In the context of the music industry, the term was used exclusively to trumpet success in ticket sales until the 1950s. It was already familiar in discourse around civil rights: NAACP house organ the Crisis called a “Republican role in [a] Senate rules maneuver a ‘sellout’ ” in 1949. And it appears to have been first applied to musicians by black audiences and fellow musicians criticizing black gospel and jazz performers who were perceived as having tailored their acts to appeal to white audiences. Reflecting later on the commercial successes of saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, jazz critic Doug Ramsey wrote, “Cannonball was subjected to the standard abuse of jazz artists who win public acceptance; he was called a sellout. Show me a solvent jazz band and I’ll show you a band accused of selling out.”
Politics were part of this conversation, too. Jazz writer Eric Porter points out that “[m]any of the young men writing about jazz either had direct connections to the left or were more generally invested in left-liberal politics.” As a result, they had a tendency not only to analyze the music through the lens of whether it fulfilled an image of “the pluralistic and democratic America they idealized” but also to import invective terminology from the political front lines. Duke Ellington was attacked, wrote musician Randall Sandke, by roots-music producer and civil rights activist John Hammond for “losing the distinctive flavor [his music] once had, both because of the fact that he has added slick, un-negroid musicians to his band and because he himself is aping Tin Pan Alley composers for commercial reasons.” Ellington, in an unusually heated response, said that Hammond was acting in “his role an ‘ardent propagandist’ with connections to the Communist Party.”
It was in the folk-revival circuit, where older black artists met white purists with ties to the old left and (perhaps exaggerated) ideas about authenticity, that the tinder really caught. No one was attacked as personally or virulently as Bob Dylan in the wake of what critic Nat Hentoff called “the newest commercial boom, ‘folk-rock’ … an outgrowth, in large part, of Dylan’s recent decision—decried as a ‘sellout’ by folknik purists—to perform with a rock ’n’ roll combo.” When he was asked in one 1965 interview about the hate mail he received after going electric, Dylan described being called a “Sellout, fink, Fascist, Red, everything in the book.”