Origins of rock and roll
In 1939 during the April 5th broadcast on “The Fred Allen- Town Hall Tonight- Show” the song “Rock and Roll” appeared as a barber shop quartet lead-in.
[3] In 1951, Cleveland-based disc jockey Alan Freed began playing this music style while popularizing the term "rock and roll" on mainstream radio.
[5] Freed was the first radio disc jockey and concert producer who frequently played and promoted rock and roll, including songs by black artists that were considered to be R&B.
[citation needed] In 1934, the Boswell Sisters had a pop hit with "Rock and Roll" from the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round,[33][34] where the term was used to describe the motion of a ship at sea.
[citation needed] When Alan Freed began referring to rock and roll on mainstream radio in 1951 however, "the sexual component had been dialled down enough that it simply became an acceptable term for dancing".
"[40] In 1939, a review of "Ciribiribin" and "Yodelin' Jive" by the Andrews Sisters with Bing Crosby, in the journal The Musician, stated that the songs "... rock and roll with unleashed enthusiasm tempered to strict four-four time".
"[43] In the April 25, 1945 edition, Orodenker described Erskine Hawkins' version of "Caldonia" as "right rhythmic rock and roll music", a phrase precisely repeated in his 1946 review of "Sugar Lump" by Joe Liggins.
[55] Freed did not acknowledge the suggestion about that source (or the original meaning of the expression) in interviews, and explained the term as follows: "Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name.
After Freed was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, the organization's website offered this comment: "He became internationally known for promoting African-American rhythm and blues music on the radio in the United States and Europe under the name of rock and roll".
[57] Some years later, Greg Harris, then the Executive Director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said to CNN: "Freed's role in breaking down racial barriers in U.S. pop culture in the 1950s, by leading white and black kids to listen to the same music, put the radio personality 'at the vanguard' and made him 'a really important figure'".
Contributions came from America's black population, with an ancient heritage of oral storytelling through music of African origin, usually with strong rhythmic elements, with frequent use of "blue notes" and often using a "call and response" vocal pattern.
"[60]By the 1930s, African American musicians, such as Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, were developing swing music, essentially jazz played for dancing, and in some areas such as New York City processes of social integration were taking place.
Economic changes also made the earlier big bands unwieldy; Louis Jordan left Chick Webb's orchestra the same year to form the Tympany Five.
Mixing of genres continued through the shared experiences of the World War II, and afterward a new style of music emerged, featuring "honking" saxophone solos, increasing use of the electric guitar, and strongly accented boogie rhythms.
The song became much more successful the following year when recorded by Wynonie Harris, whose version changed the steady blues rhythm to an uptempo gospel beat, and it was re-recorded by Elvis Presley in 1954 as his second single.
Marshall Lytle, Haley's bass player, claimed that this was one of the songs that inspired Alan Freed to coin the phrase "rock and roll" to refer to the music he played.
As well as "rocking" rhythm and blues songs, such as the massively successful and influential "Rocket 88" recorded by Ike Turner and his band but credited to singer Jackie Brenston, the term was used to encompass other forms of black music.
One source states that Ray "opened the way for Elvis and the overt sexual energy of rock and roll ... [and] is credited by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Elton John as being a formative influence on their artistic styles".
[63]Some of the rhythm and blues musicians who had been successful in earlier years – such as Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, and Fats Domino who had his first R&B hit in 1950 – made the transition into new markets.
At the same time, younger black musicians such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley took advantage of the gradual breakdown of ethnic barriers in America to become equally popular and help launch the rock and roll era.
[67] Another white singer, Johnnie Ray, who began to achieve success in the early 1950s, has also been called a major precursor to what became rock'n'roll, for his jazz and blues-influenced music, and his animated stage personality.
[70] One source states that Ray "opened the way for Elvis and the overt sexual energy of rock and roll ... [and] is credited by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Elton John as being a formative influence on their artistic styles".
Nigel Williamson questions whether it was really an R&B song "with an unusually fast, bottom-heavy eight-to-the bar boogie rhythm and a great lyric about cars, booze and women".
[168] The music historian Robert Palmer wrote that Goree Carter's earlier 1949 song "Rock Awhile" is a "much more appropriate candidate" than "the more frequently cited" "Rocket 88".
[171][172] Others have taken the view that the first was Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight", or Wynonie Harris' 1948 version; the song received greater exposure when Elvis Presley covered it in 1954.
by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes[81] discusses 50 contenders, from Illinois Jacquet's "Blues, Part 2" (1944) to Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" (1956), without reaching a definitive conclusion.
The artists who appeared at Freed's earliest shows included orchestra leader Buddy Johnson, the Clovers, Fats Domino, Big Joe Turner, the Moonglows, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, and the Harptones.
Because the honking tenor saxophone was the driving force at those shows and on many of the records Freed was playing, the authors began their list with a 1944 squealing and squawking live performance by Illinois Jacquet with Jazz at the Philharmonic in Los Angeles in mid-1944.
[185] Ray Charles referred to Little Richard as being the artist that started a new kind of music, which was a funky style of rock and roll that he was performing onstage for a few years before appearing on record in 1955 as "Tutti Frutti.
[194] Sister Rosetta Tharpe also was recording shouting, stomping music in the 1930s and 1940s, including "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), which contained major elements of mid-1950s rock and roll.
