Rock ‘N’ Roll

Background

Rock ‘n’ roll is a form of popular music that originated in the American South in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The genre combines elements of other American musical styles—including blues, country, gospel, R&B, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz—and was pioneered by Black artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who wrote songs about youth culture in distinct, colloquial voices.

Early rock ‘n’ roll had a straightforward sound, relying mostly on guitar, bass, drums, piano, and saxophone playing up-tempo 12-bar blues. In subsequent decades, the form evolved and splintered into countless subgenres that used more diverse sounds, instruments, and lyrics.

Origins

The earliest rock ‘n’ roll records brought together regional sounds—including the Mississippi Delta blues, Nashville country, and New Orleans jazz—and set them to a rollicking beat.

Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” a song penned in 1951 by a young Ike Turner and performed by his band the Kings of Rhythm, is now widely considered the genre’s starting point. While late-40s R&B singles from Wild Bill Moore and Fats Domino have similar elements, “Rocket 88” also included distorted electric guitar, a distinction that would define the genre for decades to follow.

The same year “Rocket 88” was released, Cleveland DJ Alan Freed launched his radio show “Moondog’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Party,” rebranding R&B records as “rock ‘n’ roll” to appeal to a largely white audience. The name was a double-entendre, describing the sound of the music and the sexual activities it was said to induce, which only made the genre appear more subversive to Freed’s young audience.

Rise in Popularity

In 1952, Sam Phillips—a Memphis-based recording engineer who captured several successful blues, R&B, and early rock ‘n’ roll singles, including “Rocket 88”—launched the Sun Record Company. Sun would become the home for Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis—white artists whose countryfied take on rock ‘n’ roll was called “rockabilly.”

Presley soon became a chart-topping sensation. By 1956, he had No. 1 singles on both the predominantly white country and the predominantly Black R&B charts. His first appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show" that year featured a sensual performance of “Hound Dog,” turning him into the face of the controversial new youth culture.

By the 1960s, rock ‘n’ roll was a part of the American mainstream, with the Beach Boys crafting catchy surf-rock in Southern California and Detroit’s Motown Records engineering hit singles for artists like The Marvelettes and Stevie Wonder through its assembly line approach.

The music was spreading outside the country, too, especially in the United Kingdom, where a wave of young British bands were cutting their teeth on American rock ‘n’ roll. The Beatles, whose 1964 performance on "Ed Sullivan" was seen by an estimated 40% of American households, ushered in the British Invasion and brought the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, and more to the US.

By the end of the decade, rock took a political turn, doubling back to its counter-cultural roots, with Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol pushing the genre toward avant-garde artists like those associated with the Beat Generation, while others, like those gathered at the legendary Woodstock festival, infused it with the free-love ethos of hippies.

In Africa and South America, rock artists mixed the American form with their own national musical styles, often as a reaction to political upheaval.

Lasting Influence

In the decades to follow, rock music continued evolving and splintering into various styles and subgenres—including funk, punk, glam, new wave, metal, goth, and indie—and influenced other iconoclastic pop forms like dance and hip-hop.

While rock ‘n’ roll was once denigrated as unserious pop culture, it’s now considered serious literature, with its own critics, historians, and even a Nobel laureate.