Although several issues arise when looking at white covers of songs originally sung/written by black artists, one thing that really stood out to me was the practice of white singers removing the more "sexual" or even slightly provocative lines in the original songs in order to make them more appropriate for the radio and its white audiences.
Some of the line changes made a bit of sense, such as changing "way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through" to "wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice" in "Shake Rattle and Roll"; that's certainly a more obviously inappropriate line I can see offending older radio listeners, or parents worried about their children listening to anything risqué. However, some lines are so subtle that you'd need to be listening closely to catch (such as "she rocks to the east, she rocks to the west" which was changed to "I've been to the east, I've been to the west" in "Tutti Frutti"), or one with only the slightest connection to anything sexual ("get out of that bed" was turned into "get out in that kitchen" in "Shake Rattle and Roll").
I find it interesting just how far white singers (and most likely their producers) went to avoid having anything that could be vaguely construed as sexual in their music. Obviously, the black artists had no such worries about the content of their music, which suggests that the white singers were altering the songs for the purpose of making them more popular. It makes sense that they would want their music to be popular; that is part of the commercial music game. However, the fact that they felt like a song needed to be changed to become popular does suggest that these singers were, at least partially, more interested in getting songs onto charts than honoring the original song. The other problem this act of changing songs suggests is that those covering songs by black artists and those listening to the covers believed that the original songs were not good enough on their own, and needed to be "purified" by white singers to be listened to and enjoyed more.
It's understandable for radio audiences to be worried about sexual content in their music, but one point to be made from that is that all of those "purified" songs I mentioned were songs by white artists, while the black artists were the ones being left off the charts because of the content of their songs. While Americans made an effort to control the sexual content in songs being played in the fifties, they also damaged the ability of black singers to hear their songs on the radio, unless they chose to remove the more risqué content or let them be covered by white singers.
