The Emergence of Rock and Roll

Music and the Rise of American Youth Culture

Mitchell K. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415833127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135053574
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

Rock and roll music evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of African American blues, country, pop, and gospel music produced a new musical genre. Even as it captured the ears of the nation, rock and roll was the subject of controversy and contention. The music intertwined with the social, political, and economic changes reshaping America and contributed to the rise of the youth culture that remains a potent cultural force today. A comprehensive understanding of post-World War II U.S. history would be incomplete without a basic knowledge of this cultural phenomenon and its widespread impact.

In this short book, bolstered by primary source documents, Mitchell K. Hall explores the change in musical style represented by rock and roll, changes in technology and business practices, regional and racial implications of this new music, and the global influences of the music.

The Emergence of Rock and Roll explains the huge influence that one cultural moment can have in the history of a nation.

CHAPTER 1 The Early Years of Rock and Roll

DOI: 10.4324/9780203501450-1

America’s post-World War II baby boom lasted from 1946 through 1964, and produced over 76 million babies. Even before they became teenagers, fears about their impact surfaced. Social commentators, writers, and filmmakers all worried about growing rates of juvenile delinquency, underage drinking, rebellion against authority, and even clothing styles. Among all these concerns, nothing threatened the established order more than rock and roll. The music defined a new youth culture and marked a separation between generations.

The birth of rock and roll represented a dramatic shift in the style of mainstream music in the second half of the twentieth century. Evolving from multiple styles that came largely from the nation’s musical margins, it ultimately challenged not only prevailing cultural tastes but social standards as well. Known initially as music of youthful rebellion, it eventually captured a dominant place in American life and represents a revolutionary change in American popular culture.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, professional songwriters and music publishers concentrated in New York City, turning it into the nation’s music capital. Many of the publishing houses collected in an area of Manhattan that became known as Tin Pan Alley. Named for the tinny sound of composers pounding out tunes on their studio pianos, the term later referred generically to much of mainstream popular music. The music of Tin Pan Alley, although clearly successful when measured by its pervasive exposure and national sales, did not appeal to all audiences. Its composers, largely confined to the major cities of the northeast and southern California, best related to the educated, white, middle and upper classes. African Americans, working-class southern whites, and Latinos were among the populations that created their own separate musical traditions, but they generally remained in the margins of society. Over time, however, these styles inevitably intermingled.

The rise of rock and roll coincided with other significant developments in the music industry. The recording business assumed the dominant position by the early 1950s, when income from record sales surpassed sheet music sales. On the eve of World War II, RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca—all headquartered in New York—had established themselves as the nation’s leading record companies. They were joined in the immediate postwar years by Capitol and MGM in Los Angeles, and Mercury out of Chicago. These six majors utilized a standard production process, dividing the labor as writers, musicians, singers, and producers each performed their particular task. Each company had extensive promotion and distribution systems that allowed them to market their products nationally. Small independent record companies looking to enter or expand their business often targeted the largely ignored rhythm and blues (R&B) market to make a living. Independent labels such as Chess (Chicago), Atlantic (New York), King (Cincinnati), Sun (Memphis), and Imperial (Los Angeles) served as the main catalyst for rock and roll’s development.

Happy Days

The 1950s is frequently portrayed as a lighthearted if somewhat sterile decade of innocence before the exciting confrontations of the sixties. This nostalgic view ignores the complex world faced by its inhabitants. As the war years receded into memory, American life adjusted to a decade of relative peace. If some people settled into a rather mundane conformity, others faced sobering challenges. The calm demeanor of President Dwight Eisenhower and the nation’s general economic prosperity may have distracted attention from more troubling events. The United States pursued a global Cold War against communism, engaged in a shooting war in Korea, and endured the indignities of McCarthyism. The postwar housing boom led many Americans to the comforts of suburbia and enhanced the car culture. The emergence of television reinforced conservative family values and carefully controlled sexual behavior. Challenging traditional behavior were the Kinsey Reports and Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine and philosophy.

Young people recognized the growing frustration among black Americans over their inferior social and legal position. In fact, college-age students, adolescents, and even children participated with adults in publicly demanding change. The 1954 US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education marked a key step toward ending racial segregation. Just as important were the measures taken by a grassroots civil rights movement. Sparked by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, black citizens and their white allies made gradual progress against widespread resistance to the goal of black equality.

The status quo was also under challenge in the field of popular music. Marginal musical styles, neatly segregated into rhythm and blues and country and western categories, were infiltrating mainstream music. Country star Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya” spent six weeks camped out on the pop charts in the fall of 1952. White pop singer Johnny Ray’s number one hit “Cry” topped the rhythm and blues chart that same year during a fifteen-week stay, and Bill Haley and His Comets sent “Dim, Dim the Lights” to the rhythm and blues charts in January 1955.

More consistently, black artists, sometimes after years of success on the rhythm and blues charts, found a mainstream audience and made their way onto the pop charts. In the first years of the 1950s, Joe Turner, Fats Domino, and Ruth Brown all made brief appearances on the pop chart. Vocal groups had slightly more success, with the Dominoes, Orioles, and Crows all making the pop top twenty. As the Greek philosopher Plato is often paraphrased, “When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.” In the early 1950s, America’s walls were shaking.

Popular Music

During the 1940s and early 1950s, middle-class adult tastes determined American popular music. The most successful artists included big band leaders Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, jazz-influenced soloists Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, crooners Bing Crosby and Perry Como, vocal groups such as the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers, and the varied work of other stars such as Frankie Laine, Dinah Shore, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, and Nat “King” Cole. Songs from the Broadway theater and novelty tunes often found their way into the upper reaches of the pop charts. Prior to the rock and roll era, the music business—from singers, writers, and instrumentalists to owners, producers, and technicians—was dominated by adults creating and promoting music for a predominantly adult audience. It was, however, written to appeal to a broad family audience that encompassed children as well. This encouraged songs that avoided suggestive or potentially controversial topics. Pop lyrics were usually innocent observations about romantic love, so inoffensive that critics note their blandness and blind optimism. The major record labels and radio networks tried to maximize their profits by appealing to the broadest possible audience. In practice this meant musical styles favored primarily by middle-class whites. Until the 1950s, this was the music listened to by most American teenagers.

Postwar Youth Culture

American society in the years following World War II experienced a momentous social transformation. Traditionally, teenage children rather quickly acquired adult responsibilities and largely adopted established cultural tastes. These expectations changed in the decade after the war. Middle-class adolescents with a degree of economic security enjoyed the luxury of avoiding adult responsibilities longer than ever before. Essentially freed from substantial work obligations, teens in the 1950s used their increased leisure time to develop common interests that were unique to their peers, establishing a distinct generational identity. The desire of teens to have a subculture of their own, apart from adults, led them to seek out or create new experiences. When it became apparent that young people had their own disposable income, marketers supplied or created a range of distinct products including clothes, literature, and motion pictures for this new youth culture. It was this generation that read Seventeen and Mad magazines, watched The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause in movie theaters, and wore leather jackets or poodle skirts. After a generation of depression and war, the return of peace and prosperity allowed parents hoping to restore a more stable family life to commit more of their time and resources to the needs and desires of their children.

Even as they enjoyed these new possibilities, young people felt the uneasiness of the domestic social and political conformity of the Cold War era. Seeking a mild form of resistance to this discomfort, many chose the exciting blend of diverse, marginalized musical styles that became rock and roll. Writers Don Hibbard and Carol Kaleialoha argue that “rock ‘n’ roll provided its predominantly middle-class audience with a vent for its discontent, a form of excitement, and a sense of group identity, while it pursued its socially prescribed goals.”¹

Music was the heartbeat of the new youth culture, and more than most forms of popular entertainment, rock and roll depended on this culture for its growth. The conventional and predictable offerings of mainstream music provided few direct links to the everyday lives of teenagers. To many white teens, the black rhythm and blues they heard on the radio offered an exciting sound that was further enhanced by their parents’ disapproval. Many adults criticized the music not only for its erosion of established racial boundaries, but also because of its often overt sexuality and its association with youthful crime.

Records, Radio, and Television

Radio played a key role in the emergence of rock and roll. Postwar technological advances forced a dramatic change in electronic enter tainment. Although the number of radio stations in the US doubled between 1945 and 1950, they faced a new and formidable competitor. As early as the late 1940s, networks began shifting many of their variety and comedy shows from radio to television. When the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on licensing new television stations in 1952, radio programmers faced a crisis. With large gaps appearing in their programming, radio stations turned in large numbers to recorded music to fill their airtime.

Disc Jockeys

The thousands of disc jockeys (DJs) across the nation that played these records generally made their own decisions about what to play, and the most successful emphasized the regional tastes of their audience. Listeners tuning in could hear an eclectic variety of music. While parents could at least monitor their children’s concert attendance or record purchases, there was no way to block the airwaves. In the late 1940s, homes with a television were rare, but nearly every household owned at least one radio, and cars increasingly had them as well. These changes contributed to an erosion of existing racial and social barriers. A growing number of DJs, both black and white, enjoyed the rhythm and blues music marketed to black audiences but that was rarely heard on the majority of white-owned radio stations. In the early 1950s, however, white teens in increasing numbers listened to radio stations playing black rhythm and blues. For many, this was their first exposure to the heavier rhythms and more crude lyrics of black popular music. Smaller but still significant numbers of whites bought R&B records by Chess, Atlantic, Imperial, King, and others. Disc jockeys who recognized and developed local cross-racial audiences for this music, and who played rhythm and blues with personal flair, did a great deal to spread what became known as rock and roll. Broadcasters who recognized this trend programmed more R&B to help offset their losses to television.

White DJs who attracted big audiences for playing rhythm and blues included Dewey Phillips of WHBQ in Memphis, whose popular “Red, Hot, and Blue” program began in 1949. Other notables include Hoss Allen, John Richbourg, and Gene Nobles of WLAC in Nashville, Bill Randle of Cleveland station WERE, and Hunter Hancock of KFVD in Los Angeles. Listeners could not always identify the race of their favorite DJ by their voice, which only added to their mystery. Only sixteen of the approximately 3,000 DJs in 1947 were black, but the most well-known included Tommy Smalls in New York, Jocko Henderson in Philadelphia, and Rufus Thomas of WDIA in Memphis.² The growing popularity of R&B, however, brought rapid change. By 1953, the number of black DJs had risen to over 500.³

The most famous DJ of the decade was probably Alan Freed. He debuted his “Moondog House” show for Cleveland’s WJW in the summer of 1951 after his sponsor noticed teens buying large numbers of rhythm and blues records. Although the R&B he played was directed at a black audience, whites tuned in as well, and they liked what they heard. As much as anyone, Freed popularized the term “rock and roll” to identify this style of music. The success of the “Moondog” show made him a local celebrity as he shouted over the music, rang cowbells, and pounded on a phone book to emphasize the beat. Freed organized a number of rhythm and blues concerts, but his first show in March 1952 was a disaster. Nearly 16,000 people, nearly all of them black, showed up to an arena that seated 10,000. The crowd overwhelmed the security staff and in the ensuing chaos the police cancelled the program. Whites criticized Freed for assembling a black mob while the local black press attacked him for promoting “low-brow … frequently obscene” music.⁴

Despite this setback, Freed enjoyed great success in Cleveland, and was lured to New York station WINS in September 1954. His new show, “the Rock and Roll Party,” went into national syndication and helped turn WINS into the city’s top radio station. Freed emerged as a strong promoter of original rhythm and blues artists over cover artists. He built a reputation through organizing local concerts and traveling shows of R&B acts, expanding the white audience for R&B music. He also appeared in a number of movies that showcased several musical artists and portrayed rock and roll as wholesome entertainment. Freed’s visibility made him a natural target for both rock and roll supporters and critics, but cities acro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• 1 The Early Years of Rock and Roll
• 2 Decline and Renewal
• 3 The Beatles and the British Invasion
• 4 Psychedelia
• 5 Rock Splinters
• Documents
• Selected Bibliography
• Index