A Generation’s Identity
New music for a new generation
 

Little Richard is known for his piano stylings and exuberant vocals

The rise of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s transformed the landscape of American popular music, further cementing the popularity of southern-derived styles ultimately derived from the blues and country music, and transforming the teenager into both a marketing concept and a cultural icon. Rock ’n’ roll records were played for dances at inner-city, primarily black, public schools, for parties at predominantly white suburban private schools, and for socials in rural settings catering to young people. If you were young in the 1950s in the United States, no matter where you lived, no matter what your race or class, rock ’n’ roll was your music.

The advent of rock ’n’ roll music in the mid-1950s brought enormous changes to American popular music, changes whose impact is still being felt. Styles that had remained on the margins of pop music began to infiltrate and eventually dominate the center. Rhythm & blues and country music recordings were no longer directed to specialized and regionalized markets; they began to be heard on mainstream pop radio, and many could be purchased in music stores nationwide.

Little Richard is known for his piano stylings and exuberant vocals.The emergence of rock ’n’ roll was an event of great cultural significance. But several issues demand our attention: first, rock ’n’ roll was neither a “new,” nor indeed even a single musical style; second, the rock ’n’ roll era does not mark the first time that music was written specifically to appeal to young people; third, rock ’n’ roll was certainly not the first American music to fuse black and white popular styles.

The new audience was dominated by the so-called baby boom generation born immediately following World War II. It was a much younger target group than ever before, a large audience that shared specific characteristics of group cultural identity. These were kids growing up in the 1950s, a period of relative economic stability and prosperity marked by a return to socially and politically conservative ways. This was also the first generation to grow up with television; this new mass medium proved a force of incalculable influence.

The term “rock ’n’ roll” was first used for commercial and generational purposes by disc jockey Alan Freed. In the early 1950s Freed discovered that increasing numbers of young white kids were listening to and requesting the rhythm & blues records he played on his nighttime program in Cleveland – records he began to call “rock ’n’ roll.” Freed promoted concert tours featuring black artists, playing to a young, racially mixed audience, and promoted them as “rock ’n’ roll revues.” The term “rock ’n’ roll” itself was derived from the many references to “rockin” and “rollin” found in rhythm & blues songs and on race records.

The purchase of rock ’n’ roll records by kids in the 1950s proved a way of asserting their generational identity through rebellion against adult standards and restrictions. Thus the experience of growing up with rock ’n’ roll music became a defining characteristic of the baby boom generation. So it is not surprising that the music catered to this age group, which by the late 1950s had its own distinctive culture and its associated rituals: school and vacation (represented in songs such as “School Day” and “Summertime Blues”), fashions (“Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini”), social dancing (“At the Hop” and “Save the Last Dance for Me”), and courtship (“Teen-Age Crush,” “Puppy Love,” “A Teenager in Love,” and “Poor Little Fool”). Some rock ’n’ roll songs – for example, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Stay” – announced themselves as emblems of a new aesthetic and cultural order, dominated by the tastes and aspirations of youth.

Rhythm & Blues
Rock 'n' roll incorporated updated rhythm-and-blues traditions

Fats Domino’s hits include “Blueberry Hill” and “Ain’t That a Shame.”Three prominent African Americans represent the rhythm & blues-based side of rock ’n’ roll. Chuck Berry was a songwriter/performer who addressed his songs to teenage America (white and black) in the 1950s; Little Richard cultivated a deliberately outrageous performance style that appealed on the basis of its strangeness, novelty, and sexual ambiguity; and Fats Domino’s work embodied the continuity of rhythm & blues with rock ’n’ roll. Domino was the earliest of the three to become an established performer, but all three crossed over to mainstream success within the first few months following the massive success of the white rocker Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”

The biggest rock ’n’ roll star to come from the country side of the music world was Elvis Presley. In 1955, RCA Victor, a major label, set about trying to turn the “hillbilly cat” into a mainstream performer without compromising the strength of his appeal to teenagers. They succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Although Presley’s television performances were denounced by authorities as vulgar, the shows were attended by hordes of screaming young fans and admired on the screen by millions. And Presley’s records racked up astronomical sales from 1956 on into the early 1960s, establishing him as the biggest-selling solo artist of rock ’n’ roll, and then as the biggest-selling solo recording artist of any period and style – a title he still holds at the beginning of the 21st century!

Presley’s extraordinary popularity established rock ’n’ roll as an unprecedented mass-market phenomenon. His reputation as a performer and recording artist endured up to his death in 1977 at the age of 42 – and continues beyond the grave. Presley made fine records at many points throughout his career, but his principal importance rests upon his achievements during the early years of rock ’n’ roll. In 1956 Presley cut a handful of records that changed the musical world for himself and for those around him, and the unbridled exuberance of his live performances during that era became the model for every kid who wanted to move mountains by strumming a guitar, shaking his hips, and lifting his voice.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Women
Empowered women were crucial to the rock generation’s self-identity

The 1950s was an inauspicious time to be seen as a rebellious and empowered young woman. The rebellious, empowered young men of early rock ’n’ roll proved controversial enough, and most teenagers were happy admiring them from a safe distance. The pioneering female rocker Wanda Jackson, for instance, recorded a number of classic singles and enjoyed the encouragement and mentoring of Elvis Presley himself – but none of her records became hits. The post-World War II ideal of domestic femininity proved to be powerful and provoked no widespread challenges until the 1960s.

By 1960 America was at last ready to embrace a young female recording artist with a feisty public image, and the teenage Brenda Lee, who became known as “Little Miss Dynamite,” was there to fill the bill with engaging rock ’n’ roll songs like “Sweet Nothin’s” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Lee also recorded a large proportion of slow, sentimental love songs.
 

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Wanda Jackson was “the first to bring a woman’s intuition” to rock 'n' roll.”
 

The 1960s: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Second Generation
Rock provided the soundtrack during a period of social and political change

Few eras in American history have been as controversial as the 1960s, a period marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Popular music played an incontestable role in defining the character and spirit of the 1960s. The baby boom generation played a vital role in the political and cultural events of this period, and the boomers were a generation identified with rock ’n’ roll.

Three important trends emerged in the early 1960s. A new kind of social dancing, inspired by “The Twist,” gave rock ’n’ roll music a distinctive set of movements and social customs. Members of the first generation to grow up with rock ’n’ roll began to assume positions of shaping power in the music industry. And new stylistic possibilities for rock ’n’ roll began to emerge out of California, spearheaded by the Beach Boys.

Brian Wilson formed the Beach Boys in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. The band was achieving national chart hits within a year. Wilson was the first self-conscious second-generation rock ’n’ roller. He explicitly acknowledged his reliance on, and reverence for, his predecessors in the rock ’n’ roll field, by covering and quoting from their records. At the same time, he carved out distinctive new ground, by deliberately moving the lyrics and the music of his own songs beyond the territory carved out by his predecessors, into novel areas that were of particular meaning to him, to his time, and to his place in America.
 

If we were to conceptualize a defining model for the career of a self-sustaining, trend-setting rock group of the 1960s, it would look something like this:

• Start out by demonstrating a mastery of the basic early rock ’n’ roll ballad and up tempo styles;
• Create original material based on, and extending, those styles;
• Eventually branch out totally beyond the traditional forms, sounds, and lyric content of rock ’n’ roll to create something truly different and unique.

The reference point that most people would use for constructing a model like this would probably be the Beatles. But the group that first established this model, and did so with outstanding success, was the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys were in fact a clear, and stated, model for the Beatles, especially during the remarkably productive and innovative years (for both groups) of 1965-67.

Motown
Black artists plus “white” pop equal musical success

The music of the 1960s includes a remarkable spectrum of styles and influences. In Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr. was creating his own songwriting/ producing/marketing organization. Motown was named after the “Motor town,” Detroit, the automobile production capital of America. It came to be one of the most stunning African-American business success stories. The intensity and duration of Motown’s commercial success reflected the distinctive dual thrust of Gordy’s vision.
 

Berry Gordy founded Motown Records. With an unmatched ability to discern popular taste, he launched the careers of many musical giants.

First, he was determined to keep all of the creative and financial aspects of the business under African-American control. This worked because Gordy had an uncanny ability to surround himself with first-rate musical talent in all aspects of the record-making process, and to maintain the loyalty of his musicians for substantial periods of time. It also worked because Gordy had a shrewd head for business as well as for music, and this leads us to the second element of his visionary plan. Motown’s music was not directed primarily at black audiences. Gordy sought to make an African-American pop music addressed to the widest possible listening public.

It is almost as if Gordy launched his enterprise as a kind of counteroffensive against the expropriation of African-American music and the exploitation of African-American musicians that had been as much a part of the early history of rock ’n’ roll as it had been of other periods in the development of American popular music. And the unique genius of Gordy was the ability to create a black music aimed right at the commercial mainstream that never evoked the feeling, or provoked the charge, of having sold out. With few exceptions, Motown recordings avoided direct evocations of earlier rhythm & blues forms and styles; 12-bar blues patterns are strikingly rare, as are the typical devices of doo-wop or anything suggestive of the 1950s sounds of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, or Little Richard. Yet a generalized blues or gospel manner remained a defining characteristic of Motown’s performers; sometimes it could be very subtle, as is often the case with William “Smokey” Robinson, and sometimes much more overt, as is the case with Martha Reeves. This proved sufficient to give a definite African-American slant to the pop-structured, pop-flavored songs that were characteristic of Motown.

Ray Charles and Soul Music
Ray Charles provided the bridge from R&B to the later “soul” music
 

Even as Berry Gordy’s Motown recordings defined one stream of 1960s popular music, another hugely talented artist was defining the path that would lead to the “soul” music that appeared later that decade. Ray Charles was a constant presence on the rhythm & blues charts during the 1950s, but major crossover success eluded him until 1959. Charles was never interested in being typecast as a rock ’n’ roller, and he never consciously addressed his recordings to the teen market. As soon as he established himself as a mass-market artist with the blues-based and gospel-drenched “What’d I Say,” in 1959, he sought new worlds to conquer; his next record was a highly individual cover of Hank Snow’s 1950 hit “I’m Movin’ On,” one of the biggest country records of all time. Within a year, Charles had achieved his first Number One pop hit with his version of the old Tin Pan Alley standard “Georgia on My Mind.”

Charles was not the first artist to assay many different genres of American popular music, and he was only one of many to achieve crossover success. What is it then that made his career so distinctive, that made him such a universally admired pop musician – by audiences, critics, and other musicians – that the appellation “genius” has clung to his name for decades?

Part of it is the astounding range of talents Charles cultivated. He was a fine song-writer, having written many of his early rhythm & blues hits, including classics of the genre like “I’ve Got a Woman” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So.” He was a highly skilled arranger, as well as an exceptionally fine keyboard player who was fluent in jazz as well as mainstream pop idioms. And above all he was an outstanding vocalist, with a timbre so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable and an expressive intensity that, once heard, is difficult to forget. But this still is not the whole story. Charles’s most characteristic recordings are not only distinguished, individual statements but also unique and encompassing statements about American popular music style.

Although the term “soul music” would not enter the common vocabulary until the later 1960s, it is clearly soul music that Ray Charles was pioneering in his gospel-blues synthesis of the 1950s. He is now widely acknowledged as the first important soul artist, and his work proved an incalculable influence on James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, Sly Stone, and innumerable others. When Charles went on to record Tin Pan Alley and country material in the 1960s, far from leaving his soul stylings behind, he brought them along to help him forge new, wider-ranging, and arguably even braver combinations of styles.

The Counterculture and Psychedelic Rock
“Alternative” bands captured the 1960s “hippie” spirit

Janis Joplin first achieved musical fame as vocalist for the psychedelic band Big Brother and the Holding Company.The explosive entrance of folk rock into the wide arena of American popular culture coincided with the development of increasingly innovative approaches to rock ’n’ roll itself. This was a period of increasing political restlessness and ferment in the United States. The youth audience for pop culture was directly implicated in the politics of the Vietnam War, as all young American men between the ages of 18 and 26 were eligible to be drafted into the armed forces. In addition, a significant number of young people were involved with the many organizations, demonstrations, and legal initiatives that characterized the civil rights movement.
 

Janis Joplin first achieved musical fame as vocalist for the psychedelic band Big Brother and the Holding Company

During the late 1960s an “alternative” rock music scene established itself in San Francisco. The city had long been a center for artistic communities and subcultures, including the “beat” literary movement of the 1950s, a lively urban folk music scene, and a highly visible and vocal gay community. “Psychedelic rock” encompassed a variety of styles and musical influences, including folk rock, blues, “hard rock,” Latin music, and Indian classical music. In geographical terms, San Francisco’s psychedelic music scene was focused on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, center of the hippie movement.

Jefferson Airplane was the first nationally successful band to emerge out of the San Francisco psychedelic scene. Along with the Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane was one of the original triumvirate of San Francisco “acid rock” bands, playing at the Matrix Club (center of the San Francisco alternative nightclub scene), larger concert venues such as the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore, and at communal outdoor events such as happenings and be-ins. The Airplane’s 1967 LP Surrealistic Pillow sold over one million copies. The biggest celebrity in the group was vocalist Grace Slick (b. 1939), who was the most important female musician on the San Francisco scene.
 

The Jefferson Airplane, pioneering San Francisco psychedelic rockers

Grace Slick’s only serious competition as queen of the San Francisco rock scene came from Janis Joplin (1943-70), the most successful white blues singer of the 1960s. Joplin came to San Francisco in the mid1960s and joined a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Their appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 led to a contract with Columbia Records, eager to cash in on RCA’s success with Jefferson Airplane, and on the growing national audience for acid rock. Big Brother’s 1968 album Cheap Thrill reached Number One on the pop charts. Joplin’s full-tilt singing style and directness of expression were inspired by blues singers such as Bessie Smith and by the R&B recordings of Big Mama Thornton.

Jimi Hendrix: The Guitar Hero
1960s electric guitarists expand musical frontiers

The 1960s saw the rise of a new generation of electric guitarists who functioned as cultural heroes for their young fans. Their achievements were built on the shoulders of previous generations of electric guitar virtuosos – Les Paul, whose innovative tinkering with electronic technology inspired a new generation of amplifier tweakers; T-Bone Walker, who introduced the electric guitar to R&B music in the late 1940s; urban blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and B. B. King, whose raw sound and emotional directness inspired rock guitarists; and early masters of rock ’n’ roll guitar, including Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the new guitarists – including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and the Beatles’ George Harrison – took these influences and pushed them farther than ever before in terms of technique, sheer volume, and improvisational brilliance.

Jimi Hendrix was the most original, inventive, and influential guitarist of the rock era, and the most prominent African-American rock musician of the late 1960s. His early experience as a guitarist was gained touring with rhythm & blues bands. In 1966 he moved to London, where he joined up with two English musicians, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, forming a band called the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The Experience was first seen in America in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, where Hendrix stunned the audience with his flamboyant performance style. This sort of guitar-focused showmanship, soon to become commonplace at rock concerts, was not unrelated to the wild stage antics of some rhythm & blues performers.

Guitarist Jimi Hendrix fused elements of rock, soul, blues, and jazz
 

Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die
Rock of the 1970s featured diverse approaches

During the 1970s, the music industry created a number of rock genres, designed to appeal to the widest possible demographic and promoted on Top 40 radio and television. Musicians as diverse as Led Zeppelin; Stevie Wonder; Elton John; Carole King; Pink Floyd; Paul Simon; Neil Diamond; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; the Rolling Stones; Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention; and Santana were promoted by record companies under the general heading of rock music. By the mid-1980s, the rocker Bruce Springsteen found a large audience. Springsteen’s songs reflected his working-class origins and sympathies, relating the stories of still young but aging men and women with dead end jobs (or no jobs at all), who were looking for romance and excitement in the face of repeated disappointments. Springsteen performed with his E Street Band, and their music was characterized by a strong, roots-rock sound that emphasized Springsteen’s connections to 1950s and 1960s music. The band even included a saxophone – virtually an anachronism in the pop music of this period – to mark the link with the rhythm & blues and rock ’n’ roll of earlier eras.

Purists insist that rock music is past its prime. The times have changed, and so has the spirit of the times. Many others insist just as fervently that rock continues alive and healthy today, and many will agree that it is hard to argue with their evidence. The profusion of forms and genres that can be called, in one way or another, rock music, is astounding. One Web site lists 32 varieties of rock music. Punk, thrash, metal, grunge, country rock, and glam rock, to name just a few, have all developed out of the rock ’n’ roll tradition that began in the 1950s. They continue to be played and heard and, just as significantly, to provide the stimulus for new forms and styles of popular music in America and around the world.