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What about the the term rock and roll?

Since when was this music called rock and roll?

Well, the sordid part of the story is that before the music came along,

the words rock and roll were sexual innuendos.

They were slang used in the black community to describe sex,

such as Trixie Smith singing, My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll in 1929.

And who coined the term for this new kind of music, and, when did it happen?

1951 was the year rock and roll was officially born.

And radio disk jockey Alan Freed, from Cleveland, Ohio was the man.

In order to describe the music he was airing on his late night radio show,

he came up with the term rock and roll.

It could easily have been something else.

Some scholars tell us, actually, that Freed did not

understand the underground meaning of the words, when he started using them.

Now, even though Alan Freed is credited with coining the term, he

is not as important to history, at least in my view, as the musicians or the music.

But now you know why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is in Cleveland,

Ohio, and not in New York, or Memphis, or Los Angeles.

It's a cool history lesson, isn't it?

But there's so much more to rock and roll than meets the eye.

So we are going to go way, way back in time,

to trace the origins of rock and roll in America.

Three music styles are considered the primary influences in the birth

of rock and roll.

Blues, jazz, and hillbilly or country music.

But even before that, there were other types of music that

indirectly influenced rock and roll, as we can see from this diagram.

Let's take a look at the history of American roots music.

There were several strains.

And those strains usually were popular with one race.

And they were often popular in a particular geographic area.

Let's begin around the beginning of the 20th century.

At that time, the United States was a nation divided,

racially, culturally and geographically.

Slavery had been abolished only about 35 years earlier.

Most black people were extremely poor, and they had little choice but to work for

white landowners who may actually have owned their parents or grandparents.

There also were cultural divisions between rural people, and

those who lived in cities.

The South, Midwest, and Western United States were mostly rural.

And the populous was rarely exposed to anyone or anything for

more than about 25 miles away, in the early part of the 20th century.

They had no idea how people lived in other parts of the US,

let alone other parts of the world.

There was no radio, no TV, often no electricity.

And many of these people were illiterate, unable to read and

write, because working on the farm was more important than going to school.

The farm was a matter of life and death, far more important than book learning.

City folk, on the other hand, were much more likely to have gone to school.

Most could at least read and write.

They had more money.

They also had much more opportunity to broaden

their cultural horizons through music, theater, and art.

And mass media came much sooner to them, than to rural America.

The geographic divisions still existed between the north and

south of the United States.

So, no they weren't at war anymore, that had ended 35 years before.

But they still were inclined to distrust one another.

And they lived different lifestyles.

The south was largely rural and agrarian, and the northeast was not.

More importantly blacks were treated much more liberally in the north

than in the south.

Black men were routinely lynched,

hanged by an angry crowd until the 1930s, this is in the south.

And that happened especially if they made even the most innocent advance or

comment about a white woman.

Popular music for whites, especially city folk, came from what were called

Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, both of which happened to be in New York City.

Now, this music was formulaic, catchy and sentimental.

It was distributed as sheet music and sold widely,

because in this era, before a lot of people had phonographs and

before radio and television were widespread, many families had pianos and,

or other musical instruments for evening entertainment.

Now, Tin Pan Alley was an area of New York City,

where professional song writers went to work each day to write popular songs.

It got the name Tin Pan Alley, because there were so

many tinkling pianos that it created a cacophony, that sounded rather

like people beating on pans made of tin.

But that term also came to represent a way of doing business.

There were promoters who took the sheet music from the songs written in

Tin Pan Alley, and tried to sell it to music stores and so on.

So there was a little hanky panky associated with Tin Pan Alley.

Broadway, is a street in New York City that was, and

is home to a lot of theaters, that specialize in live performances.

Many of the plays performed there, were and are musicals.

And artist like George Gershwin,

Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter wrote songs for those shows.

More money was actually made selling the sheet music,

than from the audiences coming to the theaters.

Now the appeal of the music of Tin Pan Alley and

Broadway, was limited to certain audiences and areas.

Mostly white, middle class people who lived in the north, above

the Mason-Dixon line, that had divided the nation before and during the Civil War.

Tin Pan Alley and Broadway had a good deal to do with the spread of music in America.

They increased interest and demand,

and they helped sell a lot of pianos to middle class families.

And pianos, by the way, are still a status symbol in US homes.

Meanwhile, black people and rural whites, had their own kinds of music.

This music was much less likely to be published or

recorded, in the early part of the 20th century.

Blacks had blues, jazz, and a form of gospel.

While rural whites had country, old time fiddle music,

bluegrass, what's called Western music, and their form of Gospel.

Intro: Popular Music in the Early 20th Century

Music's Big Bang: The Genesis of Rock 'n' Roll

Meet the Instructors