A History of Spiritual Rock Roll
Baby Boomers to the 1960’s
By: Bob Gersztyn
The first of the “Baby Boomers” were born in 1946 to returning World War II veterans. Those same soldiers fought Germany and Italy in Europe and Africa, along with the Japanese in the South Pacific and the Orient. Harry Truman, the man who ordered the nuclear annihilation of two cities in Japan was president. The returning veterans were happy to find work, after living through the joblessness of the “Great Depression” prior to going off to the work of war. From the auto plants of Detroit, to the steel mills of Pennsylvania and the oil wells of California, Oklahoma and Texas, there was plenty of work. For those that preferred a pastoral setting to that of a bustling city, there was an infinity of fertile farmland in between the coast’s to feed and employ the growing population.
The first memories of that early batch of “Baby Boomers” were formed through the lens of a new technological influence, the television set. President Dwight D. Eisenhower expounded on the Communist threat and the American Dream, while Walt Disney marketed everything from Davey Crockett to Mickey Mouse and taught the young sponges to dream. Most everyone had Sunday off from work, except for drug stores, movie theaters, bars and businesses related to the recreational/entertainment industry. For most citizens of the USA, Sunday mornings were either spent in church or watching religious programs on television.
UFO sightings, beginning in 1947 were part of early childhood memories. From flying saucer crashes in Roswell, New Mexico, to floating lights in Adrian, Michigan, earth’s attention was drawn to the sky and the possibility of extra terrestrial life. Movies like “This Island Earth”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” and authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlien speculated the ramifications of human encounters with alien life forms, robot technology and space travel.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), was first discovered in 1938, at the beginning of WW II, by Albert Hoffman, a chemist, working for Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland, on a cure for morning sickness during pregnancy. Later the psychedelic mind expanding entheogen was used by the US government in mind control experiments under the CIA’s MKULTRA program, during the 1950’s and into the 1960’s. The drug played an important part in shaping the Boomers vision of reality and spirituality, especially after receiving positive endorsements by admired and recognizable members of society, like the actor Cary Grant and the publisher of Time/Life, Henry Luce.
Pope Pius XII led the Catholics while Billy Graham donned the Protestant leadership mantle and eventually became the Protestant counterpart to the pope. War broke out again, this time in Korea, with our new enemy, the atheist Communists, who now controlled North Korea with the help of the Chinese hoards, led by Mao Zedong. The hot war in Korea ended, but the cold war with Communism continued and Nikita Khrushchev led the USA’s #1 arch enemy, the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR), as he pounded his shoe on a desk in the United Nations assembly.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe prefigured Madonna, Dolly Parton, Queen Latifah and every other future female musical rebel rolled into one. To say that she was ahead of her time would be an understatement. She was born the daughter of a Holiness minister in 1914, and was a child prodigy who mastered the guitar by the age of six. In 1934 she married a Holiness minister, and in 1938 she was signed to the Decca record label. Columbia record producer John Hammond included her in his “From Spirituals to Swing” concert, and her performance of Rock Me a remake of Thomas Dorsey’s Hide Me In Thy Bosom, laid the foundation for rock & roll nearly two decades later.
The new musical form, known as rock & roll, was born in the early 1950’s. Pioneers like Ike Turner and the “Kings of Rhythm” along with Bill Haley and the “Comets” recorded the first 45 RPM records of the new genre. The sound was derived from the merger of White country, Sothern gospel and bluegrass music with Black blues, gospel and R&B. It was hard to distinguish whether the performers were Black or White by just listening to the recordings. Some of the other early Black pioneers were Chuck Berry, Little Richard Penniman, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley.
Bo Diddley (Ellas Bates), like so many of the pioneers of rock & roll received his early musical training in the church. When Bates was asked about why so many of the early rock & roll artists were involved in churches when they were younger, he responded with “That’s where we learned how to do something…but I wasn’t playing no Rock ‘n’ Roll in it then. My pastor of my church was Reverend Smith and the man who took care of the music part was the professor O. W. Frederick, Oscar Frederick, and he taught me violin, so I played classical music for twelve years. Nobody influenced me to play classical music. I saw a dude with a violin and a stick and that looked really cool, you know? And my church got together and took up twenty-nine dollars and that’s what it cost back then. Twenty-nine bucks was a lot of money back then. You could get a sack of potatoes for like damn near ten cents.” (6)
Their White counter parts, like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Dion Dimucci came out of their respective churches. Dimucci was one of the early White rock & roll stars. He was raised a Roman Catholic, in New York city, where he formed Dion and the Belmonts, after Belmont Avenue, in the Bronx, in 1957. The style of rock that they performed was called doo wop, and used the vocal harmonizing style of Black music that originated in Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia. Dion, as he was now known narrowly avoided death, by passing up on the opportunity to fly with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper on their ride to eternity, in 1959. In a 2006 interview Dimucci talked about the different messages of Blues and Gospel music.
“A lot of Blues music seems like it’s moving away from God, or the center, and Gospel music is moving towards it. It’s embracing a higher reality. When you look a little closer, the way that I define it or explain it is that the Blues is the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God. People are searching for union with God; they’re searching to be home. There’s something in people that seeks this union with their creator. Why am I here? Where am I going? What’s it all about? Who am I? All this kind of stuff, but the Blues is a beautiful art form. It’s incredible that you could express such a wide range of feelings. You could use it to sell hamburgers or cars, or to cry out in sorrow, or joy. You could express yourself totally within the Blues. So there’s some kind of connection, but if you ask me exactly what it is, I think that it all comes out of the same place, so to speak.” (1), (2).
Christian recordings were a marginal esoteric branch of the music industry produced by Christian record companies, like Benson Records. In 1951, Jarrel McCracken, a graduate of Baylor university, in Waco, Texas began what was to become an important record label for the Jesus movement’s music – “Word”. Southern Gospel was the dominant form of Protestant Christian music at the time, in White society. Christian music was just a segregated as the rest of society, so Black gospel had its own record label, “Vocalion”. Most Christian music was marketed by Christian bookstores. In 1950 the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) was born, and included about 2 dozen stores.
Racism was the law of the land, in the form of Jim Crow, and enforced segregation. It existed throughout the country in one form or another. Some states, like Oregon, simply made it against the law for Negroes to move there, while others like Michigan, simply designated what areas they could live in, or gather. The Southern states, like Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi had perfected segregation, and had separate facilities, including restaurants, bathrooms and drinking fountains for Negroes. The mixing of the races in the music bled over into other areas. After education was integrated, in 1954, through Brown vs. the Board of Education, in Kansas, the floodgates were opened.
Elvis Presley was the breakthrough act for rock & roll to hit the mainstream. After being televised on some of the top TV programs in the mid 1950’s, including “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts”, “The Milton Berle Show”, “The Steve Allen Show” and finally “The Ed Sullivan Show” he became the most popular entertainer in the USA and ultimately the “free world”, during the last half of the 20th century. Interestingly, Presley was a frustrated Southern Gospel singer, who signed with Sam Phillips and Sun Records, after failing an audition with Jim Hamill and Cecil Blackwood’s Southern Gospel group, “The Songfellows”. At one point Presley’s popularity even eclipsed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s National Communist Witch hunt headlines.
The fear of communism and nuclear war were further exacerbated by films like “Invasion USA” and “On the Beach”. One of the pop culture trends in the 1950’s was to build a bomb shelter for the family. Using the same technology that launched destructive nuclear warheads, the USA and USSR began a space race, in 1957, after the Russian’s launched Sputnik 1. Soon the space race escalated from launching dogs and monkeys to humans, into orbit around the earth.
Beatniks and the “Beat Generation”, in the 1950’s preceded the counter culture “Hippies” of the “Baby Boomer’s” 1960’s revolution. Two of the leading literary icons of the “Beats” were poet Alan Ginsberg, the author of “Howl” an epic poem about man’s disconnection with his environment, and his novelist compatriot, Jack Kerouac, author of “On the Road”, and other equally hip tomes. They wrote about the rift between the human soul and the industrialized world that the 20th century had produced.
Preceding the Beats were the Industrialized Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. They were union activists, who used literature, folk music and blues to carry their message. One of the martyrs of the movement was an immigrant named Joe Hill, who was executed in 1915. Singer/songwriter/activists like Woodie Guthrie sang about Joe, and the plight of the working man. Even authors like James Jones wrote about economic injustice forcing the poor to join the military as their only option to poverty, in his novel “From Here To Eternity”.
By the 1950’s Chrysler, Ford and GM, the big three auto corporations, along with major supporting industries, from the rail road and trucking to steel production, were unionized. This resulted in wildcat strikes that sometimes turned violent, as the unions demanded better wages and working conditions. As wages got better, the rural Southerners, both Black and White began immigrating to the larger industrial cities, like Detroit and Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburg. Although the cities were segregated, there was a mixing of the races at the workplace, and sometimes in recreation, resulting in a new musical hybrid as sounds and ideas merged.
The Grammy Awards began in 1958, referring to the invention of the gramophone, which sparked the soul of the recording industry. So from Thomas Edison, to Alexander Graham Bell and eventually Emile Berliner, who invented the gramophone and sold the patent to the Victor Talking Machine Company (RCA) (11), the recording industry evolved into a lucrative business. Gospel music wasn’t recognized until the 4th annual Grammy Awards, when Mahalia Jackson won the “Best Gospel or other Religious Category” for Every Time I Hear the Spirit.
The Civil Rights movement began, with the passing of “Brown vs. the Board of Education” by the Supreme court, May 17, 1954, calling for the desegregation of public education. In 1955 Rosa Parks started the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that brought Rev. Martin Luther King to his leadership role, as co-founder of “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1960 Ella Baker founded “The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee” (SNCC), which was the beginning of an expression of what became known as “Black Power”.
American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark, in Philadelphia, via the television set, became the first national TV show to showcase rock and roll and its culture, in 1957. By the end of the 1950’s, Elvis was drafted into the army, and a tragic air plane crash claimed the lives of three early rock stars, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. In 1960, Chubby Checker released a cover of Clyde McPhatter’s song called the twist, which initiated a dancing craze, that got unhip white people shimmying and shaking on the dance floor. It was even reported that President Kennedy did the twist in the white house. One of the major unexpected results of this new musical phenomenon was the integration of American society.
If rock & roll was the soul of integration then folk music was the mind. By the early 1960’s the Black rock & rollers were marginalized, and top 40 AM radio stations played pop rock that had lost its earlier edge. Fabian and Franky Avalon replaced Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. As rock & roll was on the descent in the late 1950’s folk music began its ascent. Folk music was inspired by Woody Guthrie, and his student, Pete Seeger, whose group the Weavers and career were put on a temporary hiatus, when he was blackballed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, as a Communist.
The Kingston Trio was the first major act of the new folk fad, to receive national recognition and air play. After them came the Limelighters, The Highwaymen, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. The music was acoustic in instrumentation, and used guitars, mandolins and banjos. It employed a wide range of vocal styles, both solo and in harmony, and its lyrics dealt with gritty subject matter. Topics like adultery, exploitation, murder, robbery, swindles, extraordinary exploits and broken promises told stories that captivated its audience.
Peter, Paul and Mary were made up of Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. Their debut album in 1962 was inspired by the same social, cultural and political tradition that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger followed. Their first hit off the album was “If I Had a Hammer”, recorded over a decade earlier by the “Weavers”, who were made up of Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Pete Seeger who first recorded it in 1949. They represented the musical conscience of the nation, supporting the struggling civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam war faction.
At one point folk music upset the status quo in New York city so much that they banned folk singing in Washington square, which precipitated a protest that successfully, reversed the decision. Popular folk singers of the day participated in the civil rights movement, and sang about its struggles. The biggest folk ensemble of the 1960’s, the “New Christy Minstrels” performed at the White house for President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
This thought provoking music reflected the mood of the country, as it continued in the Ideological war with the Soviet’s. There were multiple Cold War confrontations with Communism, in the early 1960’s, from the Marxist conversion of Cuba, the crisis with Russia, over nuclear warheads in that island nation resulting in the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco, the invasion of the Dominican Republic and escalating US military involvement in Viet Nam.
Barry McGuire began a solo career in 1960 after he purchased his first guitar. He spent some time in the Navy, and got into Woodie Guthrie, Ledbelly and Pete Seeger until he started gigging at Santa Monica bars, where Peggy Lee discovered him, and got him a recording contract. In 1962 he joined Art Podell’s group, the “New Christy Minstrels” as the lead singer. He wrote and sang lead on the group’s biggest hit 45 rpm single, “Green, Green”, and eventually went solo again, which produced the biggest hit of his career, when he recorded P. F. Sloan’s song “Eve of Destruction, in 1965.
Black music groups began receiving more air play, on White radio, after groups like the Mills Brothers and the Inkspots broke the ice, back in the 1930’s. By the 1950’s when Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry came on the scene, the White market was being integrated by Black music. Columbia records producer, John Hammond signed a Black Gospel singer from Detroit, Michigan, named Aretha Franklin in 1960. At the same time Detroit produced the most important Black record label of the 1960’s, when Berry Gordy established “Motown” records with Smokey Robinson singing You Got To Shop Around.
Sam Cooke was 1 of 7 children born to a Baptist minister in Clarksdale, Mississippi. After the family moved to Chicago he became part of the family’s singing quartet, and by 1950, at the age of 19, joined the “Soul Stirrers”, a black gospel group. Through his success with the “Soul Stirrers”, on Specialty records, he achieved fame and fortune within the Black gospel music community. He signed as a secular artist with Keen records where he had his first hit, with “You Send Me”. He started his own record label, SAR, and finally signed with RCA, where he had a string of hits, until his untimely death in 1964.
In an interview in 2002 Clarence Fountain, leader of the “5 Blind Boys of Alabama”, who was a contemporary of Cooke, explained – “We had plenty of chances to go with rock & roll. We had plenty of chances for doing the things that all the rest of the people had done. We could have did that too, but we didn’t want to. I was in the studio with Sam Cooke when he signed his contract. The man offered me one just like he did him. But I turned it down because that ain’t what I told the Lord I wanted to do. I wanted to sing gospel.” (8)
After his discharge from the army, Elvis Presley became a movie star, only singing songs in his own films, that he starred in, with titles like “Blue Hawaii”, “Follow That Dream” and “Kid Galahad”. His impact on music now wasn’t from his style and manner of performance, but from the direction that he took. Music films, featuring artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan would soon begin to make their way to the screen, as an important way to satisfy and create fans.
The 1950’s ended on a sour note, as Fidel Castro established a Marxist government in Cuba, after taking power, and became an ally of the Soviet‘s. The next conflict with the Communist’s occurred when U2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down over Russian air space. Everyone was ready for a change, when a youthful looking John F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic president elected, and ushered in an era of optimism, along with the Peace Corps. Kennedy’s inaugural speech in January 1961 set the tone of his administration when he said, “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Mylon LeFevre was a member of his parents Southern gospel music group, “The Singing LeFevres”. “The LeFevres” were pioneers of Southern gospel music, and owned their own recording studio, as many of the early groups did. They also embraced the potential for ministry using the new medium of television. While Mylon was in the army, in the early sixties, he wrote a song titled Without Him, which was recorded by Elvis Presley, and over 100 other artists. (2), (3), (4) A few years later Mylon formed a secular Southern Gospel Rock group named after himself, and spread the gospel in secular venues, through his music, in the late 1960‘s and 1970’s.
The next major breakthrough that would change the social structure of the country was the advent of the FDA approved birth control pill, which began the sexual revolution. Sex without the consequence of pregnancy never had been readily available before. This liberated women, as they never had been before, which in turn augmented the women’s rights movement.
The Roman Catholic Church convened Vatican II, in 1962, to discuss the birth control pill among other issues of the day. Pope John XXIII was in office at the time and at least four future popes were council members. Some of the key issues that impacted church members were, no longer requiring them to abstain from eating meat on Friday, allowing the mass to be spoken in the language used by attendees, instead of Latin and economic justice.
In an interview in 2006 Christian social justice musician, Bruce Cockburn explained the impact of Vatican II on the world in general. “One of the things that happened in the 1960s was Vatican II, in which Pope John XXIII convened all the bigwigs of the Catholic Church to decide what the destiny of the church should be and what role it should play in the modern world. It was decided at that time that the church would be the church of the poor. It was decided that I think because of the vibe of the sixties, the kind of philosophy and energy that was flowing around. It flowed through the clerics as much as it flowed through everybody else. I mean it was just in the air. It touched everybody, whether they wore the uniform or not…of the hippie movement I mean. As a result of Vatican II the church began to teach people in Latin America to read. As a result of people in Latin America learning to read they started trying to overthrow the governments that were keeping them poor and malnourished and not getting medical attention and all sorts of stuff. Many church people became supporters of that kind of social change, and we’ve been living with the result ever since.” (6)
Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, as the Berlin wall was erected. Freedom riders descended on the segregationist South, from Washington DC, as students begin protesting everything from nuclear testing to the escalating war in Viet Nam. The CIA conducted experiments, under the code name MK Ultra, to find out the potential of psychedelic drugs like LSD, for mind control. Ken Kesey, a Stanford graduate student in creative writing was given LSD, at the same time that he worked in a mental institution, and wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
At the turn of the decades, with Elvis in the Army and rock & roll on the decline after the payola scandal ruined the career of New York DJ Alan Freed, and nearly derailed Dick Clark’s American bandstand, squeaky clean Pat Boone was the top pop star in the US. Boone was a descendent of American frontier pioneer, Daniel Boone and was one of the most important performers, in the 1950’s, responsible for the integration of rock & roll into mainstream society. He had his own TV show, and was a successful film and recording star, who was also a devout Christian. He began his singing career in the 1950’s, when he was a college student, and recorded sanitized versions of what was then called race music. He had hits on the radio with songs like Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame” and Little Richard’s Tutti Fruiti. He drew criticism from both sides, when some accused him of trying to pollute White society with Black music, while others claimed that he was exploiting Black songwriters by capitalizing on their compositions.
The human space barrier was cracked for the USA, when John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962, and the first communications satellite, “Telestar” was launched by AT&T, which producing a radio hit for the “Tornados”. “Silent Spring” one of the first books, voicing concern for the environment was published by Rachel Carson. Students began protesting more loudly, as they supported the civil rights movement, and began speaking with a louder voice, through the Free Speech movement in California and the forming of “Students For A Democratic Society” (SDS), in Michigan. At the same time Bob Dylan released his debut album, which was produced by John Hammond, on Columbia Records.
Another genre of music, who’s popularity was waning in the early 1960’s was known as doo wop. Groups like ‘Little Anthony and the Imperials‘, “The Drifters” “Dion and the Belmonts” and “The Coasters” were some of the top groups. The Castells, with lead singer Chuck Girard had a couple of top 40 hits with “Sacred” and “So This Is Love”.
“I was pretty much a straight-laced young guy. I was into the music thing. I wasn’t really much of a student but I wasn’t really into religious activity or spiritual curiosity in those days. I was more into the music thing, I got bit with the music bug about junior high school years, and by my senior year in high school I had put together a little vocal group. I’m old enough to where I go back to the doo-wop days in 1961.” (7)
Soon afterwards Girard began working as a studio musician. and collaborated with Beach Boy producer, Gary Usher, and sang lead on Brian Wilson’s hit composition about a motorcycle, called “Little Honda” by the “Hondells”. Motorcycles would play an important part in the 1960’s, after cheaper versions of Harley Davidson’s and Triumphs were marketed by the Japanese, in the form of Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha, allowing the average person to purchase one. Then after an up and coming journalist named Hunter S. Thompson published “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, in 1966, Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels became celebrities.
Civil rights was the dominant issue during much of the early 1960’s, along with the escalating conflict with Viet Nam. Bob Dylan wrote and recorded “Blowing In the Wind”, which not only became a top 40 hit when Peter, Paul & Mary recorded it, but an anthem of the civil rights movement. Pop art took the stage and graphic television images of self immolating Buddhist monks in Viet Nam burnt themselves into the brains of the “Babyboomers”.
Interest in mind expanding substances like psilocybin, mescaline and LSD increased after LIFE magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson, about the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of an indigenous tribe in Southern Mexico in 1957. In 1954 writer Aldous Huxley published the Doors of perception, about his mescaline experience and later became friends with Timothy Leary when he was conducting his experiments with LSD at Harvard. Leary and his associate, Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard, after their research with mind expanding drugs got out of hand. The duo then moved the experiments with psychedelics to Millbrook, a private estate in New York. (9) (10)
President Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation is punctuated by violence, including the death of Medgar Evers whose murder Bob Dylan wrote a song about, and four Black girls that were killed in an Alabama church by a bomb blast, detonated by White supremist terrorists. At the same time the UK, US and USSR sign an above ground nuclear test ban., as women officially find out that they are discriminated against, through a commission’s finding and a US supported coup condones the murder of president Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam’s puppet president.
The era known as the 1960’s, was officially ushered in when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn was assassinated by Jack Ruby, with Lyndon Baines Johnson being sworn in as the new president. President Johnson declares an “unconditional war on poverty”, and signs into law, the “Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Dr. Strangelove” is released and the Beatles come to America, appear on the Ed Sullivan show, while “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is number 1 on the radio charts.
- Welch, Brian “Head”. Washed By The Blood, from “Save Me From Myself”, Driven Music Group, 2008.
- http://www.drivenmusicgroup.net/ 2 September 2009
- The Bible. King James version. Matthew 11:28.
- Welch, Brian “Head”. “Save Me From Myself”, published by: Harper Collins, 2007.
- Utube testimonial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZlgrT0hfjE 31 August 2009.
- Blueswax Interview with Bo Diddley by Bob Gersztyn. February 15, 2006 blueswax.com
- Wittenburg Door Interview By Bob Gersztyn May 2007. wittenburgdoor.com http://www.diondimucci.com/bio.html (4 November 2008)
- Dion Dimucci Interview . By: Bob Gersztyn, in Blueswax. http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/blueswax/getarchivedfeature.cfm?aaa=zzz&featurenumber=685 (2 February 2006)
- Banville, Scott. “The LeFevres“, “Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music”, edited by William McNeil. Routledge 2005.
- http://www.mylon.org/homePage.php (6 November 2008)
- Powell, Mark Allan. “Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music”, Hendrickson Publishers 2002.
- Bob Gersztyn. Interview with Bruce Cockburn. Folkwax, November 16, 2006.
http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/folkwax/backissues/folkwax_294.cfm (November 12, 2008).
- Bob Gersztyn. Interview with Chuck Girard. Submitted to the Wittenburg Door 2007.
- Bob Gersztyn. Interview with Clarence Fountain of “The Blind Boys of Alabama”. The “Wittenburg Door”. May/June 2003.
- Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. Published by: Harper & Row, 1954.
- Solomon, David, editor. LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug. Published by: P. Putnam’s Sons 1964.
- Bellis, Mary. “Emile Berliner – The History of the Gramophone”.
http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/gramophone.htm (14 December 2008)
