Rock Music

Until the 1950’s, American popular music was divided into three separate styles. Each had its own performers, musical content, and audience. One style was called pop. Pop songs came from movies, Broadway musicals, and pop composers. The songs were mainly simple 32-bar melodies with lyrics about love. They were played by bands in dancehalls, restaurants, and nightclubs and on radio. The bands consisted of anywhere from six to more than twenty musicians playing combinations of trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and clarinet, with a rhythm section of drums, guitar, string bass, or piano. Soloists or small vocal groups generally accompanied the bands.

In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, there were hundreds of “big bands.” The most popular included the white bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, and Woody Herman. There were also the more jazz-style black bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Lionel Hampton. After World War II, individual singers such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat (”King”) Cole, Doris Day, Patti Page, and Jo Stafford, most of whom had been band singers, became much more popular than the bands themselves.

The second style was rhythm and blues. It came from the blues sung by black performers, along with the fast dance music that had grown out of ragtime and boogie-woogie. It was the popular music of the black people of the United States. It was played and sung in taverns and clubs or listened to on records in jukeboxes. Later, it was called soul music. A few of the most popular rhythm and blues performers of the 1940’s and early 1950’s were Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, B. B. King, Dinah Washington, and Willie Mae Thornton. Both the white pop bands and the black rhythm and blues musicians were influenced by jazz and by black spirituals and gospel music.

The third style is now called country and western, or country music. But before World War II it was often called hillbilly music. It includes the commercialized folk music of the rural southern and southwestern parts of the United States. The main center of this music has always been Nashville, Tennessee.

How Rock Began

Rock and roll was the name given to the music that developed when these three separate styles came together in the early 1950’s. It is widely believed that the term “rock and roll” was first used by a Cleveland disk jockey, Alan Freed. He was one of the first persons to bring rhythm and blues to white audiences. He did this on his radio program and through concerts he produced, beginning in 1952. These presented both black and white performers to audiences of black and white teenagers. But not any one person created rock and roll. Rock was born as a result of changes in the music, broadcasting, advertising, and entertainment industries.