This blog exists because the history of pop music does not begin and end with the Top 40 charts. In fact, some of the most interesting records never made the charts, or weren't popular enough to have been resurrected like zombies by Oldies Radio. This blog is dedicated to those stories.

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Though we last ended with the winter months of 1947, two important songs were omitted. One was "Oakie Boogie" by Jack Guthrie (cousin of Woody Guthrie), another country boogie that climbs the charts and a kissin' cousin of Hank Williams' "Move it On Over." The other was Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied."

"I Can't Be Satisfied" was a reworked version of "I Be's Troubled," a song Waters had recorded in 1941 for Alan Lomax and his portable recording unit in the Mississippi Delta. After slowly making a name for himself on the south side of Chicago, piano man Sunnyland Slim invited Waters to accompany him on a 1947 session for Aristocrat Records, which in turn led to another, where Waters recorded "Satisfied."

Besides a howling harmonica, "Satisfied" features an electric guitar and a snare-played heavy backbeat, two elements that would become the bedrock of rock n roll. The single hit the big time in Chicago (Waters reportedly had a hard enough time finding copies for himself in the record shops on Maxwell Street). Soon after, the Aristocrat label would change its name to Chess Records, later becoming one of the most important labels in rock n roll and blues history.

1948 was the year the term "race music" died a much-needed death. The term had, ironically, come from within the black community decades before, but in Post-World War II America, with tensions beginning to rise (leading to the civil rights demonstrations a decade later), the term was finally considered too offensive to be used in a marketing sense. Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine is credited with coining the term Rhythm and Blues to replace "race music" as well as the category "Harlem Hit Parade"; however, it's interesting to note that RCA Victor was simultaneously marketing African American music under the name "Blues and Rhythm." (Writer/Producer Robert Palmer would later use R&B as a synonym for Jump Blues, but the AllMusic writers separate it from Jump because of its stronger, gospel-esque backbeat. Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, would simplify it even further than Palmer: according to him, R&B encompassed all black music except classical music and religious music, save for the odd gospel song that had sold enough to hit the R&B charts.)

Readers of last week's installment will not be surprised to learn that 1948 once again belonged to Louis Jordan, who dominated the top five slots of the R&B charts with three songs. In all, two of that year's top five songs were based on the boogie-woogie rhythms that had developed during the 1940s, one of which was Amos Milburn's "Chicken-Shack Boogie," a piano-based boogie with a heavy blues influence. "Chicken-Shack" racked up a combined 5 weeks at #1 on the R&B charts.

Meanwhile, Arthur Smith, a South Carolina-born textile mill worker, surprised everyone by achieving a Top 10 Country hit with his MGM recording of "Guitar Boogie." Smith first wrote and recorded the song in 1945, shortly before signing with MGM. (In fact, Smith and our friend Bob Wills were the first two Country artists to sign with the label in the 1940s.) "Guitar Boogie" became the first guitar instrumental to top the Country charts, and after crossing over to the US pop charts, it sold over three million copies, giving him the nickname "Guitar Boogie Smith" for the rest of his life; more importantly, it introduced many people to the musical and economic potential of the electric guitar. (Smith would eventually become a successful entrepreneur; among other things, he built and managed the first commercial recording studio in Southeast America, but he would forever be remembered when his 1955 instrumental "Feudin' Banjos" appeared in the 1972 film Deliverance as "Dueling Banjos," not credited to him. In a landmark copyright infringement suit, Smith was eventually given all songwriting credit and back royalties.)

Songs like "Guitar Boogie" proved to be such a draw with record buyers that Billboard once again shifted names on the charts in 1949, opting to use the terms "country" or "country and western," having replaced the term "hillbilly" with "folk songs and blues" some five years previously. That year, the Delmore Brothers recorded "Blues Stay Away From Me" on May 6, co-written with Henry Glover, a black songwriter; a fusion of black and white musical styles, the song further develops what will eventually be called Rockabilly. Elsehwere, Johnnie Lee Wills and Deacon Anderson record "Rag Mop," a Western Swing tune. The lyrics consist mostly of spelling out the title, leading people to dismiss it as a novelty song at the time.

That same year, the R&B charts exploded with new music that drew upon boogie-woogie:
-"The Huckle-Buck", recorded by band leader and saxophonist Paul Williams, becomes a #1 R&B tune, remaining on top of the charts for nearly the entire year. Written by musician and arranger Andy Gibson, the song is described as a "dirty boogie" because it was risque and raunchy.
-John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" also reaches #1 on the R&B charts; though not directly influenced by boogie-woogie, his laid-back, slower style had enough of a boogie taste that his style is sometimes lumped in with guitar boogie.
-Granville Henely "Stick" McGhee re-records "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee," a song he originally recorded in 1947, for Atlantic Records. Credited to Stick McGhee and his Buddies, the song became a massive R&B hit and found another life 10 years later when Jerry Lee Lewis records his own version.
-Jimmy Preston records "Rock the Joint" for Gotham Records in May, another "rock" title song after the success of "Good Rockin' Tonight" in 1947. The song reaches #6 on the national R&B chart later that year.
-Goree Carter records the near-instrumental "Rock Awhile" for the Freedom label in Houston, Texas; its opening one-chord electric guitar lick is built upon T-Bone Walker's "Mean Old World," and would be made famous by Chuck Berry in 1955.
-"Wild" Bill Moore cuts "Rock and Roll" for Modern Records, an update of his 1947 recording, "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll." The song features Scatman Crothers on vocals and is probably the closest to what would be considered rock n roll by the early 1950s.
-Fats Domino records "The Fat Man" for Imperial Records in New Orleans on December 10. The record goes on to become a national hit early the next year.

The important song of the year, however, was another by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, who once again made the top 5 with "Saturday Night Fish Fry." Originally recorded by Eddie Williams and His Brown Buddies, Jordan dropped the shuffle rhythm of Williams' original in favor of a boogie-woogie beat. Jordan also takes took an intermittent refrain of Wiliams' version ("It was a-rockin'") and turned it into the chorus of the song. "Fish Fry" became a big hit, topping the R&B chart for 12 weeks and reaching #21 on the national charts. Like "Wild" Bill Moore's "Rock and Roll," "Fish Fry" is dangerously close to rock n roll territory.

The 1950s saw a rise in the power and influence carried by the teenager. Until that time, the teenage years hadn't carried much weight in American culture. However, in post-war America, it was now expected that children would graduate to university, instead of working full-time by the late teens. The booming industrial sector provided less dangerous part-time work for teens; their newfound pocket money was soon spent on records, movies and candy. Later, the ubiquity and affordability of the 1950s automobile would grow to be almost the cornerstone of teeange life.

Perhaps sensing this cultural fundamental, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys recorded "Hot Rod Race," a Western boogie about a car race between a Ford and a Mercury, in 1950. The song not only stays on the charts for 7 weeks, peaking at #5, but is now considered the progenitor of hot rod/car culture songs of the 1950s and 1960s.

Also that year, the Dominoes -- an African American vocal group signed to Federal Records -- record "Sixty Minute Man" on December 30. The song is issued in May of the following year and held the #1 spot on the R&B charts for close to 14 weeks. The song's lyrics are a not-so-veiled double entendre about the singer's sexual prowess, its roots going back to the hokum artists of the early twentieth century, such as Tampa Red. (See Installment #1)

On August 5, 1951, blues singer Elmore James led a session for Trumpet Records on the song "Dust My Broom," originally by Robert Johnson, one of James' contemporaries. James' version followed Johnson's melody closely, but some of his lyrics were pulled from Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's 1949 reworking. "Dust My Broom" became a surprise R&B hit the following year, and gathered a larger following years later when it is covered by the Yardbirds, ZZ Top, Fleetwood Mac and others.

1951 was also the year that the term Rock n Roll, applied to music like "Dust My Broom," entered the public consciousness. That summer, on July 11, Cleveland DJ Alan Freed started a late-night radio show called "The Moondog House Party" on WJW-AM (850). Freed's show is sponsored by Fred Mintz, an R&B record store owner; Freed begins referring to the rhythm and blues music he played as "rock and roll." (On July 12, Freed played Wild Bill Moore's "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll" on his show.) A legal threat issued by a New York City street musician forced Freed to change the name of the show once it moved to the city's WINS station in 1954; by then, it was simply known as "The Rock and Roll Show."

Most people know the above story in an abbreviated version. Later it was reported by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes in What Was the First Rock n Roll Record that Freed had connections to Morris Levy, founder Roulette Record. Levy was an oppressive figure in the music industry, known for claiming authorship on songs that he did not help compose; anyone who questioned him was removed from the label and blackballed. Dawson and Propes allege that Freed and Levy conspired to copyright the term "rock and roll" in hopes of cashing in on infringement lawsuits after having hyped it on his radio show. But the sceme worked too well; according to Dawson and Propes, the courts decided that the popularity of the term (thanks mostly to Freed) made it generic, thus making them unable to sue anyone who used it. Freed moved on to hype "The Big Beat," a sound that was supposed to be Rock n Roll's better successor, but it was too late; the music already had a name.

But more important than having a name was having a sound, and one song in 1951 helped define the rock n roll sound, shifting it slightly away from R&B. While rehearsing at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, fleshed out a song called "Rocket 88." Based on Jimmy Liggins' 1947 "Cadillac Boogie" and influenced by Pete Johnson's instrumental "Rocket 88 Boogie," it sang the praises of the Oldsmobile 88, a new car with the revolutionary Rocket V8 engine. The Kings of Rhythm recorded the song under the name "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats" on March 3 (or March 5) at the Memphis, Tennessee recording studio of Sam Phillips, future owner of Sun Records. "Rocket 88" is notable for being one of the first examples of distortion, or fuzz guitar, on a record; legend has it the amplifier of guitarist Willie Kizart was damaged on Highway 61 during the drive from Mississippi to Memphis, either from rain leaking into the trunk or from being dropped during unloading. Either way, Phillips liked the sound, and it nearly became a centerpiece of the song. "Rocket 88" went on to become the second-biggest R&B single of the year, and probably the one of the most influential songs ever recorded.

1952 saw limited development. Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton recorded "Hound Dog," a slow-burn meld of blues and soul, on August 13, written by teenagers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Released on Peacock Records the following year, the song ended up at #3 on the Billboard R&B charts.

However, Jimmy Preston's “Rock The Joint” was covered that year by Bill Haley and his backing band, the Saddlemen, in February or March; the recording is widely considered to be the first rockabilly record. To appeal to his country audience, Haley rewrote much of the lyrics and included references to a number of hillbilly dances. Haley also changed the arrangement, utilizing a percussive slap bass and electric guitar. (Danny Cedrone would reuse his own guitar solo note-for-note three years later for "Rock Around the Clock.") Over Labor Day weekend that year, Haley renames the band Bill Haley With Haley's Comets.

The following year, the Atlantic label found itself home to some major proto-rock R&B hits. Ruth Brown placed hits in the top 5 every year from 1951 through 1954, including "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean," the #1 R&B record of 1953. Later, Atlantic president and founder Ahmet Ertegün gave "Mess Around" to blind pianist Ray Charles, liberally borrowing key phrases and the boogie-woogie rhythm from "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie." The song was wholly credited to Ertegün.

In February, the Crows -- a streetcorner vocal group from Harlem -- recorded "Gee," a doo-wop song; they were the first group signed and the first to record for Rama Records. The song was released that June as the b-side of "I Love You So," a ballad, which fails to make much of a splash. However, later that year, radio stations started discovering "Gee," first in Philadelphia and later in New York and Los Angeles. By April of 1954, the song had risen to #2 on the R&B charts and #14 on the Pop charts. It became the first doo-wop record to sell over one million records, crossing over to the wider pop market -- though it featured less of a doo-wop style and was more rock-oriented than "Sh-Boom," released the following year by the Chords.

1953 was also the year "Little Richard" Penniman began recording for Peacock Records. Richard originally recorded jump blues on the RCA Victor label in 1951; neither his Peacock nor RCA recordings made much of a splash, but he began making connections in the music scene. One such connection was Eskew Reeder Jr, aka Esquerita, whom he met while traveling through Macon, Georgia. Esquerita, another piano player, reportedly showed Richard how to play high notes on the piano without compromising the bass; in return, Richard claims to have influenced Esquerita's flamboyant style. (Esquerita did eventually record an album for Capitol Records at the end of the 1950s, performing in heavy makeup and piling two wigs atop his head to make one massive pompadour.)

Since changing their name, Bill Haley With Haley's Comets kept plugging away. They eventually recorded the song "Crazy, Man, Crazy" in April of 1953 at Coastal Studios in New York, released by Essex Records in May. On May 23, the song entered the Billboard charts and reached #12, now known as the first "rock and roll song" to do so. That Summer, the song became the first rock and roll song to be heard on national television in the United States, when it is used on the soundtrack of an installment of the CBS anthology series Omnibus starring a then-unknown James Dean portraying a disaffected teen.

After the national success of "Crazy, Man, Crazy," Haley was offered to record "Rock Around the Clock" by James Myers, the song's co-author. Haley and his Comets added the song to their live repertoire, but their producer, Dave Miller, refused to record it for his Essex Records label. (Miller allegedly tore up the sheet music the few times Haley tried to bring it to a session.) Miller's behavior would eventually push Haley away, and as we shall see next week, this one act happens to have some incredible ramifications in 1954...

When we last left our little jaunt into history, we were on the cusp of the 1940s, a decade that would bring great change not only to pre-rock music, but every major corner of Popular Music.

Thanks to the 1938 From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall, boogie-woogie became a public craze; by the 1940s, the floodgates of boogie-woogie would open, with the style splashing over into other genres. Consequently, the formerly "sweet" Swing and Big Band groups found themselves scrambling to incorporate at least one or two boogie numbers in their repertoire, as the public embraced new dances that required the boogie-woogie beat. (The Jitterbug and the Lindy Hop were only two popular examples.) Other bands and musicians, many of which had dabbled in boogie-woogie following the the days of George W. Thomas, were only too happy to suddenly find a demand. 1940 saw the Andrews Sisters release their own Swing boogies, most notably "Beat Me Daddy (Eight To The Bar)" and "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." Bandleader Will Bradley, perhaps taking a cue from the small-scale bands that blossomed in the Swing era, pared his own orchestra down to a drums-bass-piano combo to record "Down the Road Apiece" that August. Credited to The Will Bradley Trio, the boogie-woogie song became a top 10 hit in the closing months of the year and eventually became a rock n roll standard, since recorded by over 100 artists. Tampa Red, having made the transition to an electric guitar, also recorded "Don't Lie to Me," a song that went mostly unnoticed until the song was revived by Chuck Berry in 1961 (although Berry did not give Red songwriting credit).

Meanwhile, the 1940s would see the death of the term "hillbilly music," slowly replaced with the less offensive monikers "country music" and "folk songs" by 1944. Bob Wills was back in the spotlight in 1940 after adapting "Corrine, Corrina," an old country blues song, into a Western swing dance hit. His April 15 recording with the Texas Playboys soon entered the standard repertoire of all performing Western swing bands at the time. Al Dexter's "Pistol Packin' Mama," recorded with with Gene Autry's backup band at Columbia's Hollywood studios, sells a million copies in the first six months of 1943, despite being controversial for its content.

Despite the popularity of boogie-woogie and the rising status of country and western music, the blues was not to die out. On the contrary, experimentation was about to set in. Sonny Boy Williamson, originally from near Jackson, Tennessee, had relocated to Chicago and found success as a bandleader and a sideman with the Bluebird label. Though he was synonymous with harmonica blues until his death in 1948, Williamson's jumping songs "New Early In The Morning" and "Jivin' The Blues," both cut on May 17, 1940, would later be recognized as some of the first Chicago blues with a prominent drum section. On the other end of the spectrum was Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, whose 1942 recording "Mean Old World" melded blues with cool jazz. Walker's song featured fierce one-chord guitar vamps, seemingly inspired by the Washboard Rhythm Kings' "Tiger Rag," which would be further developed by Elmore James and Chuck Berry. Finally, 1946 saw RCA Victor's release of "That's All Right Mama" by Mississippi blues singer Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. In a gentle irony, the song would eventually bring RCA Victor to an up-and-coming Memphis singer singer by the name of Elvis Presley -- but that will come later.

The most important blues work of the decade would come not from a blues musician, but someone simply trying to document it. Alan Lomax, son of pioneering musicologist and folklorist John A. Lomax, spent 1936 to 1942 as Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song, a repository of the Library of Congress. Along with his father, Lomax scoured rural communities, recording prison work songs, reels, ballads, and oral stories. In 1941, Lomax and his Library of Congress researchers discovered and recorded Son House, Willie Brown, and Muddy Waters. Prior to this, Lomax had not recorded much of the Delta blues musicians; subsequently, it became one of his most extensive recording areas. Lomax, his father and their numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings to the Archive, many of which now reside in the Smithsonian Institution.

Due to the nature of his work, Lomax was regularly hassled by white authorities on his trips to the South. For the heinous crime of talking to poor Blacks and asking to hear them play music, Lomax's credentials would be challenged, his researchers would be intimidated, and they would often be told to leave town; as mentioned in the first chapter of his wonderful The Land Where the Blues Began, a sheriff once informed Lomax: "We don't call Niggers mister in Coahoma County." Even the FBI got into the intimidation act; in June of 1942, shortly before Lomax left for another trip to the Mississippi Delta, federal agents asked Archibald McLeish, Librarian of Congress, to fire Lomax on the grounds that he was an alleged Communist sympathizer. Author Ted Gioia discovered an FBI report, dated July 23, 1943, quoting an informant who suspected Lomax’s peculiar personality and poor grooming came from associating with "the hillbillies who provided him with folk music."


The boogie-woogie fad had been an unexpected turn in pop music, but nonetheless was consigned to the fad category, a designation that came with built-in death date. It was probably not only a surprise that the "fad" lasted well into the 1950s, but also spawned a new musical genre: Jump Blues.

Jump blues was a lot like boogie-woogie: both used relatively small combos, up-tempo music, and blues chord progressions. But while Jump was an extension of the boogie craze, the bands tended to be larger than the average boogie combo, featuring a few horns and a rhythm section. Today, we look back at Jump bands as a bridge between boogie groups and the fuller Swing orchestras of the era.

One could argue the bedrock of Jump was laid as early as 1942 by bandleader Lionel Hampton and his 1942 hit "Flying Home." Hampton had been in Benny Goodman's jazz quartet in the late 1930s, leaving around 1940 to start his own Big Band. "Flying Home" was popular enough to warrant a "sequel" of sorts, "Flying Home Number Two" in 1944, but it was the stomping original, with a honking tenor sax solo by Illinois Jacquet that defined the Jump sound, as well as paving the road for Rhythm and Blues just a few years later. "Flying Home" was produced by Milt Gabler, then the vice-president of Decca Records.

Jump gripped the "race charts" and proved itself as a viable music commodity between 1945 and 1946, when Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five released a string of Jump-style hits. The songs -- including "Caldonia," "Choo-Choo-Ch'Boogie", and "Let the Good Times Roll" -- further developed Lionel Hampton's style by accentuating the grittier version of swing-era saxophone and lyrics laced with jive talk. Of equal importance was the fact was Milt Gabler was also behind the production of Jordan's hits. (I could be coy about the subject, but instead I'll come flat out and say it: remember the name Milt Gabler; it will become very important later.)

While Jump surged in popularity, other stylistic developments were taking place in African American culture. Joe Liggins, a member of Sammy Franklin's California Rhythm Rascals, had asked Franklin to record his song, "The Honeydripper," in 1945. The song alluded to an African American nickname for an overall "sweet" guy, and had been the alias of blues pianist Roosevelt Sykes, who had formed a group called The Honeydrippers only 3 years earlier. Sammy Franklin turned down Liggins' request, so on April 20, 1945, Liggins recorded it himself with his own four-man combo. Though the song was a hit for 18 weeks, through early 1946, it more importantly cited by some authors, such as Jim Dawson and Steve Propes in What Was The First Rock'n'Roll Record, as "the earliest runaway hit in the formative Rhythm & Blues style." Later in 1946, Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack would record "The House of Blue Lights," making them some of the first white artists to perform a style that is now considered R&B.

Meanwhile, the former hillbilly bands were also experimenting with a new sound. Alton and Rabon Delmore, billed as The Delmore Brothers, recorded "Freight Train Boogie" in 1945, a song that combined country, boogie-woogie and blues. Nobody had a name for the sound at the time, but probably due to boogie-woogie still being popular, the trickle of similar music is called "hillbilly boogie" or "okie boogie," which eventually grows to a flood in late 1945. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys jumped on the bandwagon the following year with "Roly-Poly", a fusion of western sound and boogie. Meanwhile, the Delmore Brothers had expanded their acoustic two-piece arrangements into a full band, with bass, mandolin, steel guitar, fiddle, and harmonica players. Their material builds upon "Freight Train Boogie" with an up-tempo direction, reflecting the newfound surge called "western boogie." Another year later, Hank Williams' massive hit "Move it On Over," a 12-bar blues song based largely on "Kansas City Blues" by Jim Jackson (see last week's post) furthered the cause. It wouldn't be for another few years before the combination of blues, country and boogie would come to be known as Rockabilly.

But the most important event in 1940s music -- perhaps of the most important in the history of rock n roll music -- was to happen in 1947. Roy Brown, a former gospel singer and professional boxer, had returned to his hometown of New Orleans that year to sing at the recently-opened Dew Drop Inn. Brown had been performing professionally for two years, after winning a singing contest at the Million Dollar Theater in Los Angeles.

Before moving back to Louisiana, Brown had had a stint at a club in Galveston, Texas, where he developed a song called "Good Rocking Tonight." The song was a slight parody of the gospel music Brown had sang in his younger days, dropping the religious connotation of "rocking" for the dancing, sexual reference. Brown unsuccessfully lobbied Wynonie Harris, an established blues shouter with new-found solo career, to record "Good Rocking Tonight." Instead, Brown was introduced to Syd Nathan, the president of De Luxe Records of New Jersey. Nathan signed Brown and tapped "Good Rocking Tonight" as his first release.

Brown's recording of "Good Rocking Tonight" more or less bombed on the charts (except in New Orleans), but it somehow caught the ear of Wynonie Harris. Despite having turned it down earlier in the year, Harris decided to record it (for reasons unknown) on December 28. Harris dropped the shuffle tempo of Brown's version, opting instead to add more Gospel-style aspects, such as handclaps and an prominent backbeat. In accentuating the style Brown was attempting to parody, Harris' resulting song is a far more raucous affair than Brown's, which is probably why his version hits #1 on the charts and stays there for half of 1948. (Brown's version re-entered the charts after Harris released his version, but it only charted for 1 week, hitting #13 on the Billboard R&B charts.)

In the short term, "Good Rocking Tonight" ushered in an era where songs with Gospel-style backbeats and the word "Rocking" in the title became wildly popular. In the long term, however, one could argue the song hastened the death of Jump Blues music and helped push that raucous style to new territory: rock n roll.

Part 1: Stop Breaking Down (1922-1939)

Bing Crosby: "We have as our guest the master of swing and I'm going to get him to tell you what swing music is."
Louis Armstrong: "Ah, swing... Well, we used to call it syncopation -- then they called it ragtime, then blues -- then jazz. Now it's swing. White folks, yo'all sho is a mess, ha ha! Swing!"
-- The Bing Crosby Show, circa 1935

The problem with giving a movement a name is that everything before the name becomes an enigma, or worse: the subject of mythmaking. This, I've found, is the problem with tracing the roots of Rock n Roll. Books upon books exist about the subject, and almost all of them start with 1954, largely considered the birth year of Rock with the release of both Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" and Elvis Presley's "That's All Right." And even when authors and historians venture farther back to pluck out the obscure song they feel truly signifies the start of the Rock n Roll phenomenon, they get hung up on specifics.

Take, for example, the online discussions and Wiki guides spawned by the discussions in Jim Dawson and Steve Propes' book What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record. While one can see the obvious good intentions behind the research, much of the discussion gets bogged down with the movement's name. Instead of trying to trace the stylistic origins that led to the crystallization of Rock n Roll in the mid-1950s, what we are left with is a group of people trying to one-up each other by digging up obscure songs with the words "rock" and "roll" in the title. This is why we are, of late, told that vaudeville singer Trixie Smith's 1922 recording of "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" could be considered The First Rock n Roll Record. Though a fine record in its own right and historically significant (it was probably the first secular recording to use the phrase "rock n roll" to mean dancing), it has little to do with even developmental Rock. Had these enthusiasts read Billy Vera's foreword to What Was the First Rock'n'Roll Record, they might have saved themselves the trouble of one-upping each other: "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."

Vera's comparison to evolution is spot-on; most modern enthusiasts are looking for the equivalent to the evolutionary "missing link," a popular term but ultimately a misconception in the scientific study of evolutionary transition. In both History and Evolution, change occurs within a tremendous number of layers of individual development, acted upon by an equally tremendous number of outside forces and events. For example, the idea that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria touched off World War I -- a story that most of us were presented with as fact in early history classes -- is ludicrously simplistic; the shooting may have set many events in motion, but World War I was the result of a complex network of relationships and problems, including uncompromising nationalism, unresolved previous territorial disputes, a fragile system of power alliances.

To find out where rock n roll started, we have to go further back into history, instead of just looking for a Missing Link record. The roots of rock n roll can be traced to late 18th century America, when immigrants from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland arrived in Appalachia, a stretch of land from what is now southern New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. The European immigrants brought with them the musical traditions of their native lands, primarily English and Scottish ballads (unaccompanied narratives, probably originating from Scandinavian and Germanic epic poetry, such as Beowulf) and fiddle-led dance music. The Irish brought over the fiddle; the German scheitholt mixed with other crafted instruments and created the dulcimer; the Italians brought the mandolin, the Latin Europeans brought the guitar; the influx of African-American slaves into the region brought the banjo. As the immigrants of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds interacted over the next century, a style of music unique to this region began to the develop: Appalachian Folk music.

Meanwhile, as immigrants continued to stream into the United States, not all of them were content to settle in Applachia. A number of European groups, mainly from Ireland, Germany, Spain, and Italy, moved to the American southwest. especially Texas. There, another cultural gene pool began to develop, as the Spanish, Mexican and Native American musical traditions met head-on with the Europeans'. As I'm sure you can guess, this is where the roots of Country music lie.

But the biggest influence on rock n roll came at the hands of the disaffected African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As freed slaves found themselves still ostracized, still restricted, and in many part of the country, still in constant danger, the religious spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads that formed in the days of slavery -- sometimes as a way of entertainment, but usually to keep themselves sane -- progressed into an accessible form of self expression after the Civil War called The Blues. The blues influenced later American and Western popular music, becoming a basic pattern of jazz, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and rock and roll. The Delta blues subset heavily influenced the British interest in the blues during the 1960s, which led to the birth of hard rock and heavy metal.

The first appearance of the blues is often dated between 1870 and 1900, concurrent with the transition from slavery to the small-scale agricultural production era of the South; more precise records simply do not exist, as blues musicians typically wandered from region to region, and most African American culture was regarded at the time as low-class, unfit for consumption by the upper and middle-classes for any purpose. In fact, the first copyrighted blues composition came by way of Hart Wand, of Oklahoma City, a white fiddler and bandleader, who published "The Dallas Blues." Two other blues-like compositions were also published in 1912: "Baby Seals' Blues" by "Baby" F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews) and "Memphis Blues" by W. C. Handy. Also in 1912, another song, "The Negro Blues", was copyrighted by LeRoy "Lasses" White, but not actually published until 1913.

But it was in 1916 that the rock n roll bloodline began to appear in the music publishing business. Texas pianist George W. Thomas had published "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues"; at the time, it was simply a twelve-bar blues song, but today, a number of historians recognize it as one of the earliest pieces of sheet music with a boogie-woogie bassline.

In my estimation, Boogie-Woogie is the grand root of all rock n roll; its origins are as mysterious and clouded as the Blues, but its effects are far-reaching, even today. A departure from the blues and jazz depicting a variety of emotions, boogie-woogie was a stripped-down, funkier version of jazz piano associated with dancing and fun. Both rock and boogie-woogie have four beats to a bar and follow the twelve-bar blues chord progression; rock n roll, however, would put a greater emphasis on the backbeat. As we will come to see, the boogie-woogie style gained prominence from the late 1930s into the early fifties, and made a major contribution to the development of jump blues and ultimately to rock and roll.

Thomas, along with his brother Hersal, later published the song "The Fives" in 1921, which some historians say gave birth to all modern boogie-woogie bass figures, and deserves much more credit for developing modern boogie-woogie "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues."

Along the same time, blues-related music (and the culture that went with it) began to take hold in America and expand. This emergence coincided with the unexpected growth of urban territories during the Great Migration, when lower-class Black workers moved from the South into industrial cities such as Chicago (which later led to the Chicago blues style). As the blues moved into different areas, it began to evolve; in 1923, Kentucky-born Sylvester Weaver became the first to record slide guitar music, using a guitar fretted with a knife blade or the sawed-off neck of a bottle. The slide guitar would subsequently become an important part of the Delta Blues.

At the time, the recording industry developed and created a marketing category called "Race Music" to sell music by blacks, for blacks; labels such as the American Record Corporation, Okeh Records, and Paramount Records, began to record all kinds of African American music. The recording industry embraced the blues, which had evolved from informal performances in bars and wandering guitarists to entertainment in theaters. Blues performances were being organized by the Theater Owners Bookers Association in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and the bars along Beale Street in Memphis. This evolution would lead to a notable diversification of the styles, and to a clearer division between blues and jazz; blues and jazz were part of the same musical world, with many accomplished musicians straddling both genres, but the dividing lines were being drawn more and more clear. The recording industry was also instrumental in creating demand for other kinds of African American music; one example was Hokum Blues, which had been torn from its roots in Minstrel Shows and vaudeville. Jug bands in Beale Street saloons and bordellos could be heard playing good time, upbeat music, filled with double entendres and sexual innuendo, on makeshift instruments. Because the music was tailored for party atmospheres and had none of the grim reality of the Delta Blues, the music has been collectively dismissed over the years, despite its popularity at the time.

While Thomas was publishing "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues," British folklorists Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles were touring the southern Appalachian regions of the US. The two collected over 200 "Old World" ballads in the region, many of which had varied only slightly from their British Isles counterparts. The work confirms what many folklorists at the time had suspected: the remote valleys of the Appalachian Mountains were a vast repository of older forms of music, soon to be called "Old Time."

At the time, there was no clear division between the blues and Appalachian music, except for the ethnicity of the performer, and even that was sometimes mixed up by the labels when the time came to promote records. All of that was about to change in the mid-1920s.

Perhaps spurred by the work of Sharp and Karpeles, OKeh Records talent scout Ralph Peer held the first recording sessions for Appalachian regional musicians in Atlanta in 1923. The commercial success of the music recorded at the sessions prompts OKeh to look for more musicians from the region. The next year, Peer recorded a North Carolina string band fronted by Al Hopkins, who called themselves "a bunch of hillbillies." The term would be both helpful and controversial in the years to come, but whatever the consequences, Peer grabbed the name and ran with it, making "hillbilly" synonymous with Appalachian string band music.

After moving to the Victor Talking Machine Company, Peer held another series of "hillbilly music" sessions in 1927, this time in Bristol, Tennessee. Often called the "Big Bang of Country Music," these sessions are heralded as the birth of commercial country music: not too long afterward, other record companies, such as Columbia Records and ARC, took a cue from Peer and held their own recording sessions, proving that there was a market for "mountain music."

That same year, Jim Jackson recorded "Kansas City Blues" on October 10 for Vocalion Records. Today the song is estimated to be one of the first million-selling records, but more importantly, its melody and lyrics would be found referenced (or outright copied, depending on the opinion) in many later rock and roll songs, including Hank William's "Move it on Over," Bill Haley's "Rock Around The Clock," and "Kansas City," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Clarence "Pinetop" Smith won his entry music history the following year when he recorded "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" on 29 December, the first boogie-woogie song to be commercial hit and establishing the name of the style. Interestingly, Pinetop's decision to talk over the recording, directing "the girl with the red dress" to "shake that thing" and "mess around," led to phrases that were later adopted by other musicians as the language of rock n roll. It was closely followed by another example of pure boogie-woogie, "Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Meade Lux Lewis, recorded for Paramount Records.

Also in 1928, bottleneck guitarist Hudson "Tampa Red" Whittaker, accompanied by Thomas Dorsey (performing as "Barrelhouse Tom" or "Georgia Tom"), recorded "It's Tight Like That," a hokum blues song, for Vocalion Records. The song went over so well that the two bluesmen team up and became known as the Famous Hokum Boys. That year, Tampa Red became the first black musician to buy a steel-bodied resonator guitar made by National, the loudest and flashiest guitar available before amplification technology, allowing him to develop his bottleneck style of single string runs, not block chords;this would later become the the most popular style of solos in blues and rock and roll.

The onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s reduced demand for recorded music, and most "hillbilly" musicians, who had found a moderate amount of fame and success, suddenly fall back into obscurity. In its place, broadcasting became a popular source of entertainment; by the end of the decade, it had become the establishment. "Barn dance" shows featuring hillbilly music would begin all over the South, as far north as Chicago, and as far west as California; meanwhile, radio programs, such as the Grand Ole Opry, not only keep interest in Appalachian music alive, but introduce it to countless new audiences.

The Washboard Rhythm Kings (later known as the Georgia Washboard Stompers) would fuse such Appalachian instrumentation with jazz musicianship on their 1932 record "The Tiger Rag". The Kings played good-time swinging music, featuring spirited vocals, a washboard player and occasionally a kazoo. Their recording -- and later re-recordings -- of "Tiger Rag" have been cited for their "wild, informal feel" as an early precursor of rock n roll recordings; the repeated one-note guitar lick that opens "Tiger Rag" would be built upon later by T-Bone Walker (See Next Week's Chapter).

The next year, Tampa Red, flush with success, launched a fruitful career with Victor Records' sub-label, Bluebird Records. There, he formed the Chicago Five, a pool of regular session musicians (including Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes, Washboard Sam and Sonny Boy Williamson); The Five creates what becomes known as "the Bluebird Sound," a precursor of the small-band style of Jump Blues, Rhythm and Blue, and Chicago Blues; when electric amplification is added to the Bluebird Sound, it becomes highly influential on early rock and roll records.

Jazz, which had risen up from blues roots in the 1920s, had made enough of a cultural impact to spawn its own offspring in the 1930s. One of these was "Blues Shouting," developed before amplification, when bands had swollen to larger than a three-piece blues combo or an Appalachian string band. To make sure his or her voice could clear the drums and musical instruments, the vocalist had to project, or "shout."

Jazz itself had evolved, and, as some saw it, became stagnant. The style had gotten a reputation as immoral and decadent in the 1920s, threatening the long-established social values (not to mention being distinctly African American). Even so, the popularity of jazz was such that it had seeped into white culture; by the early 1930s, popular jazz was dominated with sweet and romantic melodies, accompanied by a lush string orchestra and a tenor singer. In the "underground" of the jazz culture, bands rebelled with simpler, "edgier" arrangements that emphasized horns, wind instruments, and improvised melodies. Despite this development, "sweet" jazz remains more popular (or maybe more proper?) for white dancers. Benny Goodman's appearance at the Los Angeles Palomar Ballroom in August of 1935 changes everything. "Hot Swing" (later shortened to just Swing) and boogie-woogie became the dominant form of American popular music for the next ten years, as jazz bands jettisoned their stringed instruments and intensified their arrangements. Benny Goodman would revolutionize Swing only 2 years later, when his orchestra recorded "Sing, Sing, Sing," written by Louis Prima, on July 6 in Hollywood. Featuring relentless tom-tom breaks by Gene Krupa, the song became not only the most identifiable Swing song history, but also an influence on rock and roll drumming.

The latter half of the 1930s would be a productive, popular period for African American musicians playing stomping, good-time music. In April of 1936, the Harlem Hamfats recorded "Oh! Red" in April; their small band and their riff-based music would pave the way for Jump Blues-style artists, notably Louis Jordan, only a few years later (See Next Week's Chapter). The following July, talent scout H. C. Speir located guitarist Roosevelt Graves and his brother Uaroy, who had recorded gospel and blues music for Paramount Records in 1929. Speir arranges for them to record in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, joined by local piano player Cooney Vaughn. The trio, billed as the Mississippi Jook Band, recorded four tracks for the American Record Company -- "Barbecue Bust", "Hittin' The Bottle Stomp", "Dangerous Woman" and "Skippy Whippy". Later, the writers of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll would claim these songs held a definite rock connection by featuring "fully formed rock & roll guitar riffs and a stomping rock & roll beat." Meanwhile, John Lee Curtis Williamson recorded his first song, "Good Morning, School Girl," under the name Sonny Boy Williamson in 1937. The song was a major hit on the "race records" charts, and became a rock and roll standard in the 1960s, popularized by the Yardbirds.

By 1938, boogie-woogie had become a public craze, thanks in no small part to the From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall, promoted by record producer John Hammond, on the December 23 and 24. The concerts featured Pete Johnson, a Kansas City pianist, and Big Joe Turner, a former bartender, performing "Roll 'Em Pete," an up-tempo boogie-woogie song with Turner as Blues Shouter. While in New York, Turner and Johnson sign with Vocalion, recording "Roll 'Em Pete" on December 30, which featured one of the earliest recorded backbeats. The next year, country singer Johnny Barfield re-recorded Pinetop Smith's "Boogie Woogie," leading other country artists to take up the boogie woogie cause; by the next decade, hillbilly boogie would become another sensation (See Next Week's Chapter).

Back in 1938, Gospel made its presence known in the jazz scene by way of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Tharpe grew up accompanying her mother, a Church of God in Christ evangelist and mandolin player, as she preached at tent revivals throughout the South. After marrying a preacher in her mother's church, she began recording gospel themed-songs with bouncy, up-tempo arrangements, including 1938's "Rock Me." The word "rock" had been long used in the English language to mean "shake up, disturb or incite," and after an unnamed male quartet had recorded the song "The Camp Meeting Jubilee" in 1916, the term "rocking and rolling" was used with a religious connotation for almost 30 years afterward. Thus, Tharpe and other gospel singers in the South were using "rocking" as something akin to spiritual rapture during church service. It didn't matter, though, as many churchgoers were shocked and outraged by her mixture of religious and secular music. (A year later, police officer Buddy Jones from Shreveport, Louisiana, began recording risque honky tonk for Decca Records. His 1939 "Rockin' Rollin' Mama" is notable for using "rock n roll" in the unspoken slang sense: a double entendre for sex.)

In terms of popularity, 1938 belonged to Bob Wills. Wills had grown up in Texas, learning folk music from his family and the blues directly from African Americans. After finalizing the lineup of his band, The Texas Playboys, and relocating to Oklahoma City, his band became the first superstars of what would later be called Western Swing. Although talented and surrounded with sophisticated musicians, Wills' greatest facet was his disregard for tradition; by 1935, Wills had added drums to the Texas Playboys, even though it was considered sacrilege by other early country musicians. The next year, the Playboys recorded "Steel Guitar Rag," which essentially popularized the steel guitar as an important instrument in Western music. It was in 1938, however, that Wills and his band recorded "Ida Red," a traditional Appalachian folk song, but played with a swift dance beat. The song was a hit, but 10 years later, the Texas Playboys re-recorded "ida Red" with a boogie-woogie beat called "Ida Red Likes The Boogie," which spent 22 weeks on the charts, reaching #10 in 1950. Five years later, "Ida Red Likes The Boogie" would play a direct part in the development of rock n roll. (To Be Followed-Up Soon...)

Bob Willis might have been a superstar in 1938, but he has been largely forgotten today. While Wills was enjoying success in 1938, the year marked the end of another musician; relatively obscure in his own lifetime, a handful of records and a mythology were all it took in the ensuing decades to secure a place in history for Robert Johnson.

Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi sometime between 1911 and 1912, Johnson traveled up and down the Delta as an wandering musician circa 1930. In 1936, he was put in touch with Ernie Oertle, who offers to record him in San Antonio. The session was held on November 23 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, which Brunswick Records had set up as a makeshift studio. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson records sixteen songs (including "Cross Road Blues"). One of the songs, "Terraplane Blues," became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.

In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas for another recording session in another makeshift studio, this time at the Brunswick Records building. Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year, including "Stop Breaking Down Blues."

The following year, Johnson died (the method changes depending on who you talk to). Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's recordings, sought him out to book him for the From Spirituals to Swing concerts; upon learning of his death, Hammond played one of Johnson's recordings from the stage.

In the ensuing 30 years, Johnson's stature grew, helped in no small part by a story that Johnson had turned up in Robinsonville, Mississippi with a miraculous guitar technique that he had gotten from The Devil Himself. In some stories, Johnson met Satan at the Crossroads late one night; in others, it's a graveyard. The truth is, the story was lifted wholly from a legend attributed to another blues drifter, Tommy Johnson, who claimed he got his guitar skill from the Devil, and had recorded a decade earlier. Whatever the case, the Devil legend stuck to Robert and his own legend solidified. Johnson's records would be championed for years, eventually proving so influential with artists like Muddy Waters, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, that he is eventually regarded as the Grandfather of Rock 'n' Roll.

Next week: 1940-1947

I present to you the Russian version of the Stooges' self-titled debut.

While doing standard maintenance on my punk collection, I found a newsprint catalog. Stuffed inside a Runaways mini-album from the early 1980s was a catalog from Rhino Records, the disc's label.

At the time, Rhino was a novelty song and reissue label, known for releasing retrospectives of famous comedy artists and 1960s pop and R&B with a few ventures into "New Wave" (hence my Runaways album). In 1986, four years after the date on this catalog, Rhino signed a six-year distribution agreement with Capitol Records; when that ended in 1992, Rhino signed a new distribution deal with Atlantic Records, and in 1998 became a wholly owned unit of Time Warner. Nowadays, Rhino releases remastered editions of albums by the Grateful Dead; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Yes; the Doobie Brothers; Chicago; and the Bee Gees;

"Rhino versus the Record Conglomerates?" You can't make up anything funnier than this.