This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
The First Rock and Rollers Cross Over
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part One
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From the lesson
The Birth and First Flourishing of Rock and Roll (1955-59)
Chart crossover and cover versions, the first hits of Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, the rise of Elvis Presley, the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, the rise of American Bandstand, the payola scandal and the "death of rock and roll."
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Let's look, take a look at who some of the
first rock and rollers were in this first period of rock
and roll 1955 through 1959 when these first rock and
rollers begin to cross over from R&B onto the pop charts.
The first one I think that we should talk about is Bill Haley and the Comets.
And we'll come back to him in just a minute.
But, we've talked a lot about how important
Rock Around the Clock was as a record.
Shake, Rattle and Roll is something that
he had done the year before.
and so we should really sort of tip our hats at Bill Haley as as really being the
first one to, to really to really sort of
get this, this rock and roll thing going in 1955.
But there are some other important early entries here.
let's turn our attention, for example, to Fats Domino.
Fats Domino coming out of New Orleans, appearing on the Imperial
label which was out of, the label in Los Angeles but all the recording
was done in New Orleans by a fellow by the name of Dave Bartholomew.
He's a famous New Orleans musician.
Fats Domino was an interesting kind of, a,
of, of, a, of an entertainer for these years.
Fats Domino, an African American guy who was maybe a little, overweight.
you know, very, very friendly.
sort of, cheerful
demeanor.
And in no way would white audiences think that, that Fats Domino was.
Threatening or menacing in any kind of way, and I'm
not I'm not saying that would have any reason for that.
These are all kind of racial or racist kind of views at the time, but
for a black entertainer to to succeed in a white audience with a white audience.
There are, there are probably some features there that
can help that happen, and Fats Domino was a very
kind of friendly guy.
His music had a kind of easy-going 12 eight compound
time deebata, deebata, deebata, deebata, deebata, deebata kind of feel.
A kind of a laid-back New Orleans kind of sound.
he really had a lot of country influence.
In fact, among the other musicians that he hung with in New Orleans, They all
kind of thought of him as more of a kind of a country country western artist.
We don't think of him that way, but in his crowd,
that's the way he was thought of.
So, maybe, if there's a bit of the sort of country twang
that that makes his music maybe even a little bit more approachable.
By a wide audience that's, that's not particularly familiar
with rhythm and blues, or rhythm and blues culture.
So if his early R&B hits that didn't cross over, I mean,
he was on the R&B charts way before rock and roll 1955.
his first big one was The Fat Man from 1950.
And another one called Goin' Home from
1952, there are several more.
But his first big crossover is a tune called Ain't It A Shame from 1955.
We'll talk about that with regard to Pat Boone in just a minute.
And, maybe the most representative song of of Fats Domino from this era is Blueberry
Hill from 1956 a big hit for him. Another one is I'm Walkin' from 1957.
An interesting note about Blueberry Hill, is it goes against a lot
of what we talk about with regard to crossovers and covers in that
Blueberry Hill is a song that didn't really arise out of the R&B tradition.
Blueberry Hill is a song that had been a hit in 1940 for the Glen Miller Orchestra.
A big band.
So in some ways, the biggest hit for
Fats Domino, one of the early African American, first,
early African American stars of rock and roll, was
a cover version of a tune that had originally
been done By Glen Miller.
So, the minute we start to generalize too much about cover and
cross over, it's always possible to come up with a counter example.
and this is one of them.
Moving on from Fat's Domino, let's concider Chuck Berry coming out of St.
Louis.
Via Chicago. He recorded on Chess Records.
Was introduced to the guys at Chess Records by Muddy Waters.
Chuck Berry was also a big fan of country music.
And in his autobiography, he talks about how important it was
in his live act before he
started recording, to understand different dialects.
He calls them with music and so he could do country western
tunes in the country western style with his voice sounding very country western.
Then he could do blues and R&B, and
[UNKNOWN]
for instance.
And these really understood different kinds of styles.
and in many ways I think he used an awful lot
of the country voice when he was recording those first couple
of tunes because most, well, many listeners as the story goes
had no idea that Chuck Berry was was a black guy.
They thought he was white.
There's actually some television clips from the day when you
can see where he comes out and there's a studio
audience there and maybe I'm imagining it, but they pan over to the studio
audience and it seems like a lot of those audiences are almost entirely white.
It seems like a lot of those folks are looking at
Chuck Berry and they're going, God I though he was white, right?
And so, again, like Fats Domino, that
country twang, that country influence maybe gives these
first black artists, maybe more approachability in the
white market than they might have had otherwise.
In fact. Chuck's first big hit is the
song called Maybellene from 1955.
And it's really kind of an interesting example because
for one thing, if you look at the credit
who it was written by, it was clearly the
words the music we'll talk about in a minute.
But the words were clearly written by Chuck Berry, but it
says words of music By Chuck Berry, Leonard Chess and Alan Freed.
Well, why should that be?
What could Alan Freed have possibly had to do with the writing of Maybellene or
even Leonard Chess for that matter?
Well, Leonard Chess owned publishing, and Alan Freed was cut
in on a piece of the publishing which meant that
every time Alan Freed played that record, if it became
a hit It would be money coming back to Alan Freed.
And so these kinds of publishing deals were made all the time
as a way of cutting somebody in on the publishing of a tune.
So that they would have an incentive to play the tune, and make it into a hit.
And that's exactly what happens
with Maybellene. Interestingly, the song, Maybellene.
Actually goes back to a fiddle tune called Ida Red, that had been
originally recorded by people like Roy Acuff
and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
In fact, he was going to do it as Ida Red, because
he did it as part of his country western kind of set.
But they said, no, if you do Aside A Red it's in the public domain.
That's a traditional song.
You won't get any publishing on it.
Let's just do the same, do the same tune,
what you usually do it, but let's just change
the lyrics.
because if you change the lyrics, you can call
it a different song and we can cover it.
Then, you get some publishing, and I'll
get some publishing, and we'll, and Leonard
Chess gets some publishing, and Allen Freed
gets some pub, so that's what they do.
How did he come up with Maybellene, well Chuck
Berry would never give you a straight answer on that.
And I think one of his, his funniest responses
to that was, it was the name of a cow.
In a children's book he read when he was a kid.
But the story goes, at least coming
from Leonard Chess, that it came directly from a makeup the box of
a makeup kit there, because Chuck Berry had been a cosmetician in St.
Louis, and so Maybellene, of course, a famous brand of cosmetics there.
So right there, inside that tune You begin to see an awful lot going on there.
If you, if you listen to the lyrics,
it, it, and think about the metaphors very closely.
it's almost it's self kind of a hokum blue so all the metaphors
are so thickly veiled that you really can't tell that there could
be any kind of sexual content, but I'll leave it to you.
To check it out and see if you think that that's an accurate description or not.
One thing about Chuck Berry is, he saw what was happening with these crossovers.
And he decided his lyrics be, would be
written so that they didn't need to be fixed.
In other words, he would write them so
they were directly appealing to a teenage audience.
So nobody had to change anything.
And maybe his records then. British records
to be covered by somebody else.
And he could get the he could get the
money and the and the fame that came with it.
And, in fact, he did.
School Day, 1957; Rock and Roll Music,
1957; Sweet Little Sixteen, 1958; Johnny B.
Goode, 1958.
All of those became big hits for Chuck Berry, and a lot more.
Is a very, very important song-writer, Chuck Berry,
writing all his own songs at a time when
most performers didn't write their own songs, along with
Buddy Holly, one of the most important ones of
this generation.
Also his guitar style, that sort of, the guitar licks that
you hear like at the very beginning of Johnny be Good.
Are something that every kid learning rock and roll guitar, up to a
certain period maybe in the 80s or 90s, maybe they still learn it.
But everybody, sort of learned that, like that Chuck Berry thing.
And this other thing he does, this duck walk thing where he
gets down and puts the guitar between his legs and does that.
All these things Made Chuck Berry a fantastic
guitarist and showman, and a, and a tremendous personality.
Let's talk a little now about Little
Richard, because now we're getting farther and
farther away from the image that would be most appealing to to white listeners.
Little Richard was a flamboyant guy, there's just No two ways about it.
Chuck Berry might have been the first rock and roller to write a song
about makeup, but Little Richard was the first rock and roller to wear makeup.
I mean he was a sort of a crazy exciting,
energetic performer, playing on the piano, singing, sometimes screaming, sometimes
with his feet up on the keyboard, he was fantastic.
But all, in a very kind of
charismatic Lovable, perhaps nonthreatening kind of way.
Always music, always filled with a certain kind of excitement and joy.
tunes like Tutti Frutti from 1955 which was a number two hit on
the R&B charts but only got to number 17 on the pop charts.
The Pat Boon
version got to number 12. Long Tall Sally.
1956 was the number one hit, number six on the pop charts.
Good Golly Miss Molly, 1954, was number four on
the R&B charts, number ten on the pop charts.
Now if you paid attention to those numbers that just went by, you'd notice that the
R&B numbers are always closer to the top of the charts, than the pop numbers were.
but again, a flamboyant style may be a
little rawer and rougher than Fats Domino's music or
Chuck Barry's.
But the, these three guys, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Along
with Bill Haley right there at the very beginning of Rock and Roll.
Now, let's move on to this idea of the whitening of rhythm and blues that
we talked about in the last lecture, and, and, and think a little bit about this.
Bill Haley who recorded for Deca.
Now we, we, we've talked about his Shake, Rattle and Roll
from 1954, that was his cover version of the Joe Turner tune.
And so we all ready know something about this whitening effect
that goes on with the original, R&B recordings and changing the lyrics.
Sort of making them more, appealing perhaps, or
at least acceptable To a mainstream pop audience.
The guy who takes most of the heat for this kind of this, however, is Pat Boone.
Pat Boone is actually a descendant of the the
explorer Daniel Boone, and recorded for an indie label in
Gallatin, Tennessee called Dot.
His version of the Fats Domino tune Ain't That a
Shame, went to number one in the pop charts in 1955.
remembering that the, the Fats Domino's did not do as well.
And his version of Tutti Frutti, the Little Richard
tune in 1956, went to number 12, beating out Richard's.
And sort of passing it in the charts on the way along.
So, he usually takes the, the brunt of the heat for doing.
Cover versions
that most fans would say they don't like nearly as much as the originals.
But what he does, by adding almost a kind of
a swing band kind of vocal approach to those tunes.
Really merging the mainstream pop kinds of styles from before 1955 with R&B.
In some ways what he does is more
indicative of the qualities of rock 'n roll,
separable From rhythm and blues than, than the
original R&B ones are in certain kinds of ways.
Pat Boone also had a whole ton hits
that were not cover versions of somebody else's tune.
Don't Forbid Me, Love Letters In The Sand, April Love, those were all number
one hits in 1956 and 1957, some of them even crossing over.
People were surprised to find this.
Pat Boone hits that aren't cover versions crossing over.
On to the R&B charts we sometimes call that reverse
cross over where a song becomes a hit on the
mainstream chart and then becomes a hit on the R&B chart.
We come back again to the society of the controversy
over cover versions is the idea of these white musicians.
covering music that was originally done by black musicians.
And whether or not this is, this is right or not.
And I've offered in the, in the previous
lecture, I I offered the, the reasoning there.
I'll leave it to you to decide what you think.
But I would ask you to keep an open mind
to the idea that
It probably matters whether, how close the song hues to the original version.
In the case of the Pat Boone versions of both the
Fats Domino version and the Little Richard version, they are not dupliacates.
If you don't like them, you don't like them because,
because of how much they don't sound like the original, right?
And in that way, even if you don't like it, you have to acknowledge
that in the, in terms of the pop and music at that time it was
perfectly alright to do a cover version of
somebody elses tune, if you made it your own.
The tops his of mainstream pop hits of 1955
there are three, of those top hits, I don't
know if it's the top 20, or 25 hits,
there were three versions of the ballad of Davy Crockett.
So, it was certainly possibly for that to happen.
The ones I think that really are subject to a
certain amount of Of negative criticism are the ones that basically
just duplicated somebody else's record.
Where the only reason why you did it
was basically to put a white artist label, name
on the label, because you didn't think you could
sell it with a black artist name on it.
And that's probably one of those things in history of
rock that will, we, we, shouldn't be too proud of.
But that's, that's part of what happened and it's part of the culture of the time.
So now, having talked about this first rush of Of, of, of a
stars from 1955, we turn to the guy who really sort of defines
this first wave of Rock and Roll, and that's Elvis Presley.
We'll talk about him in the next lecture.
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