How old is rock and roll

The term "rock 'n' roll" had been used since the early s as a blues song lyric meaning sexual intercourse. Freed was impressed with Mintz's customers' reaction to rock 'n' roll and began playing a rock 'n' roll record on his afternoon show as a novelty song sometime in early Freed and Mintz became good friends. His P. With Leo Mintz sitting in the studio at his side, handing him records, the music mix evolved into the first rock 'n' roll radio format. They were attracted to the music, but it was Freed's Moondog persona that created a very loyal audience, the Moondoggers.

Advertised as "the most terrible ball of them all," the event was called the "Moondog Coronation Ball" because Freed intended to crown himself the "King of the Moondoggers. Neither Freed or the Arena staff were prepared for the large crowd that showed up the night of the concert. After admitting the capacity of the hall, there were still thousands outside waiting to get in. When the music started, the huge crowd outside broke down the Arena doors.

That was because their songs were marketed to whites. The foundation on which this scheme rested was obviously extremely shaky, and several industry developments made it even shakier.

One was the rise of the local radio station. As a consequence of an F. By , the radio stations most people were listening to were local. And everyone listened. Ninety-six per cent of homes in the United States had a radio.

One article of faith in the music business is that repetition is a key to sales. Jukeboxes were another. By , there were close to half a million jukeboxes in the United States. This is why d. A song that was played a lot could be predicted to sell a lot, so distributors and retailers took notice.

Jukeboxes and local radio stations allowed the music audience to segment—a key development in a racially divided society. A third of the population of Memphis was African-American, for example, and so a small local station could survive profitably with programming for African-American listeners.

In fact, the first station with all-black programming in the United States it was owned by whites was in Memphis: WDIA, which began broadcasting, at two hundred and fifty watts, in King started his career there, as a disk jockey and on-air performer.

But the spread of jukeboxes and the success of local radio showed that the market, though small, was still there. As if on cue, a swarm of independent labels arose to manufacture and sell rhythm-and-blues records: Specialty, Aladdin, Modern, Swingtime, and Imperial all in Los Angeles—for a time, oddly, the capital of R.

All those labels were established between and Phillips actually came late to the party. Rock and roll became possible when it started to dawn on people that not everyone buying R. In , the year Phillips launched Sun, forty per cent of R.

The year before, a classical-music d. He was one of the first people to call R. By the time Sun opened for business, it was obvious that many white teen-agers wanted to listen to R. Sam Phillips knew it, but, as Guralnick says, everybody knew it. The problem was not how to create the market but how to exploit it.

Still, it raises an interesting question. The band had damaged an amplifier on the way to the studio, so it buzzed when music was played. Phillips considered this a delicious imperfection, and he kept it. I guess some song has to be the first. Why, if white kids were already buying records by black musicians, did the breakthrough performer have to be white? The answer is television. In , less than two per cent of American households had a television set.

By , more than two-thirds did. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows—hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como—that booked musical acts.

Since most television viewers got only three or four channels, the audience for those shows was enormous. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record. And sponsors avoided mixed-race shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate viewers in certain regions of the country.

Cole had to quit after a year. The stage was thus set for Elvis Presley. Presley was a walk-in. He showed up at the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of , when he was eighteen, to make a record for his mother. After three hours, they gave up. But Phillips thought of putting Presley together with a couple of country-and-Western musicians—Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played standup bass—and invited the three of them to come to the studio.

They did multiple takes; nothing seemed to click. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start from the beginning. After many takes, they had a record. Phillips had become friendly with a white disk jockey, Dewey Phillips, who played some R. Becoming friendly with d. Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, used to have a trunk full of alligator shoes when he drove around visiting local d.

Sam gave the recording to Dewey, and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation. To make a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. The point was that Elvis was not a pop singer who covered R. Plenty of pop singers did that. Elvis was a crossover artist. Guralnick says it was Phillips who persuaded Junior Parker that the train should have sixteen coaches. It was a fucking masterpiece.

Presley was made for television. Offstage, he was bashful and polite, but, with a microphone and in front of an audience, he was a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. He loved to perform. The rest is history. Originally, Phillips never had any idea of using Presley to cover an R. He called him in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley always believed he essentially was.

When Phillips decided to bring in two white musicians, Moore and Black, to back Presley, he had them try pop and country songs. Moore and Black thought the song was a joke, too. Related Story.

On Words is an an occasional series of essays in which faculty members write about some of their favorite words. Subscribe to the newsletter and be notified of future essays when they publish.

You May Also Like.