What was rock and roll

In Freed was indicted on payola charges by an FTC congressional committee. Freed died broke in Freed left behind a city of rock 'n' roll fans.

Their acceptance and enthusiasm for new bands, musical trends, and recordings made Cleveland a hot music market. With a perspective of 15 years, Gillett credited Freed's role in starting rock 'n' roll and saw the Moondog Coronation Ball as the beginning of rock 'n' roll.

In the mids, disc jockey Norm N. The museum, located on the lakefront, opened to the public in Sept. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start from the beginning. After many takes, they had a record. Phillips had become friendly with a white disk jockey, Dewey Phillips, who played some R. Becoming friendly with d. Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, used to have a trunk full of alligator shoes when he drove around visiting local d.

Sam gave the recording to Dewey, and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation. To make a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. The point was that Elvis was not a pop singer who covered R.

Plenty of pop singers did that. Elvis was a crossover artist. Guralnick says it was Phillips who persuaded Junior Parker that the train should have sixteen coaches. It was a fucking masterpiece. Presley was made for television. Offstage, he was bashful and polite, but, with a microphone and in front of an audience, he was a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer.

He loved to perform. The rest is history. Originally, Phillips never had any idea of using Presley to cover an R. He called him in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley always believed he essentially was. When Phillips decided to bring in two white musicians, Moore and Black, to back Presley, he had them try pop and country songs.

Moore and Black thought the song was a joke, too. It worked, but it seems to have been completely unpremeditated. It was a regional hit. Producers knew where the new sound was headed. Rhythm and blues was hot. By , the all-black-programming WDIA had become a fifty-thousand-watt station reaching the entire mid-South. A year later, there were more than six hundred stations, in thirty-nine states, that programmed for black listeners.

When the young Pat Boone walked into the studio at Dot Records, in Gallatin, Tennessee, in the summer of , he was shocked to be asked to sing an R.

Like Presley, Boone saw himself as a ballad singer. African-American performers began to benefit from the popularity of the new sound. By January, when Presley was beginning to appear on television, it had reached No.

In , only three per cent of songs on the pop retail chart were by African-American artists; in , it was nearly thirty per cent.

That was unprecedented. He helped make R. In , seventy-six per cent of top R. The marginal market had become the main market, and the majors had got into the act. The d. Folk songs had a message, and some sixties rock songs had a message. In order for a music for young people to come into being, young people have to have a way to play it. The jukebox was one delivery mode: kids could listen to the music in a diner or an ice-cream shop, someplace outside the home and in the company of other kids.

More significant, as Ennis points out, were several inventions. The r. Soon, RCA introduced a cheap plastic record player, which played only 45s and sold for twelve ninety-five. They did not have to listen in the living room on the family phonograph. In , transistor radios came on the market. Kids could now carry the music anywhere, including to school. A robust national economy in the United States after meant that teen-agers were staying in school longer than they had in the nineteen-thirties or during the war years.

High school became an important social space. It has also been tempting to make sense of the rise of rock and roll as somehow related to the civil-rights movement, whose origins date from the same period.

White enthusiasm for R. Reflective Questions Who do you think is the greatest rock and roll artist of all time? Do you think rock is dead? Will it make a comeback if so? Da Capo Press, , pages. The history of Rock and Roll in Detroit. Click here to order Browne, David. First Known Use of rock and roll Noun , in the meaning defined above Verb , in the meaning defined at sense 1. Buying Guide Our team at The Usage has selected the best wireless speakers of Learn More About rock and roll.

Share rock and roll Post the Definition of rock and roll to Facebook Share the Definition of rock and roll on Twitter. Time Traveler for rock and roll The first known use of rock and roll was in See more words from the same year. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of rock and roll. Kids Definition of rock and roll. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary.