Origins of Rock and Roll - "The First Rock and Roll Record"

"The First Rock and Roll Record"

Even more than most other musical genres, rock and roll emerged gradually from many artists' work over a number of years, so any attempt to label a record as the first rock and roll song is an exercise in narrowing things down farther than they can reasonably be narrowed. According to musician and writer Billy Vera:

"Rock 'n' roll was an evolutionary process – we just looked around and it was here.... To name any one record as the first would make any of us look a fool."

Harry Hepcat, Rock historian and performer:

"The first rock and roll record? First, try to define rock and roll. I thought it was that driving back beat, until I heard an Egyptian band that could give Bo Diddley lessons. The best I could do was to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who, in 1964, said of obscenity that he knew it when he saw it. Rock and Roll? I know it when I hear it. The first time I heard that special something that was early rock and roll was upon hearing Fats Domino's 1949 recording of "The Fat Man." "

But that has not stopped many people from asserting one song or another as the first. These include:

• Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944)
• "Good Rockin' Tonight" by Roy Brown (1947), as covered by Wynonie Harris
• "The Fat Man" by Fats Domino (1949)
• Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" (1949) has been cited as a strong contender for the "first rock and roll record" title and a "much more appropriate candidate" than the more frequently cited "Rocket 88" (1951).
• "Rock the Joint" by Jimmy Preston (1949), later covered by Bill Haley (1952)
• "Rocket 88" – either Jackie Brenston's original, recorded on March 5, 1951 with Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, or Bill Haley's cover, later in 1951
• "Crazy Man, Crazy" by Bill Haley & His Comets (1953)
• Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" (recorded on April 12, 1954)
• Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" (recorded in July 1954), a cover of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's 1946 song - which itself has been cited as "the first song to contain all of the elements... associated with rock and roll." Some of the lyrics are traditional blues verses first recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1926.

The 1992 book What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes discusses 50 contenders, from Illinois Jacquet's "Blues, Part 2" (1944) to Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" (1956), without reaching a definitive conclusion. In their introduction, the authors claim that since the modern definition of rock 'n' roll was set by disc jockey Alan Freed's use of the term in his groundbreaking The Rock and Roll Show on New York's WINS in late 1954, as well as at his Rock and Roll Jubilee Balls at St. Nicholas Arena in January 1955, they chose to judge their candidates according to the music Freed spotlighted: R&B combos, black vocal groups, honking saxophonists, blues belters, and several white artists playing in the authentic R&B style (Bill Haley, Elvis Presley). The artists who appeared at Freed's earliest shows included orchestra leader Buddy Johnson, the Clovers, Fats Domino, Big Joe Turner, the Moonglows, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, and the Harptones. That, say Dawson and Propes, was the first music being called rock 'n' roll during that short time when the term caught on all over America. Because the honking tenor saxophone was the driving force at those shows and on many of the records Freed was playing, the authors began their list with a 1944 squealing and squawking live performance by Illinois Jacquet with Jazz at the Philharmonic in Los Angeles in mid-1944. That record, "Blues, Part 2," was released as Stinson 6024 and is still in print as CD on the Verve label. Several notable jazz greats accompanied Jacquet on "Blues" including Paul Leslie and Slim Nadine (the monikers employed by Les Paul and Nat "King" Cole, respectively, in order to appear at the JATP concert incognito).

In 2004, Elvis Presley's "That's All Right Mama" and Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" both celebrated their 50th anniversaries. Rolling Stone Magazine felt that Presley's song was the first rock and roll recording. At the time Presley recorded the song, Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle & Roll", later covered by Haley, was already at the top of the Billboard R&B charts. The Guardian felt that while there were rock'n'roll records before Presley's, his recording was the moment when all the strands came together in "perfect embodiment". Presley himself is quoted as saying: "A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock 'n' roll was here a long time before I came along."

A leading contender as the first fully formed rock and roll recording is "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (which was, in fact, Ike Turner and his band The Kings of Rhythm recording under a different name), recorded by Sam Phillips for his Memphis Recording Service in 1951 (the master tape being sold to and later released by Chess Records). Also formative in the sound of rock and roll were Little Richard and Chuck Berry. From the early 1950s, Little Richard combined gospel with New Orleans R&B, heavy backbeat, pounding piano and wailing vocals. Ray Charles referred to Little Richard as being the artist that started a new kind of music, which was a funky style of rock n roll that he was performing onstage for a few years before appearing on record in 1955 as "Tutti Frutti." Chuck Berry, with "Maybellene" (recorded on May 21, 1955, and which reached # 1 on the R&B chart and # 5 on the US pop chart), "Roll over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), refined and developed the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, focusing on teen life and introducing guitar intros and lead breaks that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music. Early rock and roll used the twelve-bar blues chord progression and shared with boogie woogie the four beats (usually broken down into eight eighth-notes/quavers) to a bar. Rock and roll however has a greater emphasis on the backbeat than boogie woogie. Bo Diddley's 1955 hit "Bo Diddley", with its b-side "I'm A Man", introduced a new beat and unique guitar style that inspired many artists without either side using the 12-bar pattern - they instead played variations on a single chord each. His more insistent, driving rhythms, hard-edged electric guitar sound, African rhythms, and signature clave beat (a simple, five-accent rhythm), have remained cornerstones of rock and pop.

Others point out that performers like Arthur Crudup and Fats Domino were recording blues songs as early as 1946 that are indistinguishable from later rock and roll, and that these blues songs were based on themes, chord changes, and rhythms dating back decades before that. Wynonie Harris' 1947 cover of Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight" is also a claimant for the title of first rock and roll record, as the popularity of this record led to many answer songs, mostly by black artists, with the same rocking beat, during the late 40s and early 50s. Big Joe Turner's 1939 recording, "Roll 'Em Pete", is close to '50s rock and roll. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was also recording shouting, stomping music in the 1930s and 1940s, such as "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), that in some ways contained major elements of mid-1950s rock and roll. Pushing the date back even earlier, blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow has stated that "Crazy About My Baby" by Blind Roosevelt Graves and his brother, recorded in 1929, "could be considered the first rock 'n' roll recording".

Writer Nick Tosches stated:

"It is impossible to discern the first modern rock record, just as it is impossible to discern where blue becomes indigo in the spectrum."