Roots of Rock 'n' Roll (Pt. 1)

I was there at the time, strictly speaking, since I was born in 1947, but I was too young to know about the origins of rock 'n' roll as it was first performed. So I've always wanted to go back in time and try to figure them out.

The year of my birth, a blues artist named Roy Brown had a song, "Good Rockin' Tonight," that Paul McCartney revisited on his 1991 MTV Unplugged special:



When Roy Brown, an African American, first did it, it was considered "race music" in a segregated America. Black artists would make records to be sold to a black audience only. You could call the style of the music rhythm 'n' blues, or jump blues, or boogie woogie, or country blues, or electric blues, depending on exactly how it sounded. But you couldn't yet call it rock 'n' roll, for that name wasn't yet invented.

All of it derived from the pure blues, a song format using verses of 12 bars which African slaves and their descendants invented. The blues used "blue notes" not found on a piano keyboard, call-and-response patterns conspicuous in both the music and the lyrics, and heavy African rhythmic emphases ... but also European harmonic structures. Like its descendant rock 'n' roll, the blues was always a mix of black and white influences.

Here is the great Muddy Waters performing "Hoochie Coochie Man" in the style that became known as the Chicago blues or the electric blues:



The Chicago blues resulted when African Americans migrated north from the Mississippi delta and used electric guitars where acoustic guitars had been the rule in Delta blues.

Rhythm 'n' blues artists took elements from the blues and from two other African-American musical genres, jazz and gospel — not to mention Afro-Cuban rhythms and other African-descended musical styles from elsewhere in the Americas — and combined them into a high-voltage music for post-WWII American blacks. There were many distinctive R&B sounds. Here is the one pioneered by the legendary Bo Diddley:



The name rhythm 'n' blues was invented in 1947 by a white industry exec, Jerry Wexler, as a marketing category to replace "race music." The actual name used by blacks for the sounds created by Ray Brown and Wynonie Harris and many others in the late 1940s was "jump blues." Jump blues was derived from the big band sound in jazz, whose popularity was on its last legs.

The original jump blues was characterized by a jazzy sound featuring a saxophone and/or a trumpet or other brass horn. It had driving rhythms, shouted, highly syncopated vocals and earthy, comedic lyrics on contemporary urban themes. Unlike most other types of blues, the jump blues relegated the guitar to the rhythm section. Here — with no guitar at all — is one of the pioneers of jump blues, Louis Jordan, with "Caldonia":



A disc jockey named Alan Freed was one of the first to program R&B or jump blues records for a mostly white, mostly teen-aged audience in the early 1950s. Freed helped the blues "jump" the racial divide by taking advantage of the way AM radio waves can be picked up in distant locations after the sun goes down. White teens from all over the country would tune into his "Moondog Rock and Roll House Party," from Cleveland, when they should have been asleep.

In the supposedly segregated South, white kids like Elvis Presley rubbed musical shoulders with the black blues scene on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee and came away with a way to liven up the country 'n' western music whites played. Here is Elvis doing an early rock 'n' roll number, "Shake, Rattle and Roll":



A rock 'n' roll song that had a strong country 'n' western background would be called "rockabilly," a combination of "rock 'n' roll" and "hillbilly." Here is Elvis doing Carl Perkins' rockabilly classic, "Blue Suede Shoes":



More later ...