Meanwhile, down in Memphis, a redneck by the name of Elvis Aron Presley … but the rest you know. Initially the tune did poorly, but when it was chosen as the theme for the film Blackboard Jungle, it became a monster smash in just about every country where the movie played, selling 22 million copies in all. On April 12, 1954, Bill Haley and the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” a teen anthem generally credited with making rock ‘n’ roll a worldwide phenomenon. By 1954 Freed had moved to a late-night show on WINS in New York City, where he duplicated his earlier success. A rock ‘n’ roll show Freed promoted at Cleveland Stadium had to be canceled when the place was mobbed by thousands of fans. In any case, the term stuck.įreed was the original high-energy, shout-along-with-the-record AM screamer, and his show, along with rock ‘n’ roll music, attracted a huge following. Freed apparently used the term “rock ‘n’ roll” to describe the music because he thought the racial connotation of “rhythm and blues” might turn off the white audience. Sensing the makings of something big, he changed the name of his popular music show on radio station WJW from “Record Rendezvous” to “Moon Dog’s Rock ‘n’ Roll House Party” and began playing R&B tunes. In 1952 Alan Freed visited a Cleveland record store and learned that R&B records were being snapped up by white teenagers. That was the beginning of a flood of tunes that worked “rock” into the title, such as Bill Haley’s “Rock-a-Beatin’ Boogie” (1952), which contained the deathless words “Rock, rock, rock, everybody/Roll, roll, roll, everybody.” An earlier version by Roy Brown (Deluxe, 1947) had bombed, but Wynonie’s cover became a number one hit. In 1939 Buddy Jones recorded “Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama” (String), in which he soulfully shouted, “I love the way you rock and roll!” But rockin’ and rollin’ didn’t really catch on until 1948, when Wynonie Harris released “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (King). The Boswell Sisters did a song called “Rock and Roll” in the 1934 United Artists flick Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round. In 1931 Duke Ellington did “Rockin’ in Rhythm” for Victor. This song inspired such variations as “Rock That Thing” by Lil Johnson and “Rock Me Mama” by Ikey Robinson.īy the 1930s the term had begun to be associated with the idea of music with a good beat to it. “Daddy,” suffice it to say, wasn’t trying to rock little Trixie to sleep. According to rock historian Nick Tosches, blues singer Trixie Smith recorded a tune in 1922 called “My Daddy Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)” for Black Swan Records. In the 1920s the words “rock” and “roll,” used separately or together, were employed by black people to mean partying, carrying on, and/or having sex. But the roots of the term go back much earlier. Depends what you mean by “invent.” The term was first used to describe a particular kind of music by Alan Freed, the legendary Cleveland disc jockey who was among the first to introduce black rhythm-and-blues music to a white audience.
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