![]() Using the phrase rock-and-roll as your song title or within the song does a pretty good job of saying sex without having to say "sex". They even covered Chuck Berry's 1957 hit 'Rock and Roll Music'. Where The Beatles 1960s played their own version of rock and roll. It wasn’t long before this infectious, sexually charged teenage music jumped the Atlantic, carried by radio waves and record collecting travellers to port cities like Liverpool. Rock and roll was becoming mainstream, to the dismay of conservative religious leaders, politicians and worried parents. White artists like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis covered, co-opted or flat out copied elements of rock and roll from these and other African American artists and made it even bigger. Teenagers with their new freedoms (and pocket money) turned artists like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Little Richard into superstars. A review of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's 1942 song 'Rock Me' described the style as "rock-and-roll spiritual singing", one of the first printed references to rock-and-roll.īy the end of the 1950s the new genre of "Rock and Roll", which had by then merged elements of country music and boogie with rhythm and blues, was blasting out of radios owned by millions of young white suburban kids across the US and beyond. New Orleans harmony group The Boswell Sisters released 'Rock And Roll' in 1934, which on the surface was about being at sea, but was also ambiguous in its meaning. ![]() In 1922 Trixie Smith and her Jazz Masters cut a tune with the lyrics "My daddy rocks me with one steady roll". From the 1920s onward African-American jazz and blues musicians had adopted the saying in their songs too. Very soon, and definitely by the start of the 1900s "rock and roll" was adopted as slang for sex. You would ‘rock’ a baby to sleep, and take a ‘roll’ on the hay. Railroad workers would “rock” their rail spikes to get them into the hole when laying track. Sailors used it to talk about a boat at sea, rocking and rolling to the waves. Was this where Alan Freed first heard those words? Maybe, but with his love of jazz and blues he probably heard "Rock and roll" from records made earlier than 1951. It had a rebellious quality to it, and lyrics about a guy boasting about his skills as a lover. It had a steady rhythm, with snare hits on the 2 and the 4. Two months earlier Billy Ward and his group The Dominoes had a hit on both the pop and R&B charts in the US with their song 'Sixty Minute Man'. But while he popularized the term, he didn't invent rock-and-roll. The crossover had begun, with Alan leading a conspiracy to get music made by Black musicians into the radios and homes of white America.Īlan became a promoter too, putting on one of the first rock and roll concerts. Calling himself Moondog, he started playing the R&B records which were already selling well to teenagers in local record stores. On Jat 11pm, Alan dropped the needle on a slow blues from the Todd Rhodes Orchestra and introduced his audience for the first time to the ‘Moondog Rock and Roll Party’. The radio DJs Lou Reed and his Velvet Underground bandmates heard were people like Alan Freed, a Cleveland DJ, one of the first people to call the music he was playing on air "rock and roll". It was the radio that did it." He wrote in the liner notes for the Velvet Underground's box set Peel Slowly And See. "If I hadn't heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. And like most teenagers in the 50s and 60s he heard on the wireless. Just like Jenny in Lou Reed's song 'Rock and Roll', Lou was saved by rock and roll. "Despite all the computations, you could just dance to that rock 'n' roll station" - Velvet Underground
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