Considering that rock ’n’ roll is little more than fifty years old, its origins are remarkably obscure. For all the books, magazines, newspaper articles, movies, radio and television programs, websites, college courses, and even museums devoted to rock ’n’ roll and its exponents, few attempts have been made to trace the roots of the music back much further than the end of World War II, less than ten years before the emergence of Elvis Presley.
Although there is no consensus as to what the first rock ’n’ roll record is, it is generally agreed that rock music grew out of postwar rhythm-and-blues. Thanks to the revival of swing dancing, there’s been a growing awareness of the “jump” music that preceded R&B, but jazz historians still give short shrift to the bluesy side of the swing era. The boogie-woogie craze of the late 1930s and early 1940s has only been sketchily described, and the development of the boogie beat, the basis for early rock ’n’ roll (and for ska, the predecessor of reggae), remains little known.
The influence of country, pop, and Caribbean music on early rock ’n’ roll has likewise been acknowledged but not closely examined. The interaction of country music with jazz and R&B is especially important, but though western swing—country music’s string-powered response to big-band jazz—has been extensively researched, the “hillbilly boogie,” which bridged the gap between western swing and the rockabilly, has been virtually ignored.
Until now, rock ’n’ roll has largely been viewed as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop that preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music that had previously been played only by and for blacks. But the roots of rock can be tracked all the way back to the minstrel and “coon” songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were written and performed by whites and blacks alike. The notion that Presley was the first white artist to perform African American music with a semblance of authenticity could hardly be further from the truth. Following a tradition dating back to colonial America, white musicians sang and played black music throughout the recorded era, some so convincingly that both white and black listeners misjudged their race. Much of modern rock and pop, from Elvis to Eminem, can be regarded as a latter-day extension of blackface minstrelsy, with a harder beat but without the burnt cork.
The prehistory of rock ’n’ roll was not just an underground phenomenon, confined to the back streets and byroads of blues and country music. Besides such unsung characters as Goree Carter, Hardrock Gunter, and the Harlem Hamfats, the list of rock forerunners includes such household names as Bing Crosby, Roy Rogers, and Ella Fitzgerald. Broadway reviews showcased ragtime and jazz, Hollywood musicals and animated cartoons helped popularize swing, and singing cowboy movies created a national audience for country music. “Blueberry Hill” became a rock classic at the hands of Fats Domino in 1956, but the song, a No. 1 pop hit for Glenn Miller in 1940, was sung by Gene Autry in the 1941 western The Singing Hill and recorded in 1949 by Louis Armstrong.
It is widely believed that rock music is derived from the blues and that the blues, based on dimly remembered African models, began in the Mississippi Delta. In fact, the evidence for the Delta origin of the blues is tenuous, and the connection between rural blues and early rock ’n’ roll is oblique, mediated by jazz and country music. For the most part, the blues found its way into rock music through jazz, which has incorporated blues since jazz began. With rare exceptions, country blues had little impact on rock ’n’ roll before the British Invasion of the mid-1960s. In any case, the form followed by such rock classics as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” is not the blues but the verse-and-refrain hokum song.
The evolutionary paths of jazz, blues, country, pop, and gospel music were closely intertwined. The New Orleans–born singer and banjo player “Papa” Charlie Jackson helped spark a trend for bawdy hokum songs with his 1925 hit “Shake That Thing.” Jackson’s “Salty Dog Blues,” recorded the previous year, became a standard of both Dixieland jazz and bluegrass. Thomas A. Dorsey, who helped lead the hokum movement under the name Georgia Tom, went on to found modern gospel music. Jimmie Davis, a white country singer who recorded such risqué hokum songs as “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” also cut a version of “Salty Dog” with the black guitarists Oscar “Buddy” Woods and Ed “Dizzy Head” Schaffer, a rare example of a racially integrated southern session. After popularizing “You Are My Sunshine,” which became a hit for Gene Autry and for Bing Crosby in 1941, Davis appeared in singing cowboy movies and, after serving two terms as governor of Louisiana, spent the final years of his career performing mostly gospel songs.
During the swing era, big bands such as Count Basie’s, Benny Goodman’s, and Tommy Dorsey’s picked up the boogie-woogie, while blues and country music took on a jazzy feel. Artists such as the Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner brought the earthy sounds of the Southwest to nationwide attention; Turner’s first record, “Roll ’Em Pete,” made in 1938 with the boogie-piano master Pete Johnson, embodies the spirit of what was to become rock ’n’ roll. Early 1940s jump bands such as Lucky Millinder’s and Louis Jordan’s—with their shouted vocals, shuffle rhythms, boogie bass lines, and honking saxophones—laid the foundation for rhythm-and-blues.
With the postwar decline of the big bands, singers and small combos came to the forefront. Among the leaders of the burgeoning R&B movement were Roy Milton, Roy Brown, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and Amos Milburn—all nearly forgotten today. Wynonie Harris, who made his first record in 1945 as the vocalist with Lucky Millinder’s band, cut the smash hit “Good Rockin’ Tonight” in late 1947, launching a cascade of similar “rock” songs with lyrics about whiskey, women, and automobiles. This first wave of rock ’n’ roll had all but ended by the time young whites discovered the music and claimed it as their own.
Country musicians kept abreast of African American trends, adapting to every new style from ragtime to R&B. Western swing, born in 1930 when singer Milton Brown joined fiddler Bob Wills’s band in Fort Worth, grew increasingly sophisticated through the early 1940s, paralleling developments in big-band jazz. The hillbilly boogie emerged after the war, paving the way for rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll. It’s fairly well-known that Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” is based on Big Mama Thornton’s rhythm-and-blues original, but few are aware that there were half a dozen white country versions of the song before Presley recorded it.
The roots of rock run through mainstream pop as well, from Irving Berlin’s early coon songs to the Andrews Sisters’ harmonized boogie-woogies and the R&B-flavored belting of Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray. Before Elvis Presley or Bill Haley had a hit, the pop singer Kay Starr made the Top 20 with her cover version of the Clovers’ 1951 rhythm-and-blues chart-topper “Fool, Fool, Fool.”
Rock ’n’ roll’s long, gradual evolution can be heard through successive versions of songs such as “Keep A Knockin’.” Before Little Richard turned it into a rock ’n’ roll anthem in 1957, “Keep A Knockin’” was recorded by James “Boodle It” Wiggins and by Bert Mays in 1928, by Lil Johnson in 1935, by Milton Brown in 1936, by Louis Jordan and by Jimmy Dorsey in 1939, and by Jimmy Yancey in 1950, among others. The original melody, published by J. Paul Wyer as “The Long Lost Blues” in 1914 and recorded by W. C. Handy’s band in 1917, is a variation of “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” said to have been played in the early 1900s by the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden.
Most existing rock ’n’ roll histories begin with the late 1940s or early 1950s and proceed through the familiar developments of the following decades. Only a few, such as Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker’s Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll or Robert Palmer’s Rock & Roll: An Unruly History (both out of print), even refer to the music of the first half of the twentieth century. Pop music histories such as Ian Whitcomb’s After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock or Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV deal with ragtime, blues, jazz, country, and Tin Pan Alley but don’t systematically relate these genres to the evolution of rock. Perhaps the best explanation of the origins of rock is still to be found in Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City (first published in 1970), one of the only books to recognize the link between rock and big-band swing.
One writer who has traced some of the various musical strains that found their way into rock ’n’ roll is Nick Tosches, whose books Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll, Country, and, most recently, Where Dead Voices Gather make some of the same sorts of connections that Before Elvis does. But Tosches makes no attempt to be comprehensive, presenting the material in fragmented fashion and giving it a highly personal spin. Other writers view rock history through the prism of sociology or personality rather than focusing on the music itself.
I have long been curious about the origins of rock music and skeptical about the prevailing ideas on the subject. Since I began researching and writing Before Elvis, my enthusiasm for the book has only grown. Over the last decade or so, there has been a surge of publishing activity in the fields of blues, jazz, country, and other genres that fed into the development of rock. The past few years alone have seen the origin of the blues radically reexamined in a number of books, journal articles, and dissertations.
But while the facts are available to those who pursue them, the conventional mythology about rock’s origins persists. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s first commercial recording, for example, Time magazine’s website ran a story, under the headline “Elvis Rocks. But He’s Not the First,” that recycled such common misconceptions as that Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” was the first rock ’n’ roll record, that rock was a direct offshoot of the blues, and that Presley hung out in black nightclubs while he was still in high school.[1] I feel it’s time to set the record straight.
1. Christopher John Farley, “Elvis Rocks. But He’s Not the First,” Time, July 6, 2004, www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,661084,00.html.