2. Music Appreciation: The History of Rock
Rock and Roll
The Early Years

3. Rock and Roll (often written as Rock & Roll or Rock 'n' Roll) is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s

4. Rock and Roll combined African-American and European American rooted genres known as gospel music, blues, boogie-woogie, jump blues, jazz, rockabilly, and honky tonk music (which derives from Western swing and country music).

5. While elements of rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until the 1950s.
"Rock and roll" can refer either to the first wave of music that originated in the US in the 1950s prior to its development into "rock music", or more broadly to rock music and culture. 

6. In the earliest rock and roll styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s, either the piano or saxophone was often the lead instrument, but these were generally replaced or supplemented by guitar in the middle to late 1950s

9. The beat is essentially a blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, the latter almost always provided by a snare drum. 

10. Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), a double bass or string bass or (after the mid-1950s) an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit.

11. Beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language. In addition, rock and roll may have contributed to the civil rights movement because both African-American and white American teens enjoyed the music. 

16. The phrase "rocking and rolling" originally described the movement of a ship on the ocean, but was used by the early twentieth century, both to describe the spiritual fervor of black church rituals and as a sexual analogy.

17. In 1934, the song "Rock and Roll" by Boswell Sisters appeared in the film Transatlantic Merry- Go-Round. In 1942, Billboard magazine columnist Maurie Orodenker started to use the term "rock-and- roll" to describe upbeat recordings such as "Rock Me" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. 
By 1943, the "Rock and Roll Inn" in South Merchantville, New Jersey, was established as a music venue. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing this music style while popularizing the phrase to describe it.

18. Origins
The origins of rock and roll have been fiercely debated by commentators and historians of music. There is general agreement that it arose in the Southern United States – a region which would produce most of the major early rock and roll acts – through the meeting of various influences that embodied a merging of the African musical tradition with European instrumentation. 

19. The migration of many former slaves and their descendants to major urban centers such as Memphis, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo meant that black and white residents were living in close proximity in larger numbers than ever before, and as a result heard each other's music and even began to emulate each other's fashions.

20. Radio stations that made white and black forms of music available to both groups, the development and spread of the gramophone record, and African American musical styles such as jazz and swing which were taken up by white musicians, aided this process of "cultural collision".

21. During and immediately after World War II, with shortages of fuel and limitations on audiences and available personnel, large jazz bands were less economical and tended to be replaced by smaller combos, using guitars, bass and drums. 

24. On the West Coast and in the Midwest, the development of jump blues, with its guitar riffs, prominent beats and shouted lyrics, influenced many later developments

25. Country boogie and Chicago electric blues supplied many of the elements that would be seen as characteristic of rock and roll

26. The instrument that is the main instrumental solo in the Chicago sound is the electric guitar.
Typical instrumentation of a Chicago Rock and Roll band is very much like a Chicago R&B Band: electric guitar, piano, bass, drums and a lead vocalist.
Backup singers are generally not used and sometimes a horn may be employed, but it is usually relegated to background riffs.

27. Chuck Berry introduced an aggressive guitar sound to rock and roll, and established the electric guitar as its centerpiece, adapting his rock band instrumentation from the basic blues band instrumentation of a lead guitar, second chord instrument, bass and drums.

28. Rock and roll arrived at a time of considerable technological change, soon after the development of the electric guitar, amplifier, microphone, and the 45 rpm record

32. There were also changes in the record industry, with the rise of independent labels like Atlantic, Sun and Chess servicing niche audiences and a similar rise of radio stations that played their music

36. Some have suggested a decline of rock and roll in the late s and early 1960s due to several events:
 -Deaths of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a plane crash
-Departure of Elvis for service in the United States Army
-Retirement of Little Richard to become a preacher
-Scandal surrounding Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin
-Arrest of Chuck Berry
-Payola scandal implicating Alan Freed in bribery and corruption in promoting individual acts or songs

41. By nature of its association with black America, there were those who feared that Rock and Roll was a corrupting influence on American youth, promoting socializing between races and juvenile delinquency.

42. In August 1957, Freed’s ABC teen dance show Big Beat was cancelled after African-American artist Frankie Lymon was seen dancing with a white girl on the program, an image that outraged the network's southern affiliates.

43. Interracial dancing on TV 1950s

44. Less than a year later, at the Boston date of his Big Beat Spring 1958 tour, Freed was charged with anarchy and inciting the youths in attendance to riot, though the charges were later dropped. While Freed battled accusations of encouraging miscegenation and delinquent behavior, many of the early Rock and Roll stars coincidentally began to disappear from the charts.

45. Riots at Rock and Roll Shows

46. The absence of these original crossover artists created a vacuum that made room for a new class of performers—the so-called “teen idols”—who were positioned to broaden the teenage Rock and Roll audience while also alleviating adult anxieties over the potential corruption of their children.

47. The idols—mainly white, mainly male—performed a version of Rock and Roll that was in sync with the mainstream American culture of the day. Unlike the characters portrayed in The Wild One, artists including Dion (pictured above, right), Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello generally sported a neat, non-threatening appearance, often singing in a Pop style associated as much with Frank Sinatra as it was with Elvis Presley

48. The idols seemed to be the kind of earnest young men with whom any father would be happy to have his own daughter go out, or the kind of young women a mother would want her son to marry. Their clean-cut good looks meant that they would play well on television, which was rapidly replacing the radio as the main source of family entertainment.

49. Teen Idols

50. Dion – Teen Idol

51. In the early 20th century, the period between childhood and adulthood was simply called adolescence, a passing phase between the two main periods in one’s life. But in the postwar period, this age cohort – now known as teenagers – developed a distinct identity and established itself as an important demographic group that would come to have enormous influence on American life.

54. Because of the postwar economic boom, many white, middle-class teenagers had more leisure time and more spending power than previous generations of young people. If they held jobs, they were increasingly able to keep their earnings rather than contribute them to the support of the family, as they generally did in early generations

55. https://youtu.be/hG9oL98Ddfc

56. Movie Trailer “The Wild One”

57. American business soon realized the enormous potential of this emerging market, gearing advertising of everything from soda pop to cars in order to cash in on teens’ growing purchasing power. Companies in every segment of the entertainment world -- records, radio, television, movies – were not far behind

61. Recognizing the affinity of this new demographic for Rock and Roll; record companies, radio, television, and movies soon shaped a mass-market phenomenon out of what in the early 1950s had been a music confined to a handful of stations aimed at African-American listeners

63. From its birth in 1920 to the rise of television in the early 1950s, commercial radio played a central role in American life. For much of this era, the radio itself held an honored place in the center of the home. Entire families would gather around it to hear important news events, listen to live music, or catch the latest installment of a hit drama or comedy series such as The Lone Ranger or Amos ‘n Andy.

65. Popular music of the 1920s & 1930s was predominantly big bands, jazz, or what we now call “easy listening”.

68. News and important messages from the government were broadcast on a regular basis. The only other mass communications medium at the time was the newspaper…which made it difficult to keep up with current events. Radio brought news more immediately into the home.

71. In order to bring realism to the scripted radio shows, actors and sound effect experts created the illusion of what was happening in the radio show using whatever items they had that imitated the desired sounds.

72. Audiences were left to use their imaginations and create the settings and action in their own mind.

74. Orson Welles famously broadcast a play about an alien invasion of earth in Those who missed the beginning of the show thought that the invasion was real. It created panic in many cities and towns.

77. Radio made it possible to quickly communicate worldwide events to a large audience. People got their news faster and could hear it first-hand from the reporters on scene or from government officials. The government could also broadcast informative programs about the war efforts, suggestions for citizen action, or anything else of an urgent nature.

81. Music of different styles could also be broadcast, and audiences could choose from a wide variety of musical offerings from jazz to classical, country western to blues, or virtuoso soloists to popular singers.

83. Also very popular were the weekly drama series radio shows
Also very popular were the weekly drama series radio shows. Each week, you got a story about a hero or a beloved character that left you waiting to see what would happen in next week’s episode. Comedy shows also entertained on a weekly basis.

85. But by the early 1950s, technological shifts—most notably the introduction of television into the family living room -replacing the family radio- heralded significant changes in the American people’s relationship with radio. The rise of smaller, portable radios meant that individuals could now listen virtually any time or place. The growing popularity of television rendered radio drama and comedy series nearly obsolete; listeners were less satisfied with merely listening to stories on radio when they could see them unfold before their eyes on television. 

88. But far from disappearing from American life, as some predicted, radio instead reinvented itself in the early 1950s. Recorded popular music would come to play an increasingly central role in radio programming over the next two decades, as opposed to the live performances that dominated the airwaves in the decades prior

89. As the major networks, such as NBC and CBS, shifted their attention from radio to television, radio stations came more and more under local control, allowing for greater experimentation and creativity in programming

90. Todd Storz of WKOH in Omaha, Nebraska, pioneered a new format in which listeners could hear recordings of their favorite songs over and over again, paving the way for what would soon become known as “Top 40” radio

91. Some stations began playing a broader range of recorded music, including some that emphasized Rhythm and Blues performed by African-American artists. These changes set the stage for radio to play a central role in the Rock and Roll explosion of the late 1950s. 

92. African-American audiences were eager to hear music performed by African-American artists, particularly the new Rhythm and Blues sounds that had begun to emerge from earlier Blues and Jazz styles. In 1949, WDIA in Memphis hired a team of African-American disc jockeys and began gearing programming entirely toward African-American audiences, with R&B and Blues at its heart. In some cases, it was white disc jockeys who championed this music, playing it on radio stations that would bring together black and white audiences.

94.  Memphis’s Dewey Phillips, whose popular show "Red Hot and Blue" frequently featured music by African-American artists, and Los Angeles’s Hunter Hancock, widely regarded as the first DJ in the western part of the country to regularly play R&B on the air, reached both black and white audiences. These pioneering DJs played an integral role in bringing African-American music into the mainstream, a process that lay at the heart of the soon-to-come Rock and Roll revolution.

97. Dewey Phillips interviews Jerry Lee Lewis

100. Some music historians have pointed to important and innovative developments that built on rock and roll in this period, including multitrack recording, developed by Les Paul, the electronic treatment of sound by such innovators as Joe Meek, and the 'Wall of Sound' productions of Phil Spector, continued desegregation of the charts, the rise of surf music, garage rock and the Twist dance craze