R&B;’s ‘Good Times Roll’ on KLON

The basic contours of rock ‘n’ roll history--how African American blues was appropriated by white musicians and morphed into rock--are easily called up by even casual fans. Ken Burns certainly raised consciousness about jazz history last year with his 19-hour PBS documentary “Jazz,” and an ambitious series on the blues is headed to public television in fall 2003.

That leaves rhythm and blues, that hot-wired variation on the blues, as the last major 20th century popular music form ripe for lengthy exegesis.

Starting last Monday and continuing through next week, a 13-hour documentary series about the evolution of R&B; called “Let the Good Times Roll” is running for 13 consecutive nights in L.A., but you can’t see it on KCET. It’s a radio documentary, broadcast locally by KLON-FM (88.1), that dispenses with the smooth chronological story arc that has become synonymous with Burns’ style in favor of a saga that shambles amiably through the post-war years when the genre blossomed, stopping occasionally to take a deeper look at specific musical trends and sociological subplots.

Nabbing the rights to broadcast “Let the Good Times Roll” in L.A. is a bit of a coup for KLON, the jazz and blues station which has a lower profile than that of public radio powerhouse KCRW. But KLON program director Rene Engel, a veteran of L.A. public radio and an R&B; fanatic, was determined to claim it for the station. “The program works as a real unifier for us,” says Engel. “It’s the sort of thing we need to do. And the first two episodes, which touch on Central Avenue jazz and R&B; and doo-wop, really focus on L.A. music history.”

Narrated by R&B; legend Jerry Butler and featuring interviews with Ahmet Ertegun, Ben E. King and a host of others, “Let the Good Times Roll” takes in its subject with the voracious sweep and scope of a typical Burns survey. It also takes full advantage of radio’s intimacy to lure the listener as wizened, weather-beaten voices--some 300 in all--tell a mesmerizing tale of race and redemption forged in a furious musical tempest.

The series was conceived and produced by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that provides financial assistance to veteran R&B; musicians. The foundation is best known for its annual fund-raising Pioneer Awards ceremony, which recognizes the achievement of past legends.

“Susan Jenkins, the former executive director of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, had the idea of the series as a way of recognizing the pioneers of R&B;, aside from the awards show,” says series’ producer Lex Gillespie, whose $220,000 budget came from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts (Public Radio International is the show’s distributor). Although that’s a fraction of the $6 million Ken Burns spent on “Jazz,” Gillespie jokes, “I felt guilty spending all that money!”

Gillespie spent three years piecing together the raw materials for “Let the Good Times Roll,” interviewing 300 musicians, promoters, producers, radio deejays, songwriters and a host of others and amassing nearly 280 songs. In the process, he clocked thousands of air miles, traveling from Mississippi to Los Angeles in search of great anecdotes.

“I really tried not to tell the same stories that everyone has heard so many times,” he says. “When you’re talking about something like Motown, countless books have been written on the subject, so we tried to go behind the scenes, make it less personality-driven.”

Perhaps the wisest artistic choice was to devote entire episodes to often overlooked but crucial aspects of R&B;’s evolution. Episode 5, titled “Honkers, Bar Walkers and Screamers,” profiles the great sax players of R&B;’s golden age, which roughly spanned 1945 through 1970. Episode 6, “Bold, Bawdy and Banned,” examines the ways in which R&B; artists subverted mainstream radio with salacious “coded” lyrical content. Discussing his notorious song “Work With Me, Annie” on the show, Hank Ballard explains the logic of his thinly veiled euphemism: “Sex is work! You’ve gotta work to please your woman!”

“I’ve been around for 40 years, and a lot of the stuff in there, I didn’t know,” says Butler, a former member of the Impressions and current Rhythm and Blues Foundation board chairman. “It will be mind-blowing to all the music bluffs who think they know everything that came down the pike.”

Butler’s warm, avuncular presence as the series’ host provides “Let the Good Times Roll” with a living eyewitness who often throws the narrative into sharp relief with anecdotes taken from his autobiography, “Only the Strong Survive.” “I conducted a long oral history with him,” says Gillespie, “and I could just pull the stories out whenever they were appropriate.”

Lacking the hushed gravitas of “Jazz” and the scholarly rigor of author Peter Guralnick’s book, “Sweet Soul Music,” “Let the Good Times Roll” nonetheless does a fine job of chronicling the ways in which R&B; mirrored the social struggles of African Americans during the pre-civil-rights era. Although for years R&B; functioned as a shadow movement created by black musicians marginalized by segregation for a black audience eager to embrace it, the music sowed the seeds of social change when it began to cross over.

“I asked Julian Bond, the great civil rights leader, what role R&B; music played in the struggles for civil rights,” says Gillespie. “He said that when white kids started listening to black radio, that just opened the door just slightly for changes to take place. Almost like the Berlin Wall falling.”

“Let the Good Times Roll,” KLON-FM (88.1) 7 to 8 p.m. tonight through March 9.