Doo Wop/ 50s Rock 'n' Roll

Rock and roll (also known as rock 'n' roll), is a defined supergenre of music that originated in the United States in the 1950s, and quickly spread to the rest of the world. It later evolved into the various sub-genres of what is now called simply 'rock'. more...

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From the mid-1950s to the current time, rock has been one of the most popular forms of music in the western world. The heart of rock and roll is the rhythm, which is basically a boogie woogie blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, almost always on snare drum. Rock and roll is typically played with two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit. Keyboards are a common addition to the mix. In the rock and roll style of the early 1950s, the saxophone was often the lead instrument, replaced by guitar in the mid 1950s. In the earliest form of rock and roll, the late 1940s, the piano was the lead instrument, and indeed, rock and roll was a direct outgrowth of boogie woogie piano of the big band era of Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and others that dominated the music business of the 1940s.

Precursors and origins

Rock and roll emerged as a defined musical style in America in the late 1940s, when it was called R&B, and, with the present name, in the early 1950s, though elements of rock and roll can be heard in blues records as far back as the 1920s. An early form of rock and roll, though not the earliest, was rockabilly, which combined elements of blues, boogie woogie, and jazz with influences from traditional Appalachian folk music, gospel, and country and western. Going back even further, rock and roll can trace one lineage to the old Five Points district of mid-19th century New York City, the scene of the first fusion of heavily rhythmic African shuffles and sand dances with melody-driven European genres, particularly the Irish jig.

Rocking was a term first used by black gospel singers in the American South to mean something akin to spiritual rapture. By the 1940s, however, the term was used as a double entendre, ostensibly referring to dancing, but with the hidden subtextual meaning of sex; an example of this is Roy Brown's \"Good Rocking Tonight.\" This type of song was usually relegated to \"race music\" (the music industry code name for rhythm and blues) outlets and was rarely heard by mainstream white audiences.

During the 1920s and 1930s, many white Americans enjoyed seeing and listening to African-American jazz and blues performed by white musicians. They often objected to experiencing the music as performed by the original black artists, but found it acceptable when the music was performed by whites. A few black rhythm and blues musicians, most notably Louis Jordan, the Mills Brothers, and The Ink Spots, achieved crossover success with whites and blacks, but most were rewarded with poverty and eventual obscurity. While rock and roll musicians increasingly wrote their own material, many of the earliest white rock and roll hits were covers of earlier rhythm and blues or blues songs. Blues recordings by such artists as Robert Johnson and Skip James also proved in the 1960s to be important inspirations for British blues-rockers such as The Yardbirds, Cream, and Led Zeppelin.

Read more at Wikipedia.org