“Rock Around the Clock”: Rock ‘n; Roll, 1954-1959

2. “Rock Around the Clock”
Rock’n’Roll, 1954-1959

3. Rock’n’Roll
• Styles previously on the margins of pop music began to infiltrate and
eventually dominate the center
• Emergence of rock’n’roll - significant in cultural terms
• New audience
• Baby boom generation born at the end of and in the years immediately
following World War II
– Much younger audience than had ever before constituted a market for music
– Large audience that shared specific and important characteristics of group
cultural identity
• 1950s- period characterized by political and cultural traumas
– Cold War tension
– Racial tension
– Identification by the larger culture as a unique generational group

4. Rock’n’Roll
• Rock’n’roll- term first used for commercial and generational purposes by
disc jockey Alan Freed
– Term derived from many references to “rockin’” and “rollin’” found in many
rhythm & blues songs and race records dating back to the 1920s
• Alan Freed (1922-1965)- disc jockey who discovered in the early 1950s
that increasing numbers of young white kids were listening to and
requesting rhythm & blues records played on his Moondog Show
nighttime program in Cleveland- records he began to call “rock’n’roll”
– Disc jockeys all over the country wished to capture the new, large audience of
young radio listeners who embraced the term “rock’n’roll”
• Purchase of records by kids in the 1950s- safe and affordable way for kids
to assert generational identity through rebellion against previous adult
standards and restrictions of musical style and taste
– 1950s- essentially invented the teenager as a commercial and cultural entity
– Ricky Nelson (1940-1985)- popular teenaged musician in the 1950s who was
marketed to teenagers as a “rock ’n’ roll” artist

5. Cover Versions and Early Rock’n’Roll
• Cover version- practice of recording a song that has
previously been recorded by another artist or group
• Restricted sense- refers to a version, sometimes almost
an exact copy, of a previously recorded performance
that often involves an adaptation of the original’s style
and sensibility and is usually aimed at cashing in on
that original’s success
• Most notorious examples- white performers covering
the work of African American recording artists
– New stage in the evolution of white fascination with black
music

6. Listening Guide:
“Sh-Boom” and its Cover Version
• “Sh-Boom,” original version performed by the Chords (number two R&B,
number 5 pop, released 1954); cover version performed by the Crew Cuts
(number one pop for nine weeks, released 1954)
– Original version often cited as one of the very first rock’n’roll records
• On the “flip” side of the Chords’ cover version of white pop singer Patti Page’s “Cross
over the Bridge”
• Unexpected elements in arrangement and performance- extraordinary and original pop
record
• AABA with sentimental lyrics and stereotypical chord changes but treated as an up-
tempo instead of a ballad
• Novel touches: a capella vocal introduction, scat singing, long instrumental break with
saxophone solo, “doo-wop” nonsense syllables in the background, unexpected ending
– Crew Cuts’ version – novel touches as well
• Scat singing at the beginning, brief sections of group nonsense-syllable singing
punctuated by loud kettledrum stroke; two “false” endings
• Crooner-style singing

7. The Rock’n’Roll Business
• Music business 1950s
– Overall vitality of the American economy after WWII: entertainment industry’s
profits reach a new level
– Expansion accompanied by gradual diversification of mainstream popular
taste
– Reemergence of independent (“indie”) record companies
– Larger companies took a couple of years to react to the emergence of
rock’n’roll
• Rockabilly- form of country and western music informed by the rhythms
of black R&B and the electric blues
• Sales charts chronicle changes in popular taste and emergence of teenage
market
– “Rock Around the Clock” (Bill Haley and the Comets) 1955- became the first
rock’n’roll hit to reach number one on the “Best Sellers in Stores” chart

8. Bill Haley and “Rock Around the Clock” (1955)
• Bill Haley (1925-1981)- leader
of obscure western swing
groups seeking a style that
would capture enthusiasm of
growing audience of young
listeners and dancers
• 1954- signed by Decca Records
• Worked with Milt Gabler, who
had produced hit records with
Louis Jordan and his Tympany
Five
– Pushed Hayley’s style further
in the direction of jump band
rhythm & blues
– “Rock Around the Clock”- first
rock’n’roll record to become a
number one pop hit

9. Listening Guide: Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene”
• Music and lyrics by Chuck Berry (also credited to disc jockeys Russel Fratto and
Alan Freed); performed by Chuck Berry and His Combo; recorded 1955
• Charles Edward Anderson (“Chuck”) Berry (1926-2017)- pioneering singer,
songwriter, and guitarist who synthesized diverse influences from R&B and country
music in rock ’n’ roll songs about teenage life
• “Maybellene”- novel synthesis that did not sound like anything before it
– Distantly modeled on a country song “Ida Red”
– Rhythm & blues elements- thick, buzzing timbre of electric guitar, blue notes and slides in
voice and guitar, backbeat of the drum, form derived from twelve-bar blues
– Explosive tempo with clarity of text
– Story featuring cars and sex appeal, implied class distinctions and cars as a status symbol
• Berry’s trademarks:
– Arresting instrumental introduction for unaccompanied electric guitar
– Relentless intensity produced by a very fast tempo
– Very loud volume level
– Formal and stylistic elements strongly related to earlier rhythm and blues music
– Witty lyrics clearly enunciated and designed to appeal to the lifestyle and aspirations of a
young audience

10. Early Rock’n’Roll Stars on the R&B Side
• Three most prominent African Americans to be identified with the new music
– Chuck Berry
• Wrote records that became explicit celebrations of American teenage culture and its music
• Influential on three fronts
– Brilliantly clever lyricist and songwriter
– Fine rock’n’roll vocal stylist
– Pioneering electric guitarist
• Little Richard
– “Little Richard” (Richard Wayne Penniman) (b. 1932)- singer, songwriter, boogie-
woogie influenced pianist, and cultivator of a deliberately outrageous performance
style that appealed on the basis of its strangeness, novelty, and sexual ambiguity
• Hit the pop charts in 1956- “Tutti-Fruitti”- nonsensical song based on twelve-bar blues
• Listening Guide: “Long Tall Sally”
– Music and Lyrics credited to Enotris Johnson, Richard Penniman, and Robert Blackwell; performed by Little
Richard and unidentified band; recorded 1956
• Fats Domino
– Antoine “Fats” Domino (b. 1928)- singer, pianist, and songwriter, who was an
established presence on the rhythm & blues charts for several years by the time he
scored his first large-scale pop breakthrough with “Ain’t It a Shame” in 1955 and
ultimately became the second best-selling artist of the 1950s
• Strongest influences:
– Professor Longhair (born Henry Roeland Byrd) (1918-1980)- rhythm & blues pianist

11. Listening Guide: “Mystery Train”
• “Mystery Train,” original version written and performed by Junior Parker (no chart
appearance, released 1953); cover version performed by Elvis Presley (number 11
country and western, released 1955)
• Elvis Presley (1935-1977)- biggest star of the rock’n’roll era and arguably of the
entire history of American popular music
– Formed a band called the Starlite Wranglers with
• Scotty Moore (1931-2016)- electric guitar
• Bill Black (1926-1965)- string bass
– Series of recordings with an R&B cover version on one side and a country song on the other
– Last record before Elvis signed with RCA Victor and became a national celebrity: cover version
of “Mystery Train”
• Herman “Little Junior Parker” (1927-1971)- singer, songwriter, and harmonica
player who achieved some success with his rhythm & blues band Little Junior’s
Blue Flames
– Recorded “Mystery Train” for Sam Phillips’s Sun Label
– Song received little attention at the time of its release

12. Early Rock’n’Roll Stars on the Country Side
• Elvis Presley- biggest rock’n’roll star to come from the country side of the
music world
– Listening Guide: “Don’t Be Cruel”
• Music and lyrics by Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley; performed by Elvis Presley, vocal and
guitar, with the Jordanaires and backing instrumentalists; recorded 1956
• Reverb- electronically produced by engineers at RCA to emulate the distinctive (low-
tech) slap-back echo sound of Presley’s earlier recordings with Sun Records
• Buddy Holly (Charles Hardin Holley) (1936-1959)- Clean-cut, lanky, and
bespectacled singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the 1950s who, along with
his band, the Crickets, recorded influential hits like “That’ll Be the Day”
and made frequent use of double-tracking
– “That’ll Be the Day” (1957)- combined elements of country, rhythm and blues,
and mainstream pop
– Double-tracking- technique in which two nearly identical versions of the same
vocal or instrumental part are recorded on top of one another, foregrounding
that part so that it seems to come right out of the speaker at the listener

13. The Electric Guitar
• Electric guitar- elevation of the instrument to the position of centrality
was one of the most significant effects on popular music
• Development of the instrument
– Guitar found mainly in popular music that originated in the South
• Acoustic guitar was difficult to use in large dance bands and difficult to record
– 1920s- engineers began to experiment with electronically amplified guitars
– 1931- Electro String Instrument Company (Rickenbacker)- introduced the first
commercially produced electric guitars
– Mid-1930s- Gibson Company- introduced a hollow-body guitar
– After WWII- solid-body electric guitar developed
– 1948- first commercially produced solid-body electric guitar: Fender
Broadcaster
– 1954- Stratocaster released by Fender- first guitar with three pickups, a
“whammy” bar” or “vibrato bar”
– 1952- Gibson Company released a solid-body guitar it christened the Les Paul
– 1951- Fender Precision Bass, the first widely popular electric bass guitar
introduced

14. Wild, Wild Young Women: The Lady Vanishes
• Male-dominated account of early history of rock’n’roll
– Women who aggressively embraced the new stylistic trends were a negligible presence on the charts
• Wanda Jackson (b. 1937)- most remarkable of the pioneering rock ’n’ roll women in the
1950s who recorded fierce, unapologetic rockers like “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad,”
“Fujiyama Mama,” “Let’s Have a Party,” and her own “Mean Man,” yet failed to achieve
mainstream popular success in that style
• Janis Martin (1940-2007)- recording artist signed by RCA at the age of 16 and marketed
as the “female Elvis”
• Jo-Ann Campbell (b. 1938)- R&B-influenced recording artist, showcased by disk jockey
Alan Freed as “the blonde bombshell,” who failed to achieve commercial success
• Lorrie (Lawrencine) Collins (b. 1942)- rock’n’roll artist who was half of the duo “Collins
Kids” who, despite their scintillating rockabilly records, failed to make the charts.
• Connie Francis (Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero) (b. 1938)- mainstream pop singer
emerging in the late 1950s who appreciated the importance of appealing to the new
young audience and occasionally performed bona fide rockers like “Stupid Cupid” and
“Lipstick on Your Collar”
• Brenda Lee (Brenda Mae Tarpley) (b. 1944)- recording artist of the early 1960s known as
“Little Miss Dynamite” who sang hits like “Sweet Nothin’s”

15. The Latin Side of Rock’n’Roll
Latin American music- important
influence on popular genres that
contributed to the rise of rock’n’roll
Latin tinge in rhythm & blues, Afro-
Cuban music and its derivatives,
Mexican and Mexican-American
influences on country and western
Ritchie Valens (Richard Valenzuela)
(1941-1959)- Short recording career
helped create a distinctive Los Angeles
rock’n’roll sound, influenced by Mexican
and country and western music, as well
as rhythm & blues groups
“Donna” and “La Bamba” (1958)-
released on two sides of a 45 r.p.m.
single

16. Listening Guide: Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba”
• Most original contribution- adaptation of a folk song from
the Mexican region of Veracruz
– Son jarocho- fiery, up-tempo genre that alternates vocal refrains
(estribillos) with rapid improvisational passages
– More traditional version- improvisation and dense interweaving
of melodic-rhythmic patterns
• Valens’s version- simpler and sparser
• Session drummer Earl Palmer- use of woodblock- rhythm
derived from cha-cha-chá
• “La Bamba”- unique because of the source of the
inspiration, and because the lyric is exclusively in Spanish,
but also because of the sonic texture from the tone
qualities of the instruments played- electric guitar

17. Songwriters and Producers of
Early Rock’n’Roll
• Clear lines of division between songwriters and performers in
mainstream pop music up to 1955- no longer held up in the years of
rock’n’roll
• Increasing importance of recording itself as the basic document of
rock’n’roll
– Producer’s role grew in importance
– Producers responsible for booking time in recording studio, hiring
backup singers and instrumentalists, and assisting with engineering
process, characteristic sound of the finished record
• Best producers left as strong a sense of individual personality on their
products as did the recording artists themselves
• Innovative songwriting/producing team of early rock’n’roll years:
– Jerry Lieber (1933-2011) and Mike Stoller (b. 1933)- not recording
artists, but already writing rhythm & blues songs when they were
teenagers

18. Listening Guide: “Charlie Brown”
• Music and Lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller;
performed by the Coasters with accompanying band
(King Curtis, sax solo); recorded 1958
• “Charlie Brown”- portrait of the class clown; time period
and culture evoked through slang terms “cool” and
“daddy-o”
• Form- AABA structure; A sections are twelve-bar blues
stanzas, divided into a little verse-chorus structure
• Production effect- artificially high voices in the bridge-
playing a tape of normal voices at double speed- device
that was popular on novelty records

19. Other Currents: The Standard and
Folk Music in the Rock’n’Roll Era
• Advent of rock’n’roll often viewed as the death of Tin Pan Alley
– Tin Pan Alley proved versatile enough to survive in a number of different
guises:
• Fats Domino and other rock’n’rollers- successfully adapted standard songs
to rhythm & blues-based style
• New songs in the old Tin Pan Alley style found on pop charts even in the late 1950s
– Johnny Mathis (b. 1935)- began a career in 1957 as a latter-day crooner,
releasing gentle pop ballads like “It’s Not for Me to Say” and “Chances Are,”
and became a best-selling recording artist who appealed to rock’n’roll
generation and their parents
• Frank Sinatra’s 1950s recordings
• Folk music
– “Tom Dooley”- adaptation of an old ballad song- throwback to earlier era and
harbinger of important currents in American pop music of the 1960s
• The Kingston Trio- composed of Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob
Shane known for hit LPs and the single “Tom Dooley”

20. Singles Vs. Albums:
A Case of Not-So-Parallel Universes
• Frank Sinatra- among the first artists to creatively exploit distinctive
potential of the LP album
• Successful rocker could sell countless single records while also releasing
successful albums
• Album charts dominated by those who had only a minor presence or no
presence on singles charts
– 1950s- rock-based music- disseminated by means of 45 rpm single
• Harry Belafonte (b. 1927)- folk singer of Jamaican and West Indian
parentage who popularized calypso in the mid-1950s
• Barbara Streisand (b. 1942)- delighted audiences on Broadway, in movies,
in concert, and on records for decades as an exceptionally versatile pop
singer; among the best-selling album artists of all time
• LP- functioned as medium for genres of music that have never been
served well by singles: Broadway cast albums and movie soundtracks

21. Key Terms
Double-tracking
Reverb
Rockabilly
Rock’n’roll
Slap-back

22. Key People
Alan Freed
Antoine “Fats”
Domino
Barbara Streisand
Big Joe Turner
Bill Black
Bill Haley and the
Comets
Brenda Lee
Buddy Holly (Charles
Hardin Holley)
Charles Edward
Anderson (“Chuck”)
Berry
Connie Francis
Elvis Presley
Harry Belafonte
Herman (“Little
Junior”) Parker
Janis Martin
Jerry Leiber
Jo-Ann Campbell
Johnny Mathis
The Kingston Trio
Little Richard (Richard
Wayne Penniman)
Lorrie (Lawrencine)
Collins
Mike Stroller
Professor Longhair
Ricky Nelson
Ritchie Valens
Scotty Moore
Wanda Jackson