Rock and Roll

by Read Listen Learn

Rock & Roll: the name is famous around the world but it means different things to different people. To some, it means any popular chart music enjoyed by the young – an opinion expressed in the Billy Joel song, “It’s All Rock & Roll To Me”.

To others, it’s synonymous with ‘Rock’, the very big category of music that descended from Rock & Roll, a kind of fast dance music that had started to emerge from the black American sub-culture in the mid-1950s, and had transformed into other things by the late 1960s. It’s this original Rock & Roll that we’ll be looking at.

Most musicologists will tell you that Rock & Roll started as far back as the 1920s and 1930s. And, indeed, Youtube is full of videos claiming to show the first ever Rock & Roll record. In their day, all of these early Rock & Roll records would have been called ‘Rhythm & Blues’ or ‘Race Music’, in other words, non-religious dance music for black people.

So, naturally, the most important influences on ‘Race Music’ were Afro-American. Gospel, Jazz, Ragtime and so on. The white contribution, at this stage, was the instruments, such as piano, saxophone and trumpet, or guitar which don’t exist in African music.

In a rigidly segregated society like the southern U.S. fifty and one hundred years ago or more, the music might have stayed in local black communities in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia, getting a little air-time on tiny, local black radio stations. However, the intense racism of white Southerners and the deep economic crisis of the Depression caused very large numbers of black Southerners to migrate northwards to industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit or New York. They took their Rhythm & Blues with them and, when they arrived in these large northern cities, they found radio stations and recording studios everywhere. They also found a large black audience with steady work and a few dollars to spend on records or live music in dancehalls. Here, in the northern cities, a black musician could make a living.

There was another key connection in these cities that was essential to making Rock & Roll famous and popular. They were ethnically diverse places: people had come to the urban U.S.A. from all over the world. Ethnic groups like Jews, Turks, the Lebanese and Armenians combined a certain talent for business with a racial ambiguity. In the America of the 1940s, a Turk might be able to walk freely around the black ghetto and gain the partial trust of black musicians in a way a fully ‘white’ person could not. At the same time, a Turk would be just white enough to move in the white business world. They could book a black band into the best ‘Whites Only’ concert halls or studios. Or get them a good deal with a white-owned major record company.

The great migration of blacks to the cities also put the rural black musicians in contact with white and Hispanic musicians. In the 1940s, with internal migration happening so fast, mixed neighbourhoods would spring up before the city authorities could zone them as ‘black’ or ‘white’ residential areas. The Rock & Roll singer, Elvis Presley, grew up in just this kind of neighbourhood in 1940s Memphis in Tennessee.

By 1940, all the ingredients were in place but it took the Second World War to spark Rock & Roll off. It was in the war years that some white DJs and music journalists first started using the term ‘Rock & Roll’; a little shocking at the time because it was black American slang for ‘having sex’.

The War also took a lot of the young men away and, so, big bands were hard to keep ‘big’ and dances generally had lower numbers than before. The new style bands would have just six or seven players so, they started to sing and play louder. Which wasn’t really necessary because new technology, like microphones, speakers and electric guitars, was making the music much louder anyway. So was the volume button on radios and TVs. Any parent of teenagers could tell you; and teenagers were the target audience.

The idea of a ‘teenager’ was new at the time. Before the Second World War, you were either a child or you worked and, so, were an adult. Now, there was a large sector of society in the U.S. which continued studying to 18 or 22. They were young and energetic; they had plenty of free time, access to cars and, usually, quite a bit of spending money. So, many of them wanted to buy exciting black Rock & Roll records, or go to mixed concerts. But most white American parents were far too racist at this time to be comfortable with this crossing of racial lines, particularly where the white girls were concerned: many young white girls were ‘in love’ with Elmore James. He had a beautiful voice and a handsome face and he moved on stage like a tiger but he was black and he was not welcome in most white homes even through the TV or record-player. The solution came first with ‘Bill Haley and the Comets’ and then with Elvis Presley.

Bill Haley and his band were all white but they played hot, fast Rock & Roll music in the black way. Their big hit was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (1954). It was a great song that did a lot to make the music more popular all over the world. The problem was that neither Bill Haley nor his musicians seemed to have any sex appeal.

For Elvis Presley, this was not at all the problem. He could sing beautifully, and his years in a racially mixed gospel church as a boy had left him with a very black-sounding singing voice. He also danced on stage like a black man, thrusting his hips at the girls as they screamed in delight. His first single was ‘That’s Alright Mama’, a classic Afro-Blues. The B-side was ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, a white ‘Country & Western’ favourite. Because both black and white music had been mixed on the same record, many radio stations in Memphis and other parts of the South would not give it air-time. They said it would encourage the mixing, social or sexual, of the races.

But the times were changing and the U.S.A. was about to go through a violent social revolution in which many businesses and public institutions were legally forced to serve and accept black people. The music, Rock & Roll, was bringing American youth, black and white, together and helping to unite the new generation. Suddenly, conservative and reactionary America realised that the new sound had become much more than just popular music.

Rock and Roll came to be seen as subversive to a racially segregated America and there was a reaction against it in more and more places – often it was banned from juke-boxes and radio station playlists. Some Rock & Roll DJs had started to take bribes to play some records more than others and, when the scandal, known as ‘Payola’, broke, Rock & Roll got an even worse reputation. By the early 1960s, the big record companies had taken back control of the pop music scene and were promoting white artists like Bobby Darrin and Doris Day; while Frank Sinatra was enjoying a big comeback.

However, Rock & Roll was not dead and, as the Sixties grew old and the hair grew long, bands like ‘The Doors’, ‘The Rolling Stones’, ‘The Beatles’ and ‘The Grateful Dead’ started by covering black Rock & Roll standards and then went on to transform this into ‘Rock’, the music that would dominate the 1970s and generate many fusions and innovations. Rock & Roll, and its ‘son’ Rock music, is first and foremost about an attitude of alienation from society; of injustice to fight against but, above all, of the right to have a good time. This is why it is the defining teenage music. In the words of ‘Danny and the Juniors’:

“Rock & Roll is here to stay, It will never die...”