Pop Standards - Advent of Rock and Roll

Advent of Rock and Roll

With the growing popularity of rock and roll in the 1950s, much of what baby boomers considered to be their parents' music, traditional pop, was pushed aside. Popular music sung by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and their contemporaries was relegated in the 1960s and 1970s to Las Vegas club acts and elevator music.

A major change in popular culture came in 1983 when singer Linda Ronstadt, then considered one of the leading female vocalists of the rock era elected to change the direction of her career. She collaborated with legendary orchestra leader Nelson Riddle and released a hugely successful album of standards from the 1940s and 1950s, What's New. It reached #3 on the Billboard pop chart, won a Grammy, and inspired Ronstadt to team up with Riddle for two more albums: 1984's Lush Life and 1986's For Sentimental Reasons. The gamble paid off, as all three albums became hits, the international concert tours were a success and Riddle picked up a few more Grammys in the process. Ronstadt's courage and determination to produce these albums exposed a whole new generation to the sounds of the pre-swing and swing eras.

Using the Ronstadt prototype, rock/pop stars singing traditional pop music for a large commercial market has become accepted and bankable. Some examples include Cyndi Lauper, Sheena Easton, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson, Fiona Apple, Joan Osborne, Rita Coolidge and Rod Stewart, all of whom have made forays into this once-shunned territory.

In recent times, there appears to have been a union of rock n roll with traditional pop, as many current pop stars and musicians use rock and roll instrumentation but with arrangements and compositions in the spirit of predecessors from the earlier era. An example of this is vocalist Michael Bublé's interpretation of The Beatles' rock and roll hit, "Can't Buy Me Love", performed in more traditional pop arrangement.