussion. And people love that because their minds can grasp it.”

The alternative — “evolution through natural selection, where humans evolve gradually over time, accumulating little differences to the point where one day we had a human” — doesn’t go down quite as easily, especially with a generation weaned on internet listicles.

“The time scale is much harder to grasp,” he noted.

“At what point, if you could watch time-lapse photography, would you say ‘Right there, that’s a human’?

Rock ’n’ roll, he insists, is no different.

“It accumulated gradually over time, assimilating different styles. R&B was part of the mix. Hillbilly was part of the mix. Hillbilly Boogie was part of the mix. Jump blues were part of the mix. Gospel was part of the mix.”

In the end, his book’s cliche-heavy title and greaser dude cover is an ironic counterpoint to the material that lies within.

“They’re images to draw you into everything you think you know about the ’50s,” said Davis, summing up the book’s marketing tack. “You think, ‘I’m going to find out a little bit more about ducktails and drive-ins, and whoever the hell this guy was!’

“But really, the key word in the subtitle is ‘unsweetened.’ These are not tales that have been told too many times, sweetened for popular consumption. This is really the way it was for the people who lived it, who experienced it, who tried.

“No matter what your perceptions of this music are, be prepared to have them challenged.”

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