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Sunday 20 August 2017

Rock and roll

The term "rock and roll", which was black slang for fornication, appeared on record for the first time in 1922 on Trixie Smith's "My Baby Rocks Me With One Steady Roll".

The term 'rock and roll' was popularized by Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, who coined the word from the 1942 song of Wild Bill Moore "We´re Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll".

In 1950, Alan Freed became the first person to play rhythm and blues music to a predominantly white audience on his radio show, Moondog Rock'n'Roll Party.

Alan Freed

In March 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats recorded "Rocket 88", often cited as "the first rock and roll record", at Sam Phillips' recording studios in Memphis, Tennessee.

Sam Phillips had Elvis Presley record his first single, "That's All Right, Mama" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky," a synthesis of rhythm-and-blues and country-and-western that was for awhile described as "rockabilly." The record made an immediate impression on local listeners, who were surprised to learn that Presley was white.

By the mid-1950s such performers as Little Richard, Joe Turner, and Chuck Berry were also popular with white audiences. Radio disc jockeys began calling their music rock 'n' roll.

Variety magazine predicted in 1955 that rock’n’roll would be "all over by June."

In 1956 the 21-year-old Presley created a sensation with his rock 'n' roll-styled "Heartbreak Hotel," the first of his 14 records in a row that sold more than a million copies each.

Presley in a publicity photograph for the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock

Presley's success inspired other country performers to sing rock and roll music in the late 1950s. They were called rockabilly singers, and the most prominent of them were the hiccuping vocalist Buddy Holly and the whooping singer-pianist Jerry Lee Lewis.

As rock and roll rapidly became the most popular music of the late 1950s, record industry executives became aware that young listeners made up the largest portion of this music's audience. Therefore they recruited young, often adolescent, singers to record rock and roll and produced such songs as "Young Love," "16 Candles," and "Teen-Age Crush."

In 1959, Rock & roll was the overwhelming favorite of 14-18 year-olds, while most people aged 19-70 named it as their least favorite music.


Throughout the next few decades rock and roll spawned various genres, often without the initially characteristic backbeat, that are now more commonly called simply "rock music" or "rock". The blanket term rock comprised a multitude of styles from folk rock to heavy metal.

Comptons Encyclopedia, Europress Encyclopedia

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