Charles Thomas Gillett 1942 - 2010: Rock 'n' Roll's true scholar

The radio DJ, rock historian and world music enthusiast Charlie Gillett died on Wednesday, aged 68. Chances are you won’t have heard of him – he wasn’t that kind of DJ – but he added hugely to my knowledge and enjoyment of popular music, and I’d like to pay tribute to him here.

I first became aware of this quietly-spoken Lancastrian in the early 1970s when an enlarged version of his Master’s degree thesis - written at New York’s Columbia University in the mid-1960s - was published in 1970 as The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, the first scholarly overview of the field. 

For those of us who loved “roots” music (rockabilly, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and soul) and it’s 1960s’ offshoots, it was revelatory, and very heartening: here was someone taking our guilty pleasures seriously. (Another Brit, Nick Cohn, had already got us purring with pleasure over his take on rock and roll, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, but that was more a collection of provocatively expressed enthusiasms than a serious historical survey.) 

I’ve never needed anybody to validate my decidedly primitive tastes in popular music – they are what they are - but every page of Gillett’s book told me something I didn’t know, or discussed records I’d never heard of, or made connections that had never occurred to me.  I read it three times in a row, annotated it, and made copious lists of records I simply had to hear (not as easy then as it is in our online world). 

The whole book radiated the author’s love of the music being discussed, but that didn’t really matter – it was the intelligence and curiosity he brought to the subject that made his writing so refreshing: I didn’t agree with many of his conclusions, but the significant thing was that he realized this stuff mattered.  Now, serious rock journalism had been in full swing for several years, thanks toRolling Stone and other hippy-era publications. And, of course, the Beatles and the Stones and many other artists had paid eager tribute to the giants on whose shoulders they stood. But Gillett was trying to answer the Big Questions – who invented rock and roll?; where did rockabilly come from?; where does bluegrass fit into all this?; what’s the relationship between soul and rhythm and blues? Almost everything written on those topics until the publication of The Sound of the City  had been pretty much all wrong. 

And how typical that it should be a Brit who wrote this terrific book. This country has done more – through its fans, perfomers and writers – to keep roots music alive than the Americans who invented the stuff. True, Harry Smith, Alan Lomax and many other Americans had done a wonderful job of rescuing and reclaiming early folk and blues music through recordings and writings and compilations, but it was the Brits who kept the rockabilly, rock and roll and rhythm and blues flame burning in the 1960s – well, they basically threw petrol on it and blasted it with a flame-thrower. Charlie Gillett was just one of a long line of slightly deranged enthusiasts produced in these islands. 

Gillett started hosting Honky Tonk, a Sunday morning show on BBC Radio London in 1972. This was handy, as I could now actually hear the music he had written so knowledgeably about without taking expensive punts on dubious compilation albums at Andy’s record stall in Cambridge Market, or at One-Stop records in Soho. (He was playing featuring new artists in amongst the oldies -  he would be the first DJ to play demos by Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Dire Straits.)  

The other thing I’ll always remember Gillett  for is forming a record label, Oval, and releasing the sublime compilation of Cajun music, Another Saturday Night, in 1974.  Apart from great stuff by artists such as Belton Richard (“Une Autre Soir d’Ennui”) and Tommy McLain (“Before I Grow Too Old”), this contained one of my favourite tracks of all time, Johnnie Allen’s belting version of Chuck Berry’s“Promised Land”. I’m not sure I’d heard any genuine Cajun or Zydeco music before.

Not content with introducing Cajun music to the UK, Gillett moved to Capital Radio, where he is credited with practically starting the World Music movement , and eventually returned to Radio London. 

RIP, Charlie Gillett - and thank you.