ROCK 'N' ROLL
Restless Blood and Jungle Rhythms
At a time when America's most serious domestic problem in the minds of many people was the integration of schools, when federal integration laws were being defied across the nation, when angry parents were rioting in the streets to protest being forced to share public facilities with blacks, American teenagers became infected in epidemic proportions with an insatiable urge to dance to what their parents called jungle rhythms. Rock 'n' roll was a musical revolution in which young people, white and black, united in spirit, if not in person, outside segregated schoolhouses to adopt a criterion for musical judgment that had never been widely accepted before. Emotive expression laid over an insistent backbeat were the primary elements of the music they danced to—not pleasing melodies, clever lyrics, or even virtuosity.
Soul
If a performer had soul—the ability to experience and express deep feeling—other qualities in his music were incidental. Thus, a not particularly talented white prerock singer named Johnny Ray who writhed, agonized, fell to the floor, and cried what seemed to be real tears was hailed for his raw talent because he sang from the heart. An extremely animated, gaudily dressed black singer named Little Richard, whose talent lay in barely controlling a series of musical yells and screams, became a star because he was able to communicate his ecstatic emanations with unusual effectiveness and his rhythm never faltered.
Turn Me Loose
Rock 'n' roll was an expression of independence by adolescents socially secure enough to reject their parents' musical tastes, which valued songs in which primal impulses had been refined beyond recognition. Vic Damone, Peggy Lee, Pat Boone, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, even Nat King Cole sang songs that lacked
relevance to young listeners. It was too inhibited, too class-conscious, and too slow. The young audience of the 1950s responded to basic musical expression that they could understand and that they could even perform, if so moved. Most of all it had to be music with a dance beat—not a foxtrot, closer to a jitterbug.
"Got a Backbeat, You Can't Lose It."
The formula was simple. As Ray Charles observed, "When they get a couple of guitars together with a backbeat, that's rock and roll." Elaborate instrumentation was not required—only a singer, a rhythm guitar, a bass guitar, and, most important, drums—overstated rhythm was the foundation. Simple were mandatory. The music had to be loud, and a little distortion was acceptable, but it had to sound authentic, unlike highly rehearsed, clean sounding popular music. The quality of the singer's voice and his articulation were secondary to soulful expression. The words did not matter; the feeling did. The music was reduced to elemental values: basic chords, simple melodies, uncomplicated arrangements. One did not have to be practiced to become a rock 'n' roll musician.
R&B
Rock 'n' roll sprang from a southern blues tradition that came in two forms—white and black. Black blues and its city brother rhythm and blues, or R&B, had their roots in slavery, borrowed their rhythms from the church, and took their vitality from the intensity with which people who endured hard lives enjoyed good times. Black blues in America was nearly as old as the nation itself, yet in the 1950s it was still classified as race music and was sold and broadcast narrowly to black audiences. In the South that meant that it reached poor, white audiences as well, because the towns were small and segregation had almost as much to do with social class as with race.
Hillbilly Music
White blues was called hillbilly music. It was songs of grief, loneliness, and sometimes rough-edged humor by rural musicians closely in touch with folk traditions. It was the music of poor rural people, who sang and played soulfully on the instruments at hand. Hillbilly music was crude, simple, rhythm-bound, and cloyingly sentimental, so much so that when country fans moved to the city, they were quick to turn their backs on that unsophisticated music associated with heartache and failure.
EL DORADOS' TOUR
Late in 1955 the five-man rock 'n' roll band El Dorados went on a fifteen-city tour that lasted two months. They began in South Bend, Indiana, on 6 November and ended in Detroit the day after Christmas. In between they played, in order, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Gary, Pittsburgh, Ypsilanti, Atlanta, Newark, Newport News, Philadelphia, Canton, Lima, and Flint. Over the course of the tour they grossed a total of $4186.80, of which the agent took 10 percent. Their nightly earnings ranged from $150 for the concert in Boston to $800 for the date in Philadelphia.
By the end of the tour each band member had earned $753.62. The agent maintained a drawing account for expenses on the road. On 31 December the account balance was $132.62: each musician had $26.52 to show for his work.
Source:
Philip Ennis, The Severnth Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992).
Sun Records
In the early 1950s record producer Sam Phillips remarked that all he needed to become a millionaire was a white country boy to sing black music. Young black R&B musicians were innovative and energetic, and their music had a strong rhythmic base and an aura of sensuality that he knew would appeal to young audiences. At the time, black blues and R&B records were not sold in white record stores, available on jukeboxes in. white restaurants, or played on white radio stations. Of nearly eleven thousand disc jockeys in the country, only seven hundred played R&B. However attractive ethnic black music was, it could not be sold outside the black community.
So Phillips determined to find a white band that could perform with its own intensity, rhythmic drive, and honesty of expression.
City Rock
Meanwhile, a disc jockey named Alan Freed was experimenting in Cleveland and New York with the concept of what he called rhythm reviews, in which a program of black R&B groups played for white audiences. The reaction was surprisingly enthusiastic. He drew crowds of three times capacity and thus even had to turn fans away. He also began broadcasting a late-night radio program in New York in which he played race music with an unorthodox presentation. The program was popular, and Freed was encouraged to find a way to bring R&B to a wider audience. The solution was clear to him when he heard Elvis Presley and saw the sales of a sanitized version of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" by a white country-roots band called Bill Haley and his Comets soar after release of the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle in which they played the song: Freed understood that his audience would respond to a variation on the black music he had been promoting. He turned to what he called rock 'n' roll, which was two parts rhythm and blues, one part country, and one part pure performance.
"Gotta Be Rock 'n' Roll Music.…"
After Elvis a wave of rock 'n' roll musicians overwhelmed the industry. The success of such stars as Buddy Holly from Texas, Jerry Lee Lewis from Memphis, and Eddie Cochran from Nashville opened the way for presentation of black groups to white audiences. Chuck Berry, Chubby Checker, Lloyd Price, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and a series of singing groups, both white and black, took over the airways and elbowed their way to the frontstage of the entertainment industry. By the end of the decade much of the resources of the record and entertainment industries were devoted to rock 'n' roll, and radio found its salvation in rock music at a time when traditional programming was being challenged by television. Rock 'n' roll was the music of youth and the music of the future. By 1959 it was also very big business.
