"Rock and Roll" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot! Today we’re asking “Where did Rock & Roll come from?”, and we’ll see how the answer ties back to our video about the origin of the guitar. Are you ready to rock? Then let’s go, cat, go!

The phrase rock & roll has been around much longer than rock & roll music itself. Rocking and rolling has been used since at least the 17th century to refer to the motion of a ship at sea, reflecting both the forward-and-backward rocking and side-to-side rolling motions. It was then picked up metaphorically with sexual connotations in, believe it or not, sea shanties — they were already using the phrase to refer to the ship’s motion after all. So for instance in the song “Johnny Boker” (first printed in 1879 though no doubt the song is rather older in oral tradition) is the line “Oh do, my Johnny Boker, Come rock and roll me over, Do, my Johnny Boker, do”. Sea shanties, by the way, are a type of work song, sung by the sailors as they do their work aboard ship. Work songs are a common phenomenon, found in many cultures, times, and contexts, as they help to regulate the rhythms of the labour and keep everyone in time. We’ll come back to work songs in a minute. Meanwhile, the expression rock and roll was then picked up in African American Vernacular English, again often with a sexual connotation, and used as well in reference to music and dancing, appearing in jazz and blues songs, as well as in hymns and spirituals in reference to spiritual rapture, as well as the words rock or roll individually. So for instance there’s the 1922 song “My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)” by blues singer Trixie Smith that goes “My man rocks me with one steady roll / There's no slippin’ when he once takes hold / I looked at the clock and the clock struck one / I said ‘Now daddy, ain’t we got fun’ / Oh, he was rockin’ me with one steady roll”, and the 1938 song “Rock Me” by gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe that goes “You hold me in the bosom / Till the storms of life is over / Rock me in the cradle of our love / Only feed me till I want no more / Then you take me to your blessed home above”. Even the dance instructor Irene Castle, whose story was recounted in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, created a dance called “The Castle Rock and Roll” in 1939, which she performed at the Dancing Masters of America convention at the Hotel Astor. But the Hotel Astor is another story.

Now the word rock (meaning “sway”, not the one meaning “stone”, which is unrelated) comes from Old English roccian meaning “to rock or move (a child gently to and fro)” from Proto-Germanic *rukkon- “to move to and fro, to rock”, probably ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *reuə- “to smash, knock down, tear out, dig up, uproot”, also the source of the words rag, rug, and rough. This root also comes into Greek as orussein “to dig” and Latin as runcare “to weed out, root up, clear of weeds”. As for roll, it comes from Old French roeller “to roll, wheel around”, from Medieval Latin rotulare, from the diminutive rotula of Latin rota “wheel”, ultimately from the PIE root *ret- “to run, roll”. From Latin rota come words such as rotate, rotund, and round, as well as the word control, from Anglo-Norman French contreroller “exert authority”, from Medieval Latin contrarotulus, made up of contra “against” and that diminutive rotula “little wheel”. This sense development comes from a medieval system of checking accounts by comparing them to a duplicate register or “counter-roll”. Another probable prefixed word from Latin rota is prune, from Old French proignier “to cut back (vines), prune”, probably made up from Latin pro- “forth, before, in front” and *retundiare “to round off”, from rota, so basically meaning “to round off in front”. Now all this weeding and pruning brings us to some words that turn out to be related to that iconic rock & roll instrument, the guitar, so I’ll briefly remind you of that word’s etymology (which I explored at more length in my previous video). Guitar probably comes from the Persian chartar meaning ‘four-strings’, with the char- part going back the PIE *kwetwer- “four” and the -tar part going back to the PIE root *ten- “to stretch”. And that root also gives us tendril, something you’d prune off a vine, either through Latin tendere “to stretch” or through Latin tener “soft, delicate, tender, yielding”, but, more importantly to our story, the first part of guitar is connected to quarters, which has the special sense of slave quarters on a plantation in the southern United States where enslaved people did that kind of rough agricultural labour described by the Latin word runcare. From Latin quartarius “fourth part”, quarter came to be used by the 1520s to refer to a portion of a town (and not necessarily a fourth part of it), as in the French quarter, the Jewish quarter, or the Latin quarter of Paris. From that it developed the military sense of “soldiers’ lodgings” by 1570, and from 1724 in the particular formulation the quarters,with the definite article, it came to refer to the lodgings in which enslaved Black people lived in those southern plantations. The particular agricultural labour they were made to do was the tending and harvesting of cash crops, in particular cotton. And it’s in this rough agricultural labour that work songs come into play again, in this case in the form of the field holler, a kind of proto-blues sung by enslaved workers on the southern US plantations. The field holler was described in 1853 as a “long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto” and later prison songs recorded from the 1930s also seem to fit this description (because prison labour is really just a continuation of state-sponsored slavery and is legal in the US to this day), and also sometimes involved call and response, characteristic of later gospel music. Musically the field holler descends from the musical traditions of West Africa where the majority of enslaved people were taken from, and some scholars have also argued for connections between the field holler and Islamic music and the Islamic call to prayer, since something like 30% of enslaved people transported from Africa to the US are estimated to have been Muslim. If so, then Islamic musical influence can be found both in the history of the guitar, which, as I discussed in my other video, came from Persia to Al-Andalus with the Muslim conquerors, and from there spread to England and then the Americas, and in the field holler, which was the foundation of the blues and African American spirituals, and thereby rock & roll and indeed most African American music. And you can hear more about gospel music, which also developed out of these contexts, in our video “Good News”. Now one particular element of the blues that can be traced back to its West African origin is the use of blue notes, that is flattened notes in a scale. These could be microtonal shifts in pitch, but the term is also used to refer to full semitone drops in pitch, especially on the 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes of the scale, and using these flattened notes gives rise to blues progressions, most famously the twelve-bar blues, and blues scales, and that’s why, as any rock & roll guitar player can tell you, you can use the minor pentatonic scale, often with additional flattened notes like the flat 5, to play a guitar solo over chords in a major key. It creates a tension between the major chords and the minor scale that gives both the blues and rock & roll its characteristic sound. And if you want a more technical analysis of the twelve-bar blues and how it works, check out 12Tone’s video on the topic.

Speaking of the blues, the word blue, which comes from Old French bleu with a number of different colour connotations from “pale, pallid, wan, light-colored” to “blond” to “discolored” to “blue, blue-gray”, gained its sense of “sad, sorrowful, afflicted with low spirits” from the sense of “lead-colored, blackish-blue, darkened as if by bruising” (think “black and blue”) on the notion of having a bruised heart or feelings. That bruised sense might have come from the Old Norse cognate bla “livid, lead-colored”, as the Old French word comes from Germanic sources such as Frankish *blao, from Proto-Germanic *blæwaz, also the source of an Old English cognate blæwen, though it’s not a very common word in Old English. Ultimately these “blue” words can be traced back to PIE *bhle-was “light-colored, blue, blond, yellow”, from the root *bhel- “to shine, flash, burn” also “shining white” and forming words for bright colours, which is also the source of the colour words black (because of the burned colour left after a fire), French blanc meaning “white”, as well as the word bleach. Colour words can be strange sometimes. But in any case, blue with the notion of “sad” gave rise to the term blues to refer to the musical genre, first attested in two song titles from 1912, “Dallas Blues” by Hart Wand and “Memphis Blues” by W.C. Handy sometimes regarded as the Father of the Blues, though the term may have been in use from the late 19th century. Also dating to the late 19th century is the derogatory use of the word blue to refer to a black person having (or regarded as having) a very dark complexion, especially in African-American usage (or representations of African-American speech). The origin of the word jazz is one of the most debated etymologies in musical terminology. Attempts have been made to connect the word to New Orleans as the place of origin of jazz music, with suggestions that it comes from the name Jezebel or the word jasmine, both supposedly connected with prostitution there in the 19th century, but early on ragtime seems to have been the preferred term for the style of music. Another suggestion connects it to an itinerant black musician named Jasbo Brown (probably short for Jasper), though there isn’t any early evidence for this either. Most likely it started out as a baseball term meaning “energy, excitement, pep”, as in a jazz ball because of its wobbly and energetic curved trajectory, first attested in 1912 in Las Angeles (the musical sense isn’t attested until 1915 in Chicago), and probably came from an earlier word jasm meaning “energy, spirit, pep” first attested in 1860, which itself probably came from the word jism (first attested in 1842 and whose origin is unknown) with the sense “energy, strength” but with the later slang sense of “semen”. And as for the term ragtime, it’s short for ragged time, and both ragged and the word rag as in “a piece of cloth” come into English from Old Norse rögg “shaggy tuft, rough hair” (I guess Vikings are pretty ragged) which, appropriately enough, ultimately comes from that root *reuə- “to smash, knock down, tear out, dig up, uproot” that lies behind the rock in rock & roll.

So blues, and a little later jazz, had their origins in the American south growing out of the field hollers on the plantations, but the spread of these foundational genres of African American music comes from what happened after the abolition of slavery. In the aftermath of the Civil War the economy of the South was devastated. Though the land was initially seized by the North, with Reconstruction that land was eventually returned to the former land owners. But now, though they owned the land again, they had no labour force and little money to pay for it, so a system of sharecropping arose in which the formerly enslaved people continued to work the plantations, but this time in exchange for a percentage of the crops, not that they had much of a choice, since they had been left penniless with no means of supporting themselves. The items they needed, including seed, fertilizer, and even clothing, they received on credit to be paid off with their percentage of the crop yield, often leaving them in debt, and since the landowners, who carefully oversaw the work on the plantations with little difference from the pre-emancipation days, held considerable power in the arrangement, the outlook for those formerly enslaved people remained grim. And in the following decades things went from bad to worse for them, with growing mechanization, the Great Depression, and increasing debt, with many African American sharecroppers being evicted from their parcel of land. This plus the racial discrimination African Americans suffered under Jim Crow laws led to what is called the Great Migration, roughly between 1916 and 1970. While census records indicate that 90% of African Americans lived in the Southern US prior to 1910, that number dropped to just over 50%, and those that moved went from rural life in the South to urban centres in the north and west, where there were industrial job opportunities. And this is where we get back to the music, because they brought with them their music, particularly jazz and blues. Delta blues musicians, for instance, found themselves in Chicago, and with the noisier urban clubs, they went electric, kicking off the Chicago electric blues genre (as with Muddy Waters),while others ended up in Detroit or the West Coast (think John Lee Hooker and T-Bone Walker), which was one of the major influences on the guitar-based rock & roll.

Now for much of the first half of the 20th century, African American music such as blues, jazz, and gospel, was subsumed under the term race music, which was coined by record companies marketing what they called race records, recorded by and sold to African Americans starting in the 1920s. It was Okeh records that coined the term in 1922. The term was originally not seen as derogatory, and indeed the African American press used the word race to refer to Black Americans who took pride in their culture. But by 1949, the term “didn’t sit well” with Jewish music journalist Jerry Wexler, who worked for Billboard magazine and was one of a number of Jewish members of the music industry who were sensitive to issues of racial identity and went out of their way to promote Black musicians. He therefore coined “a label more appropriate to more enlightened times”, rhythm and blues, though in fact the term was used as far back as 1923, before Wexler popularized it in 1949. Prior to that, Billboard maintained a chart of African American music called Race Records, initially introduced as Harlem Hit Parade. The chart subsequently changed its name again a couple of times, first in 1969 to Soul, and then to Black in 1982, with rhythm and blues often being shortened to R&B as well. But it’s in rhythm and blues that rock & roll has its most immediate origins. First of all we have to backtrack little bit to the 1940s. Following WWII and its gasoline and rubber rationing, there was similarly a musical paring down. Instead of the big bands of the wartime era and earlier, smaller more economical groups became common, generally made up of a couple of saxophones, a trumpet player, guitarist, piano, bass, and drums. This also had the effect of potentially bringing the guitar more to fore. And one of the styles of music that became popular was a kind of uptempo heavy beat style of blues that became known as jump blues, and this, along with jazz, blues, and gospel, was a major influence on later rhythm & blues and rock & roll.

A good example of this is the song “Good Rocking Tonight”, written and first recorded by jump blues and rhythm & blues singer Roy Brown. Brown was a big fan of blues shouter and rhythm & blues singer Wynonie Harris, and Brown tried to get his hero to record his song, but was turned away without getting to show it off to him. So Brown instead sang it to another blues singer and pianist Cecil Gant, who immediately, reportedly at 4am, phoned up the president of De Luxe Records, Jules Braun, who he knew, and had Brown sing it over the phone to him. Braun replied “Give him fifty dollars and don't let him out of your sight”, and Brown was signed to a contract on the spot. The song became a minor hit for Brown, peaking at #13 in the Billboard R&B charts, and ironically Wynonie Harris recorded it soon after, taking it to the top of the charts (but don’t worry, Roy Brown went on to have his own chart toppers and other hit songs). Now this was one of those songs with “rock” in the title that we mentioned earlier. We can see that the main sense here is probably “dance”, but there’s clearly still some sexual undertone in the song, which also has the line “Gonna hold my baby tight as I can / Tonight she’ll know I’m a mighty, mighty man”. It wasn’t so much of a problem for the establishment at the time, since Black music was still being marketed solely to African Americans, so it wasn’t like white teenagers were listening to this stuff. Except white teenagers were listening to this stuff. At night, when the major white radio stations had closed down for the evening, which allowed for the weaker signals of the Black stations to be more easily picked up, an underground movement of white teenagers were able to tune in to these new upbeat sounds. Some of the more adventurous ones even found their way into black record stores to pick some of these songs up. And one of those white kids that did pick up on this song in particular was Elvis Aaron Presley, who would go on to record it as his second single. So does that make “Good Rocking Tonight” the first rock & roll song? Maybe, but we’ll get back to that thorny question in a minute.

Meanwhile, one of those radio disk jockeys playing R&B music to teenagers was Alan Freed, who is as important to the story of rock & roll as anyone. The story starts with Leo Mintz who opened a record store, called Record Rendezvous, in Cleveland on the edge of the city’s Black community. He started selling used jukebox records, since they tended to be restocked regularly since the machines tended to have very heavy tonearms which ground down the records fairly quickly, especially the older style shellac ones. By the way, jukeboxes, which were not only commonly found in bars and restaurants but also in barbershops, were a good indicator of what songs were actually popular with listeners. One night over drinks in a bar, Todd Stortz, who owned a chain of radio stations, made the observation to his station manager that although jukeboxes held a couple hundred records, customers tended to play the same few over and over, Stortz estimating about 40 songs, and what’s more, after the clientele had gone, the waitresses would play the same few yet again, even though they had been listening to them all night, and from this he created the concept of the Top Forty formula which became the standard for radio stations. In any case, getting back to Mintz and his record store, he put the used jukebox records in boxes for patrons to browse through rather than having to ask for them by name, and provided listening booths so they could listen in-store before buying. Around 1950 or so, Mintz started noticing an uptick in white teenagers listening and dancing to rhythm & blues records, but rarely buying them, probably because their parents wouldn’t approve. Mintz had gotten to know Freed, a hard-drinking former trombone player, who seems to have been a Wagner fan (he named his daughter Sieglinde, a figure from Norse mythology), and mentioned this to him, convincing him to play these records on the air. Mintz would sponsor the show, thus creating a market for his records. So at midnight on July 11th, 1951, Alan Freed started his Moondog Show, featuring rhythm & blues music. He got the name for the show, and his own moniker “King of the Moondoggers”, and the theme tune for the show, from an avant garde musical piece called “Moondog Symphony” recorded by a composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of several musical instruments named Louis Thomas Hardin, but more commonly known as Moondog or “the Viking of 6th Avenue”, who was *also* a devoted follower of Norse mythology and maintained an altar to Thor, and lived as a street musician, always dressed in a cloak and horned helmet, and no I’m not making any of this stuff up. A ragged Viking if ever there was one! Well, the scheme worked and Freed’s show became such a big hit that he soon moved it to New York City, with prerecorded shows going out to other radio stations, and Freed himself also engaged in concert promotion, organizing the first rock & roll show. Except he got sued by the original Moondog and had to stop using the name, so the show became Alan Freed’s Rock & Roll Dance Party, picking up on the phrase that had already been used within the Black community, at least in the lyrics of the songs, perhaps at the suggestion of Mintz. But it was Freed who brought this music, and its new name, to the mainstream white audience. And that’s why we now call the genre rock & roll. But does that mean that rock & roll is just a rebranding of rhythm & blues for a white audience? Well sort of, but we’ll need to have a look at some of the other influences on rock & roll, and consider another key musical element of the genre to get the full story.

If there’s any musical quality that differentiates rock & roll from rhythm & blues and jump blues, it’s the beat, in particular the backbeat, that is the accenting of beats 2 and 4, a kind of syncopation, which could sometimes be used for emotional effect in earlier jazz and swing music, but not all the way through the song, as was now happening. In fact, you can already start to hear this creeping into some rhythm & blues, and again, a good example of this is “Good Rocking Tonight”. Roy Brown’s version has a straight forward boogie woogie feel, but Wynonie Harris’s version adds hand claps on beats 2 and 4, giving it a more driving and danceable feel, which may have been why Harris’s version did better on the charts than Brown’s. Boogie woogie, by the way, emerging from blues and rag time, features a characteristic walking bassline generally played over a 12 bar blues chord progression. The word boogie, which originally referred to dancing or dancing music, has been connected to several African languages including the Hausa word boog and the Mandingo word booga which both mean “to beat” as in beating a drum, the West African word bogi “to dance”, and the Bantu term mbuki mvuki, with mbuki meaning “to take off in flight” and mvuki meaning “to dance wildly, as if to shake off one's clothes”. Another early example of a backbeat in a rhythm & blues song is Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man”, especially brought out by drummer Earl Palmer, who pointed out that this was the first time a drummer had played the backbeat all the way through a song, which he said derived from a Dixieland “out chorus”. Along with this greater emphasis on the backbeat, another rhythmic device that marks out rock & roll is the use of straight eighth notes. Previous forms of popular American music, such as jazz, swing, and rhythm & blues generally featured swung eighth notes, in other words a shuffle beat, but rock & roll became mostly associated with the straight eighth note rhythm. I guess rockers didn’t believe that “if you ain’t got that swing then you ain’t got a thing”! There are some exceptions of course, and in some early rock & roll songs, such as Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” you can hear a bit of a tension between Richard’s manic straight eighth piano playing and (again) drummer Earl Palmer’s swung rhythm. Palmer soon switched to matching Richard’s straight eighth rhythm, but this in-between rhythm can still be heard on later songs like Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”. One of the early candidates for “first rock & roll song” is “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, who were actually Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, which features a distorted electric guitar and lyrics praising a car, the Oldsmobile 88, but its swung rhythm disqualifies it in the judgement of some.

Another thing that marks out rock & roll as something new, is its blending of different traditions and genres. Various forms of what we would now call country music influenced the new genre. By the way, originally country music and western music were separate genres, with western music referring to cowboy music, whereas country or as it was more commonly called at the time hillbilly music came from the southern states. As we’ll see, several early rockers were influenced by these forms of music. Another genre of rhythm & blues that was important to rock & roll was doo-wop music. Alan Freed was a fan and included doo-wop in his definition of rock & roll and on his show. Doo-wop itself descends from barbershop music, but the truth about barbershop is probably not what you think it is. If the word barbershop evokes images in your mind of turn of the century white men wearing straw boater hats and striped vests and bow ties, well that’s a fiction. The reality is barbershop is more connected with black gospel music than anything else. In fact it goes back to plantation music, like the blues does. Following emancipation, young men would gather in black barbershops, as a kind of central meeting place in the community, and “strike up a chord”, singing in close harmony quartets, often using harmonies that didn’t follow the usual rules of the western musical tradition, producing the kind of ringing chord effect so characteristic of barbershop music. Indeed, some who later went on to musical fame, such as jazz great Louis Armstrong, have mentioned learning music in these contexts. However, later on, between the 20s and 40s, barbershop singing was taken up by white singers, who invented a fake white origin theory of barbershop music, referring to the “barber’s music” of the 17th century, which came from the practice of providing cheap stringed instruments to customers at barbershops for them to play on while they waited, as the origin. Samuel Pepys, who was reluctantly put in charge of transporting Charles II’s guitar to England, thus helping to popularize it there, referred to barber’s music in his diary, but in a negative way, as a kind of harsh discordant music. And it’s hard to make a connection between this stringed instrument music and close vocal harmonies. So this is an example of cultural appropriation, with a fictional white origin story to support it. But that African American tradition of close harmony singing did have an effect on rock & roll, through the doo-wop music of the 40s and 50s. And of course, there’s gospel and soul music, which essentially grew out of gospel but took as its focus more secular topics such as love and romance, which contributed immensely to rock & roll, not only through the call and response style that we saw earlier, but in the gospel roots of many early rock and rollers. Elvis, for instance, was deeply influenced by gospel, and as a child he would often ask his mother to take him to a second black church service on their way home from their own church on Sundays. But perhaps the most surprisingly important contribution to the rock & roll genre is the guitar playing of gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was a guitar virtuoso leading the way for rock guitarists like Chuck Berry with her overdriven electric guitar sound soloing style, in songs like “Strange Things Happening Every Day” and “Rock Me”, which we saw earlier. She also, after hearing him perform before her concert, called up a young Little Richard on stage to sing with her, putting him onto the road to rock & roll greatness, as well as being a big influence on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. And to hear more about gospel music and Sister Rosetta Tharpe in particular, you can check out our video “Good News: Exploring the Roots of Gospel”, and for more on the word soul, including its musical sense, check out our video “Soul Food & Early Black Women’s Writing”.

So then, what was the earliest rock & roll song? Well in many ways this is an impossible question to answer — rock & roll formed by stages based on the various foundational genres we’ve already looked at. But looking at some of the earliest possible rock & roll songs may help us to form our definition of what this genre is and how it came into being. Along with Tharpe’s proto rock & roll form of gospel, we can also look at some rhythm & blues songs that are on the transition point to rock & roll. One song that’s on many lists of “earliest rock & roll songs” is “Rocket 88” released in 1951, which we’ve already looked at, with its distorted guitar but swung rhythm. As we saw earlier, though the song was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, the band was actually Ike Turner and his band the Kings of Rhythm, and Brenston, who sang on this song, was the saxophonist in Turner’s band. Turner was a bit miffed at not getting enough credit, given that he actually wrote the song. This created friction within the band, and for a while Brenston pursued a solo career before returning to Turner’s band, eventually leaving the music business due to alcoholism. Ike Turner, of course, went on to great success, not only as a musician and songwriter, but also as a talent scout, arranger, and producer, and was particularly famous for work with, and abuse of, his wife Tina Turner. But an even earlier contender for earliest rock & roll song is “Rock Awhile” by singer-songwriter Goree Carter, recorded in 1949. Though not heavy on the backbeat and with swung eighth notes, the song is notable for Carter’s guitar playing with its overdriven distortion sound and solo licks that sound very reminiscent of those of guitar great Chuck Berry some years later. Carter, who taught himself to play blues guitar from age 12, releasing this record when he was 18, was drafted into the army at age 19. After doing a tour in the Korean War, Carter tried to pick up his music career again but struggled to get a breakthrough, with record companies balking at him recording his own songs, and though he continued playing local gigs, he never really had the recognition he deserved. Another rhythm & blues song that’s often suggested as the first rock & roll record is “Rock the Joint”, first recorded by Jimmy Preston and his Prestonians in 1949, with its boogie woogie groove and hand claps on the backbeat. A couple of years later, Bill Haley and his band, at that point named the Saddlemen, a country band, recorded a cover version of this song, changing some of the lyrics to sound more country, for instance changing the references to dances such as the hucklebuck and jitterbug to hillbilly dances such as the Sugarfoot Rag and Virginia Reel. The sound of Haley’s version was very much coming out of the western swing tradition, complete with pedal steel guitar, but Haley was already pivoting towards a style that would later be known as rock & roll, having already recorded that R&B proto rock & roll song, “Rocket 88”, and his version of “Rock the Joint” is often considered the first rockabilly song. We’ll return to Bill Haley in a minute, but as for Jimmy Preston, he gave up the music biz in 1952, and by 1962 he had shifted his focus to religion, founding the Victory Baptist Church as Reverend Dr. James S. Preston. Now another r&b song that Haley went on to record a hit cover version of was “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”, written by Jesse Stone and first recorded by Big Joe Turner in 1954. Turner’s version, which featured some quite sexually suggestive lyrics, topped the R&B charts and even made it to #22 on the pop chart, while Haley’s version, with his renamed band the Comets, made it to #7 on the pop singles chart, with its toned-down lyrics. Turner, a blues shouter and blues, jump blues, and R&B musician who earned the nickname the Singing Barman when he worked in nightclubs in Kansas City as a teenager, had a career that stretched back to the 1930s, and an earlier recording of his, “Roll ‘Em Pete” from 1938, is another candidate for earliest rock & roll song, cited for its backbeat and use of straight eighth notes.

There are also some who became very famous as rock & roll musicians, but who had already been releasing rhythm & blues records, such as Fats Domino. Antoine “Fats” Domino from New Orleans received his nickname in honour of jazz piano great Fats Waller from bandleader Billy Diamond, who heard him play at a backyard barbecue in 1947, and gave him a job in his band. Domino had already been playing in New Orleans clubs since he was 14. By 1949, Fats Domino already had his own record contract, and released his first record “The Fat Man”, an adaptation of an old New Orleans blues song called “Junker Blues” written by Domino and musician, bandleader, and composer Dave Bartholomew, who had brought Domino to the attention of Imperial Records. Bartholomew went on to collaborate with Fats Domino, co-writing many of his most famous hits, like “Ain’t That a Shame”, “Blue Monday”, and “I’m Walkin’”. “The Fat Man” reached #2 on the r&b charts, and by 1951 had sold a million copies, and Domino racked up two more million sellers in the early 50s before becoming a rock & roll star in 1955 with the release of “Ain’t That a Shame”. So it makes sense to add “The Fat Man” to our list of possible first rock & roll songs, it certainly has the hallmarks with its early use of the backbeat. Fats Domino of course became a huge popular and commercial success, but he never let the fame and fortune get to his head, remaining a devoted husband to the same woman, Rosemary Hall, until her death in 2008, racking up big long distance phone bills calling her every day while he was on tour, and they stayed living in the same working class New Orleans neighbourhood until it was flooded by Hurricane Katrina (Domino didn’t want to evacuate because his wife was ill at the time). As for Earl Palmer, he also played drums for another early rocker Little Richard. Richard Penniman, from Macon, Georgia had an early start on the stage, not only singing in the church choir, but also travelling with his family’s gospel troupe, the Penniman Family. Even as a youngster he was known for yelling and screaming all the time, upsetting those around him. He left home at 14, not getting along with his family because they suspected he was gay. Little Richard pursued a career in the music business but supported himself as a dishwasher at the Macon Greyhound bus station. He actually managed to get a recording contract and started releasing records as early as 1951, first for RCA Victor and later Peacock Records, but these more bluesy recordings, lacking the energy of his later efforts, went nowhere. At the suggestion of Lloyd Price, who had a hit with “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” with Fats Domino moonlighting on the piano, Richard sent a demo tape in to Price’s label Speciality Records, which was almost ignored and forgotten about, but on second listening, record label owner Art Rupe decided to sign him, putting rookie producer Bumps Blackwell on the job with the simple instruction “record a hit”. Blackwell, who saw Richard as Speciality’s answer to Ray Charles, though Richard, who showed up to the recording session in New Orleans with foot-high hair and wearing a shirt so loud that according to Blackwell “it looked as though he had drunk raspberry juice, cherryade, malt, and greens, and then thrown up all over himself”, said he preferred Fats Domino, which was convenient since they were recording with Domino’s backing band, including drummer Earl Palmer.

Little Richard’s claim to the first rock and roll song is Tutti Frutti. His first major recording session didn’t go well at first, lacking the energy of his live performances, so he and the backing band and producers took a break for lunch at the famous Dew Drop Inn. Spying the piano on stage, Little Richard started playing a sort of novelty song he would play at gay bars called “Tutti Frutti”, which means “all fruit” in Italian. The lyrics originally went “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop a-good-Goddam, Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, / make it easy”. But it had such raw energy that producer Bumps Blackwell saw a hit in it. He quickly called in a local young songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie to help with rewrites. Richard was initially too embarrassed to repeat the lyrics to a lady, but with the assurance that she was married, and his face turned to the wall, they got through it. But the clock was running out on their studio time so they quickly raced through two takes. Rupe wasn’t initially impressed, and come to that Little Richard didn’t think it would go anywhere either, not to mention the studio band who thought it was a bit silly sounding, but they were all proven wrong, with the song reaching #2 on the R&B charts and also crossing over to the pop charts, reaching #18, launching Little Richard into the limelight with a stream of hits. But even more importantly the song made a huge impact on the form of rock & roll, not only because of Little Richard’s loud yelling and screaming, but also because of the rhythm of the song, with drummer Earl Palmer, inspired by Richard’s manic piano playing (according to Blackwell he “would beat the piano so hard he’d break an eighty-gauge piano string)”, using a heavy backbeat, and practically inventing rock & roll drumming. There’s a reason Little Richard also has the nickname “the Architect of Rock & Roll”.

Now we’ve brought up Bill Haley a few times as having recorded cover versions of rhythm & blues or early rock & roll songs, so we should also consider him in our list of early rockers, and this brings up the issues of the white cover version and crossovers. Haley did indeed have success producing cover versions of songs originally by black musicians, but his first really big success was a song he wrote himself, “Crazy Man, Crazy”, in 1953. It’s clearly recognizable as a rock & roll song by its rhythm (though still with that steel guitar sound from western swing), and noteworthy for being the first recognized rock & roll song to be a pop hit nationally, peaking at #12 on the Billboard Juke Box chart and #11 on the Cash Box chart. It was also the first rock & roll song to be aired on national television in the US. Interestingly it also crossed over, that is it was a hit with more than one audience, not only a success in the white charts, but also reaching #10 on one of Billboard’s regional R&B charts, and even having a cover version performed by African American guitarist Lucky Enois and his Quintet. So while we might hesitate to consider Bill Haley an example of cultural appropriation, since he had for some time been experimenting with the blending of genres, that was certainly going on in the music industry at the time, with the major record labels jumping on the bandwagon with white cover versions of black songs. These were toned down with changed lyrics and lacked their original edge in order to be more commercial, and the most notorious example is Pat Boone, whose whiter than white anodyne covers can scarcely be called rock & roll. The big record companies were trying to get in on the action and sell a lot of records, exploiting African American music that was originally performed by black artists and issued by small independent labels that were often set up specifically to record non-mainstream genres like rhythm & blues. We’ll talk about a few of those in a minute. But while it’s certainly true that black artists were playing rock & roll music before it was called rock & roll, as for instance with Fats Domino, this genre also had a history of crossing and blending genres, as might be thought inevitable in a situation of cultural diffusion. Cultural diffusion is the transmission of culture and technology between groups, such as the spread of a technology like iron smelting or the alphabet through the ancient world—or, most relevant here, the spread of the guitar and guitar-like instruments from Persia to Muslim Spain to the rest of Europe to America and eventually the rest of the world. This can happen through a number of different mechanisms, such as contact between neighbouring cultures, or the invasion or migration of a people. This concept of cultural diffusion should also be understood in contrast to cultural appropriation, in which one culture adopts elements of another culture, which can be harmful when the adopting culture is a dominant one in relation to a disadvantaged or minority culture. One interesting example of crossing and blending genres in early rock & roll is the song “Hound Dog” which was a big hit for Elvis Presley in 1956. But he wasn’t the first to record it, that was African American rhythm & blues singer Big Mama Thornton in 1953. But she wasn’t the one to write the song, that was the Jewish songwriting duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were themselves big rhythm and blues fans. It’s hard to pick out exactly who was appropriating what in this situation. And at least those white cover versions often gave a bit of a boost to the original versions by black artists, raising them up in the charts as well, and depending on the music publishing deal the songwriter had, it could also be a good source of money, and often the teenagers would buy both versions, sometimes keeping the white covers out in the open and the original black versions tucked away from their parents. In the case of Bill Haley and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” originator Big Joe Turner, they remained on friendly terms with each other, sometimes touring together, and later Haley even helped Turner revive his career by lending him his Comets for a recording session. And Elvis often gave credit in press interviews to black artists, who he said were playing this music long before he came on the scene, and once even stopped a reporter who had referred to him as the King of Rock & Roll, saying “No, he’s the true King of Rock & Roll”, indicating Fats Domino who happened to be present at the time. There was often much camaraderie and mutual respect amongst both black and white rockers at that time. And the real difference between someone like Elvis and someone like Pat Boone is authenticity, a concept explored in existential philosophy and psychology. For instance copying some of the outward forms of a musical genre without adhering to its core values or appreciating the cultural contexts it came from would be inauthentic, and such a white cover musician would be considered a poser. From a young age, Elvis listened to and was inspired by African American music, and constantly drew attention to the black musicians he admired, whereas Boone was originally a traditional pop crooner, and his foray into rhythm & blues and rock & roll was more opportunistic, and he was later on more known for country and gospel music. When he recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” he wanted to change it to “Isn’t That a Shame”, and, believe it or not, he even recorded a version of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, which he thought was silly and meaningless, but was convinced by producers that it would be a hit and make money.

Part of the drive behind those white cover versions was the moral panic the new rock & roll genre evoked in mainstream white society. The 1950s was a time of many anxieties, including the Cold War and the Communist threat, nuclear war, desegregation and the growing civil rights movement, and persistent worries over juvenile delinquency, and rock & roll became enmeshed with these concerns. White teenagers listening to rhythm & blues, and later rock & roll, became a cause for concern. Not only did it foster desegregation, in the minds of some it was a cause of antisocial behaviour, and not everyone took care to distinguish between a youth subculture and actual subversion of society. Congress held many hearings over the supposed juvenile delinquency problems, and white supremacists latched onto rock & roll as a scapegoat for their anti-black racism, and the film Blackboard Jungle, about a troubled inner-city interracial high school which used the song “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets, crystallized the connection with rock & roll. Indeed the film, which to many teenagers was a call to rebellion, also made a hit out of Haley’s 1954 recording, which went nowhere until the 1955 movie used it. Though it wasn’t Haley’s first hit and it wasn’t the first rock & roll song, it became the anthem of rock & roll. Almost as if to counter the feared connection between rock & roll and juvenile delinquency, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, a mixed-race teenage doo wop group of Hispanic and Black singers, who are best known for their hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”, recorded the song “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent”, with the group presented as clean-cut well behaved teenagers. But there still lingered the perceived threat of black sexuality. Alan Freed’s prime-time tv show The Big Beat was abruptly cancelled when 15 year old Lymon was briefly shown dancing with a white girl from the studio audience while performing. This caused an uproar and scandal among ABC’s local affiliates, particularly in the South. Alan Freed, by the way, always preferred to play the original black versions of songs rather than the white cover versions. Little Richard tried to avoid the stereotypical racist fears of black men preying on white women by playing up the campiness in his stage persona, hoping to reassure the boyfriends of the white girls in the audience that he was no threat (though the girls still seemed to go for him anyway). This is why rock & roll (and rhythm & blues before it) for the most part had its origins in those small independent labels, because the big labels didn’t want to court controversy. But shortly after the war it became cheap enough for anyone with a little money to set up their own recording studio, often away from the big metropolises of LA and New York where the big record companies were located, and independent labels filled a niche by recording African American musicians, studios like Atlantic, Chess, and Sun Records.

Sun Records was founded by Sam Phillips, who had grown up on an Alabama farm picking cotton alongside his parents and black labourers, and their singing in the fields had a great effect on him and his love of music. He was planning on going into law, but his father, who owned his farm, though it was mortgaged, was bankrupted in the Great Depression, and died in 1941, forcing Sam to leave high school to support the family. He eventually found himself working for a radio station as an announcer and engineer, where he met his wife, before starting his own recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and later the record label. He was interested in different kinds of music, but particularly the blues and rhythm & blues, which he wanted to bring to a white audience, and initially he made private recordings for people as well as recordings that would be sent on to other record labels for release, so he made early recordings of blues players like B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, and in fact one of the songs already on our list of earliest rock & roll records, “Rocket 88” which was released on the Chess Records label. Phillips is of course most known for “discovering” Elvis Presley. Actually it was Phillips’s assistant, Marion Keisker, who he also knew from his radio station days, who first heard Elvis when he came to Sun Studio with his guitar in August 1953 to record a record for his mother (or so he said though he might have been hoping to be discovered), and played and sang two songs by the Ink Spots, a vocal jazz group from the 30s and 40s who were kind of forerunners of rock & roll and doo wop music, even gaining popularity among white listeners. Keisker asked the young Elvis “Who do you sound like?” and he answered quite truthfully “I don’t sound like nobody.” Though the 18 year old Elvis had only paid for an acetate record recording, Keisker turned on the tape recorder as well to play it for Phillips, marking it “Good ballad singer. Hold”, and after some coaxing she got him to listen to it and bring Elvis into the studio again to make a record. After all, though Sam Phillips was committed to recording black musicians he had often said if he could find a white singer with a black sound he could make a billion dollars, not being naive about the commercial prospects of selling African American music. Their first attempts, recording country ballads, didn’t go well, but they kept at it and at one session with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Wild Bill Black, in between takes, Elvis started singing and playing an up tempo version of the song “That’s All Right” by blues musician Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Moore and Black joined in. Phillips instantly knew he had something and told them to keep going. They also recorded a blue grass song “Blue Moon of Kentucky” originally by Bill Monroe and his band the Blue Grass Boys, but again in an unusual jumped up style, which served as the B side for Elvis’s first record put out by Sun Records. This may not have been the first rock & roll record, though some claim it to be, but it certainly catches the essence of what rock & roll came to be. With a blues song by a black songwriter on one side, and a country song by a white songwriter on the other, both played up tempo with a solid beat in a style that was a blend of rhythm & blues and country, it was hybrid, neither clearly black nor white. Of course radio stations were initially reluctant, but when one local station played it they were inundated by phone calls asking for it again, and again, and again, and that night Elvis, who had to be tracked down in a movie theatre, was interviewed on air, in which he was made to clearly state what high school he went to (thus demonstrating he was actually white), and the ship had come in for both Elvis and Sam Phillips. Phillips eventually sold Elvis’s contract to one of the major record labels, not wanting to stand in the way of Elvis’s rise to national fame, and used the money to expand his other businesses, with other greats on his own label such as Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, and also opened a radio station with an all female staff, the first of its kind, WHER. Not just women as on air personalities, which was ground breaking in itself, but the whole staff, including business and technical employees. As for Marion Keisker, who actually had a college degree in English and Medieval French, she eventually left Sun Records and joined the US air force becoming a captain and serving as information officer in charge of the Armed Forces television station at the Ramstein base in Germany.

Chuck Berry’s first record, “Maybellene”, is a similar example to Elvis’s first record, though coming from the opposite direction, and should also be added to our list. In St. Louis, Missouri, Chuck Berry, the wayward son of a preacher, who had done time for armed robbery and car theft, was playing in a group called the Tommy Stevens Combo, playing popular black hits in an upscale black club, when one night Berry decided to start playing a country song and the audience went wild for it, and he continued his country act in various clubs and with various bands, becoming more and more popular. Berry set about trying to get a record contract, and through a contact, Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters, hooked up with his label Chess Records, operated by the Polish-Jewish immigrant Chess brothers (they Anglicized their names and then named their company after themselves), another of these small independent labels that specialized in recording black artists, especially blues and rhythm & blues. They had released “Rocket 88” recorded in Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio you’ll remember. Berry was pushing his basic blues song called “Wee Wee Hours”, but Phil Chess was excited about one of his country songs, an old traditional song called “Ida Red”, which had been a bit of a hit for western swing artist Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys back in 1938. A fan of the lyrical wordplay of jump blues musician Louis Jordan, Berry had reworked the lyrics, turning it into a story about a car chase with his girlfriend driving off with another guy, but in order to copyright the song Phil Chess wanted him to change it a little more, so adapting the melody of the chorus a bit and taking inspiration from his former training as a cosmetician, Berry retitled it “Maybellene” though spelled differently from the cosmetics brand. Chess passed it on to Alan Freed and it became a smash hit, topping the rhythm & blues, country & western, and pop charts, with Freed reportedly playing the record for two hours straight. Subsequent pressings of the record added Alan Freed and the landlord of the building Chess Records was in, not that they had anything to do with writing it, but the royalty money was a way of paying people off for one reason or another. So while Elvis was a white singer bringing black elements into his music, Chuck Berry was a black musician doing the opposite, but the result was the same: startlingly new sounds, a direct challenge to the race barrier, and some of the first rock & roll songs ever recorded.

So whenever we put the starting point for rock & roll, it becomes a phenomenon between the years 1955 and 1957, but it also had something of a decline too by the year 1959. By the turn of the decade, Alan Freed had got in trouble over the Payola Scandal, a conflict of interest in taking money from record companies for preferentially playing their records (like that copyright scam with “Maybellene”), Elvis was drafted into the army and subsequently became more interested in making movies, Chuck Berry was sent to prison again, this time for dubiously violating the Mann Act by transporting a minor across state lines, Little Richard had a conversion experience and left the music business to take up religion, and of course rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash. The big record companies stepped in and created teen idols with insipid music like Fabian and Frankie Avalon, and it wasn’t until the 60s British Invasion and in particular the Beatles that rock music would see a revival, especially bringing the guitar to the fore once again. But most importantly we can see that the rise of rock & roll is a product of cultural diffusion involving migrations of people, reflects a blending of different ethnic traditions, is hard to pinpoint a precise origin of, with no clear first rock & roll song, and became intimately linked with sexuality and sometimes with immoral or dangerous behaviour — and all of those things are equally true of the most rock & roll of instruments, the guitar. So to hear more about that, check out my video on the origin of the guitar!

Thanks for watching! So what do you think is the first rock & roll song? Was there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments! There are links to all the songs I mentioned in the description. If you’ve enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe, & click the little bell to be notified of every new episode. And check out our Patreon, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I’m @Alliterative on Twitter, and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language and connections in our podcast, blog, and more!