With the passage of time, it has become more difficult to appreciate the cataclysm that was rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. The new sound of rock ‘n’ roll—loud, unruly, often beyond logical understanding—epitomized everything that gave adults pause, and was personified by the pelvic gyrations and curled upper lip of Elvis Presley, whose bass-thumping rockabilly sound and his lubricious movements “drew a line between itself and everything that came before it” (Marcus Lipstick 64). Where the youngsters heard a joyful noise, full of flirtation and frolic, the adults saw a snarl, promiscuity, and menace. Rock music became the lightning rod for the expression of a deep apprehension that festered beneath the surface of American society. According to Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, “Adults resisted teen culture in order to regain their authority over the young…the battle took place in many areas, but nowhere was the conflict more intense than in music” (14). Adult animus was directed not only at the music, but projected onto the young people who embraced it, turning differences of opinion and taste into an unbridgeable cultural chasm.
Susan McClary reminds us that music has always represented a danger to those who feel that social order is threatened by unfettered personal expression: “Denouncements of these twin threats—subversion of authority and seduction by means of the body—recur as constants throughout music history” (30). In Ancient Greece, Plato worried that poetry and music, which appealed to the emotions rather than to reason, would disturb social harmony. “The introduction of novel←27 | 28→ fashions in music,” he said in the 4th Century B.C., “is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society” (115), leading to “insolence, frenzy, and other such evils” (88). Religious leaders from Saint Augustine (354–430 A.D.) to Billy Graham (1918–2018) warned against the hedonism and immorality that they saw as intrinsic to the music of their time. Music’s capacity to loosen inhibitions and unleash passions has always posed a threat to the protectors of order and decorum, and the democratic and proletarian nature of rock ‘n’ roll clearly disturbed adults in the 1950s.
The bar for becoming a rock ‘n’ roll musician was low. The accessibility and relatively short learning curve of the electric guitar and drums made it conceivable for any modestly ambitious and talented group of adolescents to form a band. Amateurishness was of little concern to teenagers, but a source of disdain to adults, which only served as a further impetus for youngsters to find a garage and start making their own joyful noise. Belz’s definition of rock ‘n’ roll as a folk idiom is underscored by the fact that almost every city and town spawned its own rock bands, and every region of the country developed its own unique sound—rockabilly in the South, surf music in the West, doo-wop in the Northeast, blues-rock in the Midwest, etc. In every locale, a special relationship developed between the creators and the consumers of the music. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians “held a key position within the culture,” says Richard Mills. “They helped minister and uphold that experience of transformation which underlay it, [and] provided the forms and rituals through which its goals and values found expression…” (in Frith Taking 18).
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the various strains of American music underwent a parallel transition. Independently, blues, R&B, and jazz picked up electricity and speed. Seminal rockers such as Hank Ballard, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, and Chuck Berry assimilated elements of these established genres, but also injected the music with a new immediacy and urgency. Rock music acted on the culture like a cluster bomb, rearranging the landscape of popular culture and driving a wedge that further separated young from old, hip from square, modern from traditional. As Lawrence Grossberg puts it, rock ‘n’ roll “marks its fans as others, as outsiders, even while they continue to live within the dominant cultural structures of meaning” (“In Search” 169). And being “other” is to be feared. According to Martin and Segrave, “No other form of culture has met with such extensive hostility.” (3) It may seem preposterous in hindsight, but in the 1950s there was a widely held perception, amplified in the media, that rock ‘n’ roll represented a serious threat to the social fabric.
For most Americans, rock ‘n’ roll was a hot topic of media coverage before it was attached to an actual song or a singer. In 1956, Time magazine informed its readers that rock ‘n’ roll “underlines the primitive qualities of the blues with mal←28 | 29→ice, aforethought” and that teen dances “bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings” (“Yeh”). Frank Sinatra castigated rock musicians as “cretinous goons” and their sound as “the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth” (Samuels 19).1 Other “serious” musicians, including Mitch Miller and Pablo Casals, expressed indignation. It is ironic that Sinatra and Miller were so vocal in their condemnation of rock ‘n’ roll, since both played pivotal roles in laying the foundation for the new sound. Sinatra’s career transition from band singer to teen idol became a template for rock ‘n’ roll stardom, and the intimacy he established with his audience through his use of the microphone was a starting point for rock singers.2 As for Miller, Albin Zak points out that “he spearheaded a blasphemous conception of record production that prized novelty of song, arrangement, performance, and sound” (5), values that would be applied most routinely by rock ‘n’ roll artists and producers. As much as any two figures, the success of Sinatra and Miller signaled the end of the Tin Pan Alley era and pointed toward something new.
But musical objections were the least of it. Demagogic figures such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover often conflated the fear of takeover from without, in the form of Soviet communism, with the fear of takeover from within, in the form of delinquency and rock ‘n’ roll. Religious leaders such as Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York and the Very Reverend John P. Carroll in Boston suggested that law enforcement agencies should crack down on musicians and disc jockeys. The Irish Catholic Redemptionist Record called rock music “an instrument for the propagation of immorality” in an article under the heading “Knock the Devil out of Dancing,” while numerous pastors called from their pulpits for the destruction of rock records.3 WISN in Milwaukee was one of dozens of radio stations that hopped on the anti-rock bandwagon, promoting ritual record burnings and other anti-rock rallies (Martin and Segrave 41–58).
“The antipathy expressed toward rock and roll in the mainstream media did not prevent the beat from seeping into and burrowing under all aspects of life, especially advertising, but it did require that the most virulent, transgressive elements of the music had to be watered-down and suppressed” (Kenton “Come See” 280). Three areas of sociological inquiry help to put these overreactions in context. The first is sex, which became a greater focus for parents as many childhood behaviors were liberalized, and was irrevocably connected to rock ‘n’ roll. Second is race, an undercurrent that impacts all facets of American life but which had special resonance in relation to a genre of music that was birthed by Black and White procreators. And third is modernism, the idea which gained currency in the 1950s that society had made a momentous break with the traditions of the past.←29 | 30→
Sex
In addition to considerable hand-wringing over such by-products of rock ‘n’ roll as hair styles, fashions, high volume, and slang, rock ‘n’ roll heightened parental fears about sex. In hindsight, their over-reaction may seem laughable, but it is not hard to understand how it looked to the older generation. Sexuality really was (and is) an intrinsic part of the rock ‘n’ roll experience. The churning guitar of Ellas McDaniel, better known as Bo Diddley, and the piano thumping of Jerry Lee Lewis were scarcely metaphorical; they were libido incarnate. Diddley and Lewis never sang, “We’re coming for your daughters!” but they might as well have. Just as American slaves created coded, poetic lyrics for their music to express ideas and sentiments that could not be stated openly, the bluesmen, jazz hipsters, and hillbillies of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s devised a rich vocabulary, finding endlessly creative ways of describing sexual relations. Rock ‘n’ roll drew upon this rich reservoir of euphemisms and double entendres. In fact,