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1954–1959 / EARLY ROCK AND ROLL

Rock and roll (often stylized as rock ‘n’ roll) as a distinct named genre emerged in the mid-1950s, with 1955 being a key year for its commercial breakthrough. The term was used in blues and R&B recordings since the 1920s, typically as a double entendre referring to both dancing and sexual activity. The earliest title may be “My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll),” written by J. Berni Barbour and recorded by Trixie Smith in 1922 for the African American–owned Black Swan label (musically, the song is closer to New Orleans style jazz than blues). In the post–World War II era, such references became more common: Manhattan Paul Bascomb’s “Rock and Roll” (1947); Wild Bill Moore’s “We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll” (1947) and “We’re Gonna Rock and Roll” (1949); Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1947), covered by Wynonie Harris (1947) and Elvis Presley (1954); and Wynonie Harris’s “All She Wants to Do Is Rock” (1949). Country singer Buddy Jones recorded “Rock and Rollin’ Mama” in 1939.

Let’s be clear at the outset about the origins of rock and roll: no one person invented it and no single record was the first rock and roll recording. A cohort of individuals converged on a sound (and an audience for it), and there are too many candidates for the first rock record. Any designation of “king” devalues the communal effort and should be viewed with skepticism. Three artists stand out, however, and there was enough shared brilliance among them. Chuck Berry’s songwriting, guitar playing, and singing provided a model of elegance in its simplicity; Little Richard channeled outrageous youthful energy with his songwriting, piano playing, and singing and an irresistible signature beat; and Elvis Presley pulled disparate streams together with a youthful, magnetic charisma and versatile singing capabilities, achieving unprecedented mass impact (see figure 18). They all have cited earlier artists from whom they drew in their own development.

One arrival point, in terms of the music industry, came in the summer of 1955, several months after the release of Blackboard Jungle, a film about juvenile delinquency set in an urban high school. The film’s theme song, “Rock around the Clock,” performed by Bill Haley and His Comets, shot to #1 on all three of Billboard’s pop charts in July: Best Seller in Stores, Most Played by Jockeys, and Most Played in Juke Boxes. For all of August 1955 it was at the top of the three charts. It was a ripe moment, allowing veteran R&B artist Fats Domino (“Ain’t It a Shame”) and newcomer Chuck Berry (“Maybelline,” his debut recording) into the pop charts that summer for the first time. Little Richard debuted on the R&B chart in November (“Tutti Frutti”) and then crossed over to the pop chart two months later. Elvis Presley, who debuted on the national country chart in July with his fourth single on the independent Sun Records label, would hit #1 on that chart with his fifth and last single, entering in September and taking many months to reach the top, in February 1956. He would not debut on the pop chart until March 1956 (“Heartbreak Hotel”), after he moved to the major RCA Victor label.

The year 1956 would see the domination of the pop charts by twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley and the significant presence of the first generation of solo black artists to be called rock and roll: Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley (see figures 19 and 20). Film musicals began capitalizing on the sudden rise of rock and roll, featuring Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley and His Comets, Frankie Lymon, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, and disc jockey Alan Freed, and Elvis’s Hollywood film career began this year.¹

Not only were black artists more frequently appearing on the pop charts, but some southern white rockabilly artists began appearing on the R&B charts. Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”) was the first to do so, hitting #2 on both the pop and R&B charts and #1 on the country and western chart in early 1956; Presley (“Don’t Be Cruel”) hit #1 on all three charts later that year; and in 1957 Jerry Lee Lewis (“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”) hit all three charts: pop #3, R&B #1, C&W #1. About the same time, Buddy Holly (“That’ll Be the Day”) hit #1 on the pop chart and #2 on the R&B chart.²

The initial energy of this era would dissipate by the end of the decade, in part because of a series of unrelated events that took the major players off the scene with no generation behind them to pick up the slack. Or, rather, the music industry caught on and promoted photogenic clean-cut white teen idols in their wake. Elvis was drafted and then inducted into the army in March 1958, several months after Little Richard had given up rock and roll for the ministry and then gospel music. Also in 1958 Jerry Lee Lewis was blacklisted for marrying his young teen cousin. In February 1959 Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson Jr. (“Chantilly Lace”), who were all touring together, died in a small plane crash in Iowa. (Don McLean memorialized the event in 1971 with “American Pie,” calling it the day the music died.) Later that year Alan Freed was fired due to the payola scandal, and Chuck Berry was arrested and ultimately convicted in 1961, after a mistrial, of transporting a minor across state lines for prostitution.³

A number of factors converged in the decade following the end of World War II that enabled rock and roll to develop: (1) rapid changes and growth in the music and related media industries, including recording, radio, and television; (2) the rise of teenagers as a new consumer demographic; and (3) a new cohort of creative individuals who captured the imaginations of teens.

THE MEDIA

Changes in the media in the 1940s and 1950s included the growth of independent radio stations, disc jockeys, and Top 40 formats; the addition of another performing rights organization (BMI); the entrance of two new distribution formats for audio recordings (vinyl albums and singles); the growth of television; and the growth of independent record labels (Peterson 1990). They all contributed to opening up the access of rhythm and blues and country recordings to broader audiences.

In the 1930s the Federal Communications Commission tightly restricted the number of radio stations licensed to broadcast, which typically resulted in five or fewer stations broadcasting in each local market: the major networks—NBC (Red and Blue), CBS, and Mutual—plus one independent station.⁴ In effect, there was a single national market with four networks competing for that audience. In 1940, when the FCC temporarily stopped licensing new stations, there were 813 licensed AM stations. In 1947 the FCC began approving a backlog of applications, and by 1949 the number of AM stations jumped to 2,127, with small independent stations making the biggest gain. In February 1953 Variety (1953) magazine featured a front-page story—“Negro Jocks Come into Own: Play Key Role in Music Biz”—noting that five hundred black R&B disc jockeys were working across the country, with twelve in New York City alone. Their standing in the community pointed to a new role for disc jockeys, beyond just playing records. By 1956 the total number of AM stations grew to almost 3,000, and by the end of the decade about one hundred autonomous local markets had materialized,, with each having 8 to 12 or more stations competing for local audiences.

White teens could hear R&B in the early 1950s through local disc jockeys like Alan Freed, whose Cleveland radio program the Moondog House, beginning in 1951, drew many listeners. When Freed moved to WINS in New York City in the fall of 1954, soon calling his show Rock ‘n’ Roll Party, he became one of the most influential deejays in the music business. Other disc jockeys in the early 1950s, such as Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg in Los Angeles and Rufus Thomas and Dewey Phillips in Memphis (who played Elvis Presley’s first recordings in 1954), fueled the growing interest. A Top 40 radio format, wherein radio stations would play a limited list of the forty most popular songs in the nation each week, dates to the mid-1950s. The format is credited to station director Todd Storz, in Omaha, who noted people repeatedly putting coins in jukeboxes to hear the same songs over and over (Fong-Torres 1998; Rasmussen 2008).

A 1939 dispute over increased licensing fees that radio stations should pay to ASCAP (representing composers and publishers) led to radio station owners forming their own competing Broadcast Music, Inc., performing rights organization. BMI attracted songwriters working in genres that were underrepresented or excluded from ASCAP, such as rhythm and blues and country. Throughout much of 1941 network radio stations played BMI-licensed music exclusively, giving a strong boost to previously ignored musical styles.

The debut of ten-inch (soon to be twelve-inch) 33⅓ rpm long-play records from Columbia in 1948 and seven-inch 45 rpm single records from RCA in 1949 (both made from vinyl) immediately displaced the heavier and fragile ten-inch 78 rpm shellac records and had a major impact on the industry. The LP became the primary medium for jazz and classical recordings and the 45 was the one for pop music and jukeboxes. The smaller, lighter, and virtually indestructible 45s enabled independent record labels to affordably and reliably ship their product nationwide.

The growth of television had both direct and indirect effects on rock and roll. Television had made significant inroads into U.S. homes by 1949, and 65 percent of U.S. households had a TV by 1955. Thinking that television would displace radio, the major broadcast networks loosened their objections to licensing additional radio stations, and local radio exploded by the mid-1950s. While the major radio networks were using live bands for their music broadcasts, independent stations were playing recordings. Cheap lightweight compact Japanese transistor radios flooded the market about this time, further contributing to the growth of radio.

In 1948 the four major record labels—RCA, Columbia (CBS), Capitol, and American Decca (MCA)—released 81 percent of all records that reached the weekly Top 10. Independent record labels grew exponentially beginning in the late 1940s (see figure 14), and by 1959 the major labels’ share of the Top 10 pot had dropped to 34 percent. Record sales grew steadily during the first part of the 1950s and then almost tripled between 1954 and 1959, when it reached $604 million. Rock and roll releases, including those on independent labels, fueled much of the growth (Gillett 1996: 39).

YOUTH CULTURE

Post–World War II economic prosperity in the United States led to teenagers having the time and means to participate in and influence American consumer culture by the 1950s. The Wild One (1953), starring thirty-year-old Marlon Brando; Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring twenty-four-year-old James Dean; and Blackboard Jungle (1955), with twenty-eight-year-old Sidney Poitier in his breakout role, reflected a growing concern about post–World War II youth culture. Toward the end of the decade, however, a series of films featuring rock and roll began to show a lighter side to teen life, and rock and roll had become the soundtrack for this generation.

Desegregation of the U.S. armed forces ordered by President Harry S. Truman in 1948 also contributed indirectly to the birth of rock and roll. Of the 5.7 million U.S. military personnel involved in the Korean War (1950–53), six hundred thousand were African American, a significant number in a country with a population of 150 million in 1950. Whites were exposed to the listening tastes of their black counterparts during the war, and when they returned home some of them passed those new listening experiences to their younger siblings.

NAMING A STYLE

The definitive arrival of the term rock and roll to name a multifaceted musical phenomenon can be tracked to late 1954, just after Alan Freed moved to WINS in New York and was forced to drop the label Moondog for his show (a local artist with that name had sued him). Freed began calling his program the Rock and Roll Show by December (Billboard 1954), and by January 1955 the term had caught on, as can be seen in two Billboard notices.

Disc Jockey Alan Freed’s first ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’ Ball in this city was a complete sell-out for both nights at the St. Nicholas Arena [capacity six thousand]. (Billboard 1955a: 13)

[Advertisement for Alan Freed’s WINS radio program:] America’s #1 ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’ disc Jockey (Billboard 1955b)

The profile of the new style by the mainstream Life magazine in April 1955 provided a brief explanation as to how the style arose: “During the past years as the big record companies concentrated on mambos and ballads, the country’s teen-agers found themselves without snappy dance tunes to their taste. A few disk jockies filled the void with songs like Ko Ko Mo, Tweedlee Dee, Hearts of Stone, Earth Angel, Flip, Flop, and Fly, Shake, Rattle and Roll, and the name rock ‘n roll took over. On a list of 10 top jukebox best-selling records last week, six were r ‘n r” (Life 1955: 168). All the songs named were R&B hits in 1954, except “Flip, Flop, and Fly,” which was released in early 1955. By early 1956 rock and roll was no longer a novelty; in a trend that would forever mark rock, it had gained respectability and was being co-opted, as Billboard had noted: “The shouting and tumult has died, but rhythm and blues or, as the teen-agers call it, rock and roll, has not departed. Rather, it may be stated that it has received respectability. The true measure of this development is the extent to which the idiom is being used in more or less pedestrian areas of the entertainment and advertising world” (Ackerman 1956: 1).

CROSSOVERS

Crossing over from the R&B or country charts to the pop charts was a major concern of many artists and their record labels. It meant exposure to a much broader audience and greater economic returns. The Mills Brothers, Louis Jordan, and Nat King Cole were some of the very few black artists to cross over from the race charts (called Harlem, then R&B) to the pop charts in the 1940s. A new crossover trend accelerated by the mid-1950s with black male vocal groups: the Dominoes’ “Sixty-Minute Man” (1951) hit #17; the Orioles’ “Crying in the Chapel” (1953) hit #11; the Crows’ “Gee” (1954) hit #14; and the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” (1954) broke into the pop Top 10 at #5. These were the first new R&B groups or artists of the 1950s to cross over into the upper reaches of the pop charts. The Tin Pan Alley–based pop styles and forms they used most likely facilitated their entry. The two high-profile crossovers of “Gee” and “Sh-Boom” in such close succession, in May and June 1954, were a harbinger.

Solo artists who were more blues and R&B-based would soon follow. The axis between New Orleans (Fats Domino, Little Richard), Mississippi Delta and Memphis (Ike Turner), Saint Louis (Chuck Berry), and Chicago (Bo Diddley) was crucial in providing the first generation of black R&B artists to cross over. (Turner did much work behind the scenes in the 1950s as a musician, scout, and producer, but did not hit the pop charts until 1960, with his wife, Tina.) Black artists crossing over became common from 1956 onward: “Whereas during the forties and early fifties there were rarely as many as three black singers simultaneously in the popular music hit parades, after 1956 at least one fourth of the best-selling records were by black singers” (Gillett 1996: xix).

COVERS

Bill Haley and His Comets’ 1954 cover of R&B singer Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” three months after the original entered the R&B charts, could be taken as another sign that a new era was emerging. Turner hit #1 on the R&B jukebox chart in June 1954, but he did not cross over to the pop charts at the time (he would later cross over three times between 1956 and 1960). In August Haley’s cover broke into the pop Top 10 in all three charts (Best Seller, Juke Box, and Jockey). The previous year (1953), Haley debuted on the pop chart with his “Crazy Man, Crazy” at #12, and so he had already laid some groundwork with his sound—different from Turner’s, for sure—a sound that would become one of the most emblematic of the early rock and roll era (see figure 21).

A notorious case, because the cover came in such close succession and sounded so similar to the original, was “Tweedlee Dee.” First recorded by R&B artist LaVern Baker (on the independent Atlantic label), the original entered both the pop and R&B charts on January 15, 1955. Just two weeks later, on January 29, white singer Georgia Gibbs’s cover version (on the major Mercury label) entered the pop charts. And just as Baker’s original hit #4 on the R&B charts and was rising up the pop charts, Gibbs’s cover surpassed it, rising to pop best seller #3; Baker’s original stalled at #22. Baker wrote her Congress representative, protesting that her arrangement (and, presumably, style) should be protected by copyright, but to no avail (Billboard 1955c). The African American songwriters Jesse Stone (“Shake, Rattle and Roll”) and Winfield Scott (“Tweedlee Dee”) received their share of composer royalties from any cover versions; the vocalists, however, received royalties only on sales of their own recordings.

In 1950 a test case had opened the door for this common practice of pop cover versions of R&B hits, ruling that musical arrangements were not considered as copyrightable property. The independent label Supreme tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the major Decca for $400,000. Supreme claimed that Decca had stolen their arrangement of “A Little Bird Told Me,” sung by Paula Watson, when Decca had issued an almost indistinguishable cover by Evelyn Knight (Billboard 1950).

Gibbs’s cover of Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” may have prompted Langston Hughes’s (1955) article later that year in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender: “Highway Robbery across the Color Line in Rhythm and Blues.” Imitation can be a form of flattery, Hughes noted, but blacks did not have the same access to venues, radio, and film, and so the practice was inherently unfair. The week after Hughes’s article was published, Pat Boone, who was perhaps the most notorious practitioner of producing bland pop covers of R&B hits, entered the pop charts covering Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame,” with Domino following close behind. Domino’s original had been at #1 on the R&B charts for eleven weeks in the early summer. While he crossed over to pop best seller #16, Boone’s cover hit #2 and remained there for many weeks as the original fell off the charts (see figure 21). Boone’s cover may have inadvertently pulled Domino into the otherwise impermeable pop charts. Domino had placed twelve songs in the Top 10 of R&B charts since 1950, with none crossing over. He had performed earlier in 1955 at Alan Freed’s first Rock ‘n’ Roll Ball in New York City, so perhaps the time was right for him to reach a new audience, under the banner of rock and roll. According to Boone, years later Domino called him up to the stage to thank him. “This man bought me this ring with this song,” Domino said pointing to one of his diamond rings, and they sang “Ain’t That a Shame” together (J. Miller 1999: 101). Composer royalties earned from Boone’s cover may have taken some of the sting out.

Ray Charles, whose style was much less threatened by pop cover versions, had a generous attitude in his assessment of the practice: “White singers were picking up on black songs on a much more widespread basis. They had always done it, but now it was happening much more frequently. Georgia Gibbs and Pat Boone and Carl Perkins and Elvis were doing tunes which originally had been rhythm-and-blues hits. It didn’t bother me. It was just one of those American things. I’ve said before that I believe in mixed musical marriages, and there’s no way to copyright a feeling or a rhythm or a style of singing. Besides, it meant that White America was getting hipper” (Charles and Ritz 1978: 176).

The case of Boone and Little Richard may illustrate Ray Charles’s point about getting hipper. Boone’s early 1956 cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” reached pop best seller #6, surpassing the original, which had stalled at #17 and dropped off the chart. But, very soon after, Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” spent a few months on that same best-seller pop chart, reaching #6, while Boone’s cover barely registered there, appearing for just two weeks and only reaching #23.⁵ Little Richard later spoke of this moment back in 1956: “When Pat Boone come out, I was mad … because, to me he was stopping my progress. I wanted to be famous. And here this man done came and took my song…. Now, in later years I thought about that, and said, that was good. But back then I said, oooh I can’t stand him…. I wanted the whole world to know that that’s not the way it went.”⁶ Bo Diddley continued that thought in conversation with Little Richard: “I felt about the same way you did, until I learnt that, hey, I am important, very important, because if these cats think enough of me to imitate me, that’s pretty good. Because I know guys out here can’t even get arrested” (Hackford 1987-v, disc 3).

Cover versions coming out many months, or even years, later can have positive effects, as when in 1963 the Beatles, for example, covered Chuck Berry’s 1956 “Roll over Beethoven,” not only bringing Berry composer royalties, but also stimulating interest in his music for a younger generation. Many other British Invasion bands covered Berry early in their career, including the Rolling Stones (“Come On,” “Carol”), Animals (“Memphis, Tennessee,” “Around and Around”), and Yardbirds (“Too Much Monkey Business”). Berry noted that his fee jumped from $1,200 to $2,000 a night when he returned to performing after a prison term (1962–63) and the Beatles had arrived in the United States.⁷

A key question concerns the creativity of the cover version—does it offer anything new? Ruth Brown voiced a pragmatic approach: “My gripe would never be with legitimate covers, or subsequent versions like [British singer] Cliff Richard’s, but with bare-faced duplicates, with no artistic merit whatsoever. Everybody in the business accepted covers as fair game…. I covered several songs myself … but they were never by any stretch of the imagination mere duplicates. We contributed to the songs” (1996: 110).

FIVE PRIMARY STYLES

It can be convenient to get a handle on the first wave of early rock and roll (1954–56) by categorizing its diverse streams into five primary styles, as suggested by Gillett (1996: 23–35). Each of these styles has strong regional associations (see figure 22).

Northern Band Rock and Roll

Bill Haley (1925–81) and His Comets exemplify this stream with their hits “Crazy Man, Crazy” (1953), “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (1954), and “Rock around the Clock” (1955). Comparing Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” with Joe Turner’s original, one can hear one way in which R&B was reshaped for a young white mainstream audience, taking off some of the blues-drenched edge from both the musical beat and the lyrics. The saxophone, a staple of R&B, is still present, although paired with a country-style electric guitar and given less room for improvisation on recordings. Sam “The Man” Taylor’s saxophone solos on R&B recorded in New York City in the mid-1950s set a standard difficult to retain in the new world of rock and roll (e.g., his baritone sax solo on Turner’s original and his tenor sax solo on the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” recorded the following month). Haley, born in 1925 in Michigan, was pushing thirty years old during his initial years of popularity (1953–56), no match for Elvis, who was a decade younger. Haley moved to the major label Decca in 1954 after his first hit.

New Orleans Dance Blues

The two major artists in this stream are pianists Fats Domino (1928–2017) from New Orleans and Little Richard (1932–) from Macon, Georgia, who made his first commercially successful recordings in New Orleans with some of Fats Domino’s musicians. They recorded at the famed studios run by Cosimo Matassa: J&M Studio, open from 1945 to 1956, and then Cosimo’s Studio at a new location.

Fats Domino’s debut record, “The Fat Man,” the B side of a ten-inch 78 rpm single on the New Orleans Imperial label, hit #2 on the R&B Juke Box chart in 1950. Featuring Earl Palmer, a future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and one of the most recorded drummers who contributed much to the development of rock and roll (Scherman 1999), the song established Domino and his signature laid-back New Orleans–based boogie woogie sound as a major force. Domino was the most experienced and commercially successful (excepting Elvis), and one of the oldest (behind Bill Haley and Chuck Berry) of the first generation of rock and rollers, with thirteen songs in the R&B Top 15 before he crossed over to the pop charts with “Ain’t It a Shame” in 1955. That initiated an extraordinary run of thirty-six Top 40 songs in the pop charts between 1955 and 1962. Domino recorded exclusively on the Imperial label from his debut through the peak of his recording career (1950–63); his Complete Imperial Singles collection contains over 130 songs.

Little Richard Penniman was born and raised in Macon, Georgia, singing in various churches (African Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, Pentecostal) and playing saxophone in his high school marching band. Richard has attributed his unique piano style to capturing the sound of the train rolling by his home as a child. After touring with various bands (occasionally appearing in drag attire), he recorded with RCA Victor in 1951 (no chart success) and Houston-based Peacock in 1953 (not released at the time) and then regrouped with a new band, the Upsetters. He signed with the Los Angeles–based Specialty label, which sent him to New Orleans to record at J&M Studio in October 1955 with Specialty producer Bumps Blackwell and Fats Domino musicians Lee Allen (saxophone) and Earl Palmer (drums). That session yielded “Tutti Frutti,” a lewd song with lyrics cleaned up on the spot by songwriter Dorothy LaBostrie, which hit #2 on the R&B charts and crossed over to #18 on the pop Best Seller chart. His next session (February 1956) yielded “Long Tall Sally,” his greatest crossover success (R&B #1, pop #6) (see figure 20). He made appearances in three films in 1956–57 (Don’t Knock the Rock, The Girl Can’t Help It, and Mister Rock and Roll) and enjoyed some financial success as a result of his touring and record sales. Little Richard left rock and roll in late 1957 to study for the ministry at a Seventh Day Adventist university, returning in 1962. His peak recording years, just 1955–57 on Specialty, yielded close to forty songs.⁸

Memphis Rockabilly

In the mid-1950s southern white artists, primarily on independent Memphis-based Sun Records, merged country (formerly called “hillbilly”) with R&B, typically featuring string instruments: acoustic and electric guitars and bass. Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano would be the exception. Saxophones were absent. The style came to be known as rockabilly, a term that Billboard magazine began using about June 1956, two years after Elvis Presley’s first recordings. By early 1957 Billboard noted the dominance of both rock and roll and rockabilly on the pop charts (see figure 23).⁹

The genre was kicked off on Sun with Elvis Presley’s (1935–77) first single, “That’s All Right Mama” (backed with “Blue Moon of Kentucky”), recorded and released in July 1954.¹⁰ Elvis would release a total of five seven-inch 45 rpm singles for Sun over the next year, each with an R&B cover on one side and a bluegrass or country cover on the other side. Five additional songs recorded at Sun would be released on his first album (Elvis Presley), on RCA Victor in early 1956. His group initially consisted of a trio, with Elvis on acoustic guitar and vocals, Scotty Moore on electric guitar, and Bill Black on acoustic bass; various drummers joined the trio for his fourth (“I’m Left, You’re Right”) and fifth (“Mystery Train”) releases, until D. J. Fontana settled in by the time Elvis moved to RCA Victor. The sequence of Elvis’s Sun singles and his entry into the country charts is as follows:

“That’s All Right”/“Blue Moon of Kentucky” (rec. July 5, 1954; rel. July 19, 1954)

“Good Rockin’ Tonight”/“I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine” (rec. September 10, 1954; rel. September 25, 1954)

“Milkcow Blues Boogie”/“You’re a Heartbreaker” (rec. December 8, 1954; rel. December 28, 1954)

“Baby Let’s Play House” (#5 country)/“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” (rec. February 1 and March 5, 1954; rel. April 10, 1955)

“I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (#1 country)/“Mystery Train” (#10 country) (rec. July 11, 1955; rel. August 6, 1955)

In late 1955, after a year of Elvis breaking out of Billboard’s regional country charts to the top of its national country chart, the major label RCA Victor bought his contract from Sun recording studio and record-label owner Sam Phillips for $35,000 plus $5,000 in owed royalties. Phillips’s quote—“If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars”—is one of the most famous in rock and roll history.¹¹ Elvis’s massive success beginning from his very first single on RCA Victor in early 1956 marked the arrival of rock and roll as a high-profile commercial recorded product. That single (“Heartbreak Hotel”) entered the pop charts in early March, reached #1, and stayed there for eight weeks. His first album, Elvis Presley, was released in March and hit #1, staying there for ten weeks; it was the first rock and roll album to hit #1. This was an era of independent record labels scouting talent and bringing them to national audiences before the major labels caught on. The majors had the influence and finances to market Presley, and he appeared on national television shows almost every month in 1956, culminating with three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show toward the end of the year.

Presley’s standing in the history of rock and roll can be appreciated by looking at his recording track record: he had nineteen Top 10 hits between 1956 and 1959, twelve of which went to #1. “Don’t Be Cruel” (backed with “Hound Dog”) stayed at #1 for eleven weeks in the summer of 1956 and hit #1 on the pop, R&B and C&W charts, indicating that a broad cross section of American youth was listening to him. His Sun recordings (1954–55), made when he was nineteen to twenty years old, are among the most seismic in the history of rock. Drawing deep from country, gospel, R&B, and the blues, Elvis created a unique mix that reflected the mood and optimism of young America in the second decade after the Great War.

Growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, about a hundred miles east of the Mississippi Delta region, exposed Elvis early on to deeply rooted southern culture, including African American culture, which he drew on. After he moved with his family to Memphis at the age of thirteen, he would occasionally attend the church services and evening radio broadcasts of the great black gospel composer and preacher Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, who was popular among blacks and whites.¹² Elvis’s African American audience can be gauged by his R&B chart standings: between March 1956 and early 1961, he had twenty-two Top 10 hits in the R&B charts, six of which went to #1.

In April 1957 white-owned Sepia magazine, which catered to a black readership, published “How Negroes Feel about Elvis,” registering opinions that ran the gamut from condemnation to admiration. The article contained a racist comment rumored to have been said by Elvis. That summer, black-owned Jet magazine, also catering to a black audience, sent editor Louie Robinson (1957) to interview Elvis and others who knew him, including African Americans in his hometown Tupelo and in Memphis. Robinson found no credible basis for the rumor and offered up a sympathetic picture of his standing among African Americans. The article estimated that Fats Domino, his closest peer, would earn $700,000 in 1957 and that Elvis stood to earn twice that amount. (For comparison, earlier in the decade the biggest star in country music, Hank Williams, was earning $200,000 a year until his death in 1953 at age twenty-nine.) The Sepia magazine quote may be the original basis for rumors about Elvis that still persist.

Robinson also interviewed Brooklyn-based songwriter Otis Blackwell: “The lion’s share, or an estimated $900,000, of the Presley income is from records, two of the best of which were penned by a New York Negro, Otis Blackwell: Don’t Be Cruel, which has brought Presley a not-at-all cruel $202,500, and All Shook Up, which shook $135,000 into Elvis’ jeans. Blackwell refuses to disclose his earnings on the songs, but he says: ‘I got a good deal. I made money, I’m happy’” (1957: 61). Blackwell himself, according to his obituary in the New York Times, “from an early age crossed a cultural color line. At home, his family gathered around the piano to sing gospel songs, but while working at a nearby movie theater he became obsessed with the singing cowboy movies of Tex Ritter. ‘Like the blues, it told a story,’ he once said of country music. ‘But it didn’t have the same restrictive construction. A cowboy song could do anything.’ … Many of the songs he wrote for Presley gave both men songwriting credit, because of an arrangement with Presley’s management. ‘I was told that I would have to make a deal,’ Mr. Blackwell later said” (New York Times 2002).¹³

Some of the animosity toward Elvis among African Americans may be due to a perception that he did not publicly acknowledge his sources. The songwriters he covered, though, received copyright credit on his records (and presumably royalties from his sales and performance rights), and early interviews should dispel any doubts.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goose it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw” (Presley, qtd. in Gary 1956).

Presley was frank about his own contribution: “A lot of people seem to think I started this business,’ he muses, ‘but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid—like Rev. Brewster’s [Baptist] church [in Memphis]” (Presley, qtd. in Louie Robinson 1957: 61).

Presley recognized here another source of animosity: getting credit for inventing a musical style. Referring to Elvis as the king of rock and roll, suggesting that he either invented the style or did it better than anyone else, does a disservice to his African American contemporaries and predecessors. This was Chuck D’s point when he later reflected back on his incendiary lines in Public Enemy’s 1989 “Fight the Power,” lines that reinforced negative perceptions of Elvis for later generations: “Elvis [Presley] was an icon to America but he ain’t invent Rock & Roll. There were other Black heroes [that did]…. And that aspect was racist I thought, that people just obscured the Black foundation of what Elvis evolved from…. He started off being quite humble … hearing from people speaking that knew him and knew his beginnings: from Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, I had conversations with Little Richard, Ike Turner. He started out being this cat that loved Black music, the Black environment, the Black way of dress and all that” (qtd. in P. Arnold 2012).

From a commercial point of view, Presley was in a class by himself. His artistic contribution, a unique mix of styles drawing not only from R&B but also from country and white and black gospel can be readily heard by comparing his cover version of “Mystery Train” (1955) with Herman “Little Junior” Parker’s original from 1953. One would be hard pressed to doubt his talent and charisma as an entertainer. His age, eight years younger than Chuck Berry and two years younger than Little Richard, was also a major factor among a teen market that was asserting itself for the first time.

Presley’s appeal across generations, after an initial shock, was in part due to his lack of pretense: “One big element, it is clear, is his lack of all pretensions. A recurrent theme among the adult minority interviewed at Tuesday night’s show was expressed by Mrs. G. E. Anderson of Charlotte. ‘I didn’t like Sinatra in his day but I like Elvis. He’s country and I am too,’ she said. Nearly all the adults who expressed delight with Presley had 10 years before scorned the smooth Frankie boy” (Oberdorfer 1956: 1B).

Some quotations posted on the website of Graceland (2019), Elvis’s home since 1957 and now a major tourist site, provide a sense of his standing among his African American peers. Most are unsourced, but some can be tracked down, which can lead to many more. James Brown and Muhammad Ali, in particular, both icons of black identity and achievement, world famous, and born into poverty, have expressed close kinship with, and love and respect for, Presley. Muhammad Ali remembered, “All my life, I admired Elvis Presley. When I was in Las Vegas, I heard him sing, and it was a thrill to meet him” (qtd. in Hauser 1991: 481). “When I was 15 years old [about 1957] and saw Elvis on TV, I wanted to be Elvis. Other kids in the neighborhood were listening to Ray Charles and James Brown, but I listened to Elvis. I admired him so much and I decided that if I was going to be famous I’d do it just like him” (qtd. in Shanahan 2016: 138–39).

The year after Presley died, James Brown paid tribute to him, covering one of his early hits, “Love Me Tender,” saying in the introduction, “I want to talk about a good friend I had for a long time and a man I still love, brother Elvis Presley” (“Love Me Tender,” 1978). Brown wrote in his autobiography, “[in 1966] we threw everybody out of the room, and Elvis and I sang gospel together…. That’s how we communicated…. I could tell Elvis had a strong spiritual feeling by the way he sang that music…. His death hit me very hard. We were a lot alike in many ways—both poor boys from the country raised on gospel and R&B…. I went to Graceland that night” (1986: 165, 166, 247). B. B. King, who knew Elvis in his early days in Memphis, had this to say: “Respect, respect, respect. And he sorta earned it, earned that respect from me at that time. Finally I had a chance to meet him and I found out that he really was something else” (PBS 2001). Memphis all-black-formatted WDIA radio deejay Rufus Thomas stated, “I was the first black jock to play Elvis records…. We were doing a WDIA show at Ellis Auditorium, and Elvis was backstage. I took him by the hand and led him onstage, he made that twisting of the leg, and the people, these were all black people now, they stormed that stage trying to get to Elvis. After that, the show was really over. Elvis was doing good music, blues and rhythm and blues, because that was his beginning.” And R&B bandleader Roy Brown recalled, “Elvis followed us, from Tupelo to Vicksburg to Hattiesburg, and he just watched us. Later on, when I first saw him on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ all that wiggling and stuff, man, the blacks had been doing that for years. But there was something about Elvis that was different from the Fabians and them other guys. Elvis could sing. And he had a heart…. He had style, and he had soul” (qtd. in Palmer 1995: 27–28).

Elvis’s recording success immediately led to his film career, with over thirty films made from 1956 (Love Me Tender, released in November) through 1969, including Jailhouse Rock (1957), King Creole (1958), Kid Galahad (1962), and Viva Las Vegas (1964). After devoting much of the 1960s to acting, Presley made a comeback with an NBC television special in December 1968, hitting the Top 10 twice in 1969 (rare since 1963) with “In the Ghetto” (#3) and “Suspicious Minds” (#1). This led to his Las Vegas career and eventual declining health due to prescription drug abuse (Guralnick 1999).¹⁴

Immediately following the initial success of Elvis, several other Sun Records artists moved onto the national scene, notably guitarist Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes,” pop #2, 1956) and pianist Jerry Lee Lewis (“Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” pop #3, 1957). Johnny Cash (“I Walk the Line,” country #1, 1956) would top the country charts, and Roy Orbison, having only minimal success debuting at Sun (1956–58), would eventually break through when he left for Monument Records (“Only the Lonely,” pop #2, 1960). A photo of a chance meeting of Presley, Lewis, Perkins, and Cash at Sun Studios in December 1956 was captioned “Million Dollar Quartet” (R. Johnson 1956); recordings of the impromptu session were not released until 1981.

Chicago Rhythm and Blues

While a potent urban electric blues scene catering to the black community developed in the 1950s in Chicago, with many of the musicians coming from the South (e.g., Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf), other musicians were able to create a more youthful music, crossing over into the pop market. The most successful was Chuck Berry (1926–2017), born and raised in Saint Louis, perhaps the most musically influential of all the early rock and roll artists. Berry was unique in his mastery of three realms: songwriting, singing, and guitar playing. He has cited Carl Hogan, guitarist with Louis Jordan, as an important influence, which can be heard on the introduction to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” (1946).

Berry’s father was a contractor and church deacon, and his mother was a public school principal, and so he grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. He married in 1948 and worked various jobs to support his family (his daughter was born in 1950). By 1953 Berry was playing in Johnnie Johnson’s trio regularly at the Cosmo Club in Saint Louis. On a recommendation from Muddy Waters he brought a demo tape to Chess Records and made his first record there in May 1955 (“Maybelline,” an adaptation of the country tune “Ida Red”), with Johnson on piano and Willie Dixon on bass. To push “Maybelline” in the New York City market, Chess gave Alan Freed cosongwriting credit (without Berry’s knowledge), and it worked: his debut record became a #1 R&B hit, crossing over to #5 on the pop chart. Berry (1987: 90–91) had a clear understanding of his audiences (he catered to both blacks and whites at the Cosmo Club), drawing his diction from both Nat King Cole and Muddy Waters. He had nine pop Top 40 hits through 1959 (out of a lifetime total of fourteen), five of which were in the Top 10 (see figure 20). Berry is widely recognized as the great songwriter of the early rock and roll era. His only #1 pop hit, though, came in 1972 with the novelty song “My Ding-a-Ling.”

“I don’t think there’s any group in the world, white or black…. You name any top group, and they’ve all been influenced by him. His lyrics that were very intelligent lyrics in the fifties, when people were just singing virtually about nothing, he was writing social comment songs. He was writing all kinds of songs, with incredible meter to the lyrics, which influenced Dylan and me and many other people. The meter of his lyrics is tremendous. He’s the greatest rock and roll poet, and I really admire him” (John Lennon in the 1970s, in Hackford 1987-v).

Bo Diddley (1928–2008), born Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi (changing his name to McDaniel when he was adopted by relatives), moved to the South Side of Chicago at the age of seven. Like his label-mate Chuck Berry, McDaniel was the other transplant to Chicago who was a major part of this early rock and roll era. He learned and played violin at the famed three-thousand-member Ebenezer Baptist Church and later picked up the guitar. His first record, “Bo Diddley,” recorded and released on Chess subsidiary Checker, hit #1 on the R&B chart in 1955. In November 1955 he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as part of New York deejay Dr. Jive’s Rhythm and Blues Revue from the Apollo Theater. Bo Diddley had several trademarks: a signature rhythm, sometimes called hambone (same as the Cuban clave); a percussive style of playing rhythm guitar even during his solos (“Bo Diddley,” “Pretty Thing”); and a band that included a maracas player (Jerome Green) and a woman guitarist (Peggy “Lady Bo” Jones, succeeded by Norma-Jean “The Duchess” Wofford). He had the least commercial success of the early rock pioneers, in part because he put out fewer recordings, but his original, quirky sound, guitar style, personality, and look (he wore glasses and played a rectangular-shaped guitar) has given him an enduring visibility. He was inducted into the second class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2019) in 1987.

Although not based in Chicago, Ike Turner, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, brought his band to Sun Studio in Memphis to record “Rocket 88,” which was issued on Chicago’s Chess Records in 1951 under vocalist Jackie Brenston’s name. It hit #1 on the R&B chart and is often pointed to as a key recording in rock history, due in part to the prominence of the distorted electric guitar in its boogie woogie rhythm. Turner subsequently worked for several years with Sun owner Sam Phillips, who formed Sun Records the following year.

Vocal Groups (Doo Wop)

Primarily a genre associated with northern urban African American communities (especially in New York City), doo wop developed in the mid-1950s from male vocal groups. The Dominoes and Crows were from Harlem, and the Chords were from the South Bronx. Doo wop typically drew not on blues forms but rather on Tin Pan Alley styles of songwriting. This involved a thirty-two-bar verse-verse-bridge-verse structure (diagrammed as AABA), wherein each letter refers to eight bars, and the bridge features a contrasting melody and chords.

Doo wop was an optimistic music that looked to the future, especially with romantic lyrics that pointed to life together as a couple. Whereas R&B and blues were rooted in the past, doo wop represented a more modern urban and cosmopolitan outlook: “The group singers dealt with a completely different situation. For them and their audience, the past was, if not rejected and despised, then often ignored. The present was of greatest importance, and the future was looked at with wonder: Does she love me?—it’s too soon to know. The songs were invariably about unfulfilled relationships—the period after acquaintance has been established, before romance has been confirmed. A smaller number of songs concerned the aftermath of a broken relationship” (Gillett 1996: 162–63).

A series of crossovers from R&B to the pop world in the mid-1950s firmly established the genre and led to a glut on the market, reflecting its popularity in urban neighborhoods. Two of the more well-known groups in the later 1950s, both affiliated with Atlantic Records and the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller were the Drifters (1953–), featuring Clyde McPhatter (who had left the Dominoes) and then Ben E. King (“This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” 1960); and the Coasters (1955–), with hits including “Young Blood” and “Searchin’” (1957), “Yakety Yak” (1958), and “Charlie Brown” (1959).

Buddy Holly (1936–59), from Lubbock, Texas, and the Crickets are missing in Gillette’s (1996:23–35) first-wave five primary styles (1954–56), because they came on the scene in 1957, in a second wave of early rock and roll. Neither do they fit into any of the previously mentioned categories, as a white electric guitar–based quartet with drums coming from Texas, hitting the R&B charts and never making the country charts. After two misses in 1956, they hit #1 (“That’ll Be the Day”) and #3 (“Peggy Sue”) on the pop chart in 1957. They set the model for 1960s rock: they were a distinct unit (a band) that wrote their own songs, and they had a two-guitar (lead and rhythm), bass, and drums quartet format.

PAYOLA

In 1959, on the heels of television quiz-show inquiries, a House of Representatives subcommittee began investigating the practice of payola, the payment of cash by record promoters to radio disc jockeys to play their records. The highest-profile targets were Alan Freed and Dick Clark. Freed was arrested along with seven other radio figures in May 1960 for receiving over $100,000 in bribes from twenty-three record companies over the past two years—it was front-page news for the New York Times (Roth 1960). He had already been fired from his radio and television jobs in 1959 and eventually pled guilty to two of the ninety-nine counts, paying a small fine in 1963. Freed was indicted in 1964 for income-tax evasion and died the following year of cirrhosis of the liver. Clark, who was the subject of an intense hearing in April 1960 and Life magazine profile, managed to escape unscathed by divesting his questionable industry holdings: “Dick Clark … did not rely on conventional cash payola but worked out a far more complex and profitable system. It hinged on his numerous corporate holdings which included financial interests in three record companies, six music publishing houses, a record pressing plant, a record distributing firm and a company which manages singers. The music, the records and the singers involved with these companies gained a special place in Clark’s programs, which the [congressional] committee [investigating payola] said gave them a systematic preference” (Bunzel 1960: 120).

Freed and Clark had differing reputations in the African American press at the time (1959–60):

If there’s one shining star in the constellation of Alan Freed’s career, it has been his determined, quiet, but effective war on racial bigotry in the music business. Largely as a result of his efforts, several Negro singing groups are top successes today because of his encouragement and fairness…. His “Big Party” has always had Negro kids right in there putting down a tough “slop” with the best of them. Have you ever seen Negro kids on Dick Clark’s program? … Someone should raise the question as to whether there was ever any payola to keep Negro kids off of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand TV program?¹⁵ (New York Age 1959)

SOCIAL IMPACT

Gathered around a piano in the mid-1980s with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, discussing life on the road in the 1950s in a one-hour filmed conversation, Little Richard suggested that rock and roll had a stronger social impact than many people might be aware of.

Little Richard: In some of the shows that I did in the early days, when I was drawing more blacks, they would have white spectators ([to Bo Diddley:] I know you used to play like that too, I’m sure that we all did), and the white people would jump over the balcony and come down, and rock and roll really brought integration about.

Chuck Berry: It helped.

Little Richard: It was a big force and a big help in integration coming about.

Today a lot of people don’t know that.

Bo Diddley: That’s right.

(Hackford 1987-v, disc 3)

In addition to the more private kinds of listening activities, such as in the home or in a car, large-scale public rock and roll concerts—even those in segregated venues in the South—may indeed have had a positive impact in the path toward racial integration. Although, as we will see in a story related by Eric Burdon of the Animals, those teens crashing the color line in the next decade did not necessarily represent all their peers who loved rock and roll.

Just looking through the prism of the number of pop Top 40 hits from 1954 to 1959, the contributions of the first-generation architects of early rock and roll have registered very unevenly. In chronological order of breaking through, they include Bill Haley (fifteen), Fats Domino (twenty-one), Chuck Berry (nine), Little Richard (nine), Elvis Presley (thirty-two), and Bo Diddley (one). Popularity chart recognition is just one, albeit essential, part of a multifaceted story. Some parts of the story resist measurement, such as originality, innovation, and feel (groove). And still other parts, such as the virulent opposition on the part of some adults, may be hard to fathom. The contribution of this generation of rock and roll pioneers to a new vision of U.S. culture and society is well documented and generally recognized, yet still incalculable.

See figure 14. Some key independent record labels, 1940s–1950s (date founded and artist’s debut recording) See figure 18. Birth years of early rock and roll, soul, and funk leaders See figure 19. Elvis Presley Top 10 hits

See figure 20. Top 40 crossover pop hits by black rock and roll artists

See figure 21. Five cover comparisons, 1954–1956

See figure 22. Five styles of early rock and roll, 1954–1956

See figure 23. Rockabilly artists and their debut recordings

1 See Sears (1956-v, 1957-v), Price (1956-v), and Dubin (1957-v).

2 Simon (1956) noted that, before Carl Perkins, no country artist ever appeared on the R&B charts. Despite being from Texas, Holly never registered on the country charts.

3 The first two classes of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986, 1987) is populated by many of the people covered in this chapter (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2019).

4 This paragraph draws from Peterson (1990: 101, 105) and Ennis (1992: 136–37).

5 Boone’s cover had a similar fate on the Disc Jockey chart, but fared better on the Juke Box chart (#8), surpassing Little Richard (#14). One can only speculate whether white teens would have been okay with purchasing and requesting airplay of Little Richard’s recording but less comfortable listening to it in public spaces on jukeboxes.

6 Little Richard had a similar take on another cover: “Elvis took my ‘Tutti Frutti’ and I was very disgusted. But by him singing it, he really made it bigger, and made me bigger” (Wharton 2002-v).

7 See Hackford (1987-v, disc 4, Robertson interview).

8 Little Richard established the terms of a public queer persona in rock, no mean feat given his religious background (C. Malone 2017). For more on Little Richard, see C. White (1984).

9 Early uses of the term rockabilly in Billboard include the following. “The wave of ‘rock-a-billy’ imitators (which accompanied Presley’s rise) has sharply receded during the last couple of weeks” (Bundy 1956: 17). “The phenomenon of the charts, of course, is the presence of three rockabilly platters on the R&B list [by Presley and Perkins]” (Simon 1956). “The current domination of rock and roll and rockabilly tunes in the pop music field” (Billboard 1957).

10 Sixteen-year-old Oklahoman Wanda Jackson’s debut, “You Can’t Have My Love,” was released two months earlier, in May on Decca, reaching #8 on the C&W Juke Box chart. More in the realm of country, she would not cross over to the pop charts until 1960, with “Let’s Have a Party.”

11 Phillips is quoted from his studio partner Marion Keisker in Guralnick (1971: 172).

12 Louie Robinson (1957: 61); Guralnick (1994: 75); see also Reagon (1992: 201) and Heilbut (2002: 101).

13 Presley’s publisher required songwriters to give up a third of their credit if they wanted their songs recorded, something that embarrassed Presley: “I’ve never written a song in my life…. It makes me look smarter than I am” (qtd. in Guralnick 1994: 386–87). Blackwell states, “There had to be a deal, share this and that. I said no at first, but they said Elvis is gonna turn the business around, so I said okay…. It turned out we sounded alike, had the same groove…. The cat was hot, that’s why his name is on the songs. Why not? That’s the way the business is anyway” (qtd. in Giddens 1976: 48).

14 Raymond and Raymond (1987-v) focuses on 1956, when Elvis first burst into national celebrity; Wharton (2002-v) contains many tributes on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death; and Zimmy (2018-v) takes a deep dive into his life and career.

15 Delmont (2012) has more on payola and Clark (143–47) and African American newspapers noting segregation on American Bandstand (184–87); see also Jackson (1997).