Theoretically Speaking S2|E4: What Makes Rock & Roll, Rock & Roll ?

Music Theory For Non-Musicians

…if there was ever an art where breaking the rules is one of the rules, it’s music.

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S2 | E4 – What Makes Rock & Roll, Rock & Roll ?

Rock & Roll is sex. Sex is rock and roll.

I mean that literally. The phrase “rocking and rolling” was African American slang for sex long before the genre of music existed.

Why would that term become the name for this genre?

Well, just listen to it.

It’s raucous and uninhibited and exhibitionist. It’s not something for shy or repressed musicians. You gotta put yourself out there. Little Richard wasn’t a shrinking violet. Neither was Elvis Presley or Wanda Jackson.

For years, I heard that the first rock & roll song was Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley & His Comets, released in 1954. The current conventional wisdom says it was 1951’s Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston And His Delta Cats. 

However, when we look at the distinguishing characteristics of rock & roll, we’ll find earlier examples.

If you have fifteen minutes, listen to this compilation of songs from before 1950 that could easily fall into the rock & roll category. 

Rock and roll is a mixture of three genres we’ve talked about already in this series: blues, country, and swing.

There are many ways to interpret the timelines.

But I think we need to talk about the missing links of jump jive and western swing. 

Jump jive took the swinging rhythm of, well, swing and added the tonality of blues. By tonality, I mean the use of 7th chords and blue notes. Jump jive often used the 12 bar blues chord structure, too. Notable jump jive stars include Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, and Big Jay McNeely.

Western swing combined the swinging rhythm of, well, swing with the instrumentation, twang, and close harmonies of country. The mixture of these two, combined with a little jazz and a little polka, created western swing. Artists like Bob Willis And His Texas Playboys, The Skillet Lickers, and Hank Thompson popularized this mix through the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

And jazz itself had a branch that was going in a rocking new direction. With innovators like the magnificent guitarist Les Paul and his invention of multi-track recording, jazz revved up some old standards into a new kind of pop. His 1951 take on How High The Moon predicts the guitar-centric sound of rock & roll.

Now, I can’t say for sure that someone intentionally combined blues, country, and swing to make rock & roll. It happened more gradually and organically, but rock & roll has the tonality of jump jive, the guitar-forward instrumentation of western swing, and the danceability of both. But it didn’t really become rock & roll until the swing was updated to a backbeat.

When a drummer plays a simple swing beat, he kicks the bass drum on beats 1 and 3 of a four beat measure, and hits the snare on beats 2 and 4. His right hand generally plays a cymbal throughout the measure with a skipping nature. Dah-dada-dah-dada-dah-dada-dah-dada-dah.

In a backbeat, the bass and snare drum parts stay the same, though with more emphasis on the 2 and 4, and the right hand hits steady eighth notes, usually on the hi hat. The backbeat drives harder than swing. Boom-crack-boom-crack-boom-crack-boom-crack.

Older people thought it was simplistic and not really music. Simple, yes, but music?

Also, yes.

Kids liked rock & roll’s rebellious tone. Anything that annoys your parents, anything that differentiates you from them, must be good. Teenage rebellion now had a soundtrack.

It was the start of youth culture in America.

And we can’t talk about rock & roll without mentioning race.

Blues came from black culture, country came from white culture. Certain conservative circles thought the two should never intertwine. Again, some folks thought rock & roll wasn’t music, calling it “jungle music,” and worse.

Then came the phenomenon of clean cut white performers doing covers of rock & roll songs by black artists. Pat Boone took Fats Domino’s Ain’t That A Shame and Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti to higher chart positions than the originals. Boone later claimed that “it didn’t make sense” for him to do Tutti Frutti but his record label insisted. Whether the labels were racist or just knew a sizable portion of the American record buying public was racist is up for debate.

A much smaller portion of the record buying public weren’t American at all.

One of the biggest ports in the United Kingdom is Liverpool. And the musicians in that area loved this new foreign sound.

Liverpool and the surrounding area produced rock & roll hitmakers like Gerry And The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer And The Dakotas, and The Searchers. There was also a band called The Beatles. You may have heard of them.

In the U.K., it wasn’t a matter of race so much as class.

These bands from the north of England took to rock & roll and altered it slightly for working class pub patrons. They intensified the backbeat and used vocal harmonies that seem based more on traditional music hall than on American country or gospel. Still, it didn’t sound like any other British music of the time.

This music, completely new to anyone, became a dividing line between not just the young and old, but the haves and have nots. Young working class people, who saw no future in an economy still struggling after WWII and were tired of hearing about how great the victory was, now had something to rally around. Youth gangs like the Mods and the Rockers had their own favorite bands to further define their cliques.

That urge to have something in common, something different from the previous generation, something that mattered, was as important to British youth as it was to American kids.

Young people flocked to see the bands perform and buy their records. It turned into Beatlemania. 

In America, that frenzy was contagious, too. The massive popularity of English bands playing American music was called The British Invasion.

Older people didn’t get it, which helped the popularity of a different genre I’ll cover next week, but there was no doubt that the song by Danny And The Juniors was right: Rock & roll was here to stay.

Except it wasn’t.

Like all genres, rock & roll evolved into something new.

Somewhere along that path, the “& roll” part got lost.

And that gives us yet another genre to talk about in the coming weeks.

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