A term sometimes used broadly to refer to the popular music of the second half of the 20th century, but which often narrowly designates a style of the 1950s. The phrase can be found as early as the 1930s in blues lyrics, where it typically served as a euphemism for sex. Bill Haley and his Comets were the first rock and roll group to be listed on Billboard charts with their song Crazy Man Crazy (1953), and when their 1955 hit Rock Around the Clock went to number one, the sounds of rock and roll became ubiquitous. The genre is often described as a merger of black rhythm and blues with white country music, with more emphasis on the contributions of black musicians; indeed, some historians argue that rock and roll began in the early 1950s, when many white teenagers began listening and dancing to rhythm and blues.
Rock and roll combined boogie-woogie rhythms, song forms and vocal styles from both the blues and Tin Pan Alley popular song, hillbilly yelping and the ecstatic shouts of gospel. Increasingly, electric guitar solos replaced the honking saxophone solos of rhythm and blues, and straight quaver rhythms became an alternative to swing rhythms, with either option providing strong rhythmic drive. Gillett identifies five distinct subgenres of rock and roll during the mid-1950s: the northern band rock and roll of Bill Haley and others, New Orleans dance blues, the Memphis country rock of Elvis Presley and other Rockabilly singers, Chicago rhythm and blues and vocal-group rock and roll.
The development of rock and roll was facilitated by the migrations of millions of black and white southerners to urban areas in the north and west of the USA, post-war prosperity, the break-up of the large swing bands after the war, the rise of independent local record labels and the growth of mass-mediated culture, which accelerated the mixing of traditions, sounds, images and audiences. Although segregation kept black and white people apart in many ways, radio, recordings and television crossed racial boundaries and facilitated cultural interactions. White teenagers acquired new idols in black musicians, which undermined social authority and helped make rock and roll a target for governmental and other forms of repression. It is often dismissed as a music of rebellious teenagers, but rhythm and blues had long been an adult music, and Chuck Berry and Bill Haley were both over 30 when they had their biggest hits. More importantly, such a characterization ignores the serious challenges the music posed to dominant ideas about race, sexuality, class and social authority. Rock and Roll was attacked partly out of racism and partly because of an accurate assessment of its power to legitimize alternative ideals and norms. In its various forms, rock and roll brought the styles and sensibilities of black and white working-class southerners to the centre of American culture. From there the music quickly spread, primarily via mass mediation, around the globe – especially but not exclusively to English-speaking areas, most notably England. The forms, instrumentation, vocal styles and rhythms of rock and roll were adopted with little variation merged with local styles. In some cases, such as African Guitar-based genres and Jamaican reggae, rock and roll remixed with the musics of Africa and the diaspora from which it had originally risen. Rock and roll continues to have an impact on popular music around the world, from the rock and heavy metal of Brazil, Scandinavia and Indonesia to Hungarian punk and Australian rap.
See also Pop.
C. Gillett: The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll (New York, 1984, 2/1996)
E. Ward, G. Stokes and K. Tucker: Rock of Ages: the Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll (New York, 1986)
D. Bradley: Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll: Popular Music in Britain 1955–1964 (Buckingham, 1992)
J. Dawson and S. Propes: What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? (Boston, 1992)
G. Lipsitz: ‘“Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens”: the Class Origins of Rock and Roll’, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, IL, 1994), 303–33
ROBERT WALSER