I usually don’t expect “Great Stupid”-style race-baiting from The History Channel, but today for some reason it alerted me that on this date in 1955 “Black music got whiter” with the release of Georgia Gibbs’ “Dance With Me Henry (Wallflower)” “setting off a dubious trend known as ‘whitewashing.'” This recording was a cleaned up version of Etta James risque song you can hear above. “Roll with me, Henry,” as the lyrics of that song went, essentially meant “Fuck me, Henry,” and they weren’t going to play that on mainstream AM radio stations in 1955. So producers bowdlerized the lyrics for pop singer Gibbs, who was, ugh!, white, and she had a hit:

Apparently there’s supposed to be something sinister about this, as if Gibbs was “stealing’ record sales from Etta James. Nonsense. Artists aiming at different audiences with covers of songs taking a different turn is called “commerce.”

Here’s a 1936 song by Rodgers and Hart that was favored by old fogies at the time..

…but only after the lyrics were changed…

Old Blue Eyes, before he was old, covered it later by jazzing it up…

But “Blue Moon” only became a mega-smash when it a lot of 50’s era gibberish was added and it came out like this:

Continue reading →