Although young people responded avidly to this creative outburst, Richard Peterson points out that demand on the part of the baby boom generation was not a defining factor: “In 1954 the oldest of the baby-boomers were only nine years old and half had not even been born yet” (98). He uses a “production of culture” theory to suggest that if the dam burst in 1954–55 it was because market demand, which had been building for a decade (unacknowledged by decision-makers in the culture industry), was suddenly met by independent record companies and radio stations. The “indies” made R&B, rockabilly, doo-wop, and novelty records with artists that the major labels looked down upon, and got them into the hands of influential disc jockeys. Even if the songs were not particularly sophisticated or melodious, the teenagers liked what they heard. In its early incarnations, rock ‘n’ roll existed to express a feeling and elicit a response, not to make a statement.←19 | 20→ Although often inchoate, rock ‘n’ roll developed an ethos that was more than the sum of its component parts.
More important than the particular harmonics, arrangements, and riffs they appropriated, rock ‘n’ rollers emulated the attitudes of earlier musicians. They were young, barely older than their audience in most cases, and lacked the experience or discipline of their R&B or jazz models, but they developed their own insurgent and insouciant demeanor, and they shared a commitment to immediacy in their music and their daily lives. “Live for today” became a hippie mantra in the 1960s, but it was in the 1950s, with its television-generated fads (hula hoops, slinkies, poodle skirts) and dizzying array of tribalistic dances, that a deceptively revolutionary notion took root: life was supposed to be fun. This idea put the baby boomers at odds with the previous generation, for whom responsibility and sacrifice—not fun and games—were the watchwords. But revolution was not a conscious goal for most of the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, who, despite embracing many of the trappings of rebellion, rarely challenged convention. The sound may have seemed raucous at the time, but the great majority of musicians readily accepted narrow confines of decorum (no direct sexual references) and structure (the 3 minute limit dictated by the 45 rpm disc and AM radio) in order to get to the business at hand: rhythm, romance…and selling records. In this new world of heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality, “now-ness” was all, and matters of form and expertise were secondary to function and expression.
Rock ‘n’ roll could only have developed at a time when the technology, including the electric guitar and amplification, existed to project it. More than any other music genre, it epitomizes the effect of electricity. Musicians making rhythm and blues, western swing, and jazz were incorporating electrified instruments into their performances as early as the 1930s. With amplification also came acceleration. It’s not that musicians suddenly learned to play at greater speed—hillbilly fiddle and mandolin players were already renowned for their torrid “breakdowns” and various international styles including klezmer, polka, and jigs had been employing triple rhythms for decades—but that electrified instruments and microphones allowed them to play faster and still be heard over other instruments, and to perform in larger settings.13
But before the capacity for volume and speed could find its ultimate expression in rock ‘n’ roll, there was a lull. As Murray Forman points out, the brassy, uptempo sounds of the 1920s and 1930s were muted in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with weary Americans showing a preference for calibrated performances reinforcing “values of restraint and conservative decorum” (134). This shift from “swing” to “sweet” was reflected in popular variety shows of the 1940s and early 1950s hosted by Perry Como, Dinah Shore, and Tony Martin. Signifi←20 | 21→cantly, this reliance on Tin Pan Alley “standards” and what came to be called “easy listening” coincided with the penetration of television into the domestic sphere, so even when the music started picking up steam, the modulated, laid-back model for televised music had been established.
Apart from TV, however, the pace of music was picking up, reflecting the mechanization and industrialization of society, with a premium placed on efficiency and amplification. Country music spawned western swing, the fading Big Bands gave way to jump, and the blues was ratcheted up to R&B. They all pointed in the same direction: Rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll were the creative results of this increased volume and speed; one might describe it as electric energy in musical form.
Gospel music is often considered an antecedent, but it predates rock ‘n’ roll by only a few years and generally developed along parallel lines with rhythm and blues.14 The music in most Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s consisted primarily of familiar “sanctified” spirituals, generally sung without instrumentation (often variations of the same hymns sung in White churches), but with more call-and-response interaction between pulpit and congregation. Gradually, the more expressive strains of blues and jazz began to seep into the churches, and writers such as Lucie Campbell and Thomas A. Dorsey pioneered a movement towards original composition and a greater emphasis on vocal expression. Dorsey personified the trend, turning away from the blues—he had played piano with Ma Rainey and made several successful records under the name Georgia Tom—and ushered in the first wave of what came to be called gospel music.15 In the 1950s, electric guitars, bass, and drums began to be accepted as part of church services, and the gospel sound at this stage often bore a close resemblance to rock ‘n’ roll, with subject matter being the most obvious difference.16
It should not be forgotten that all music is a “cultural construction” (Albrecht 54) and, like gospel music, rock ‘n’ roll developed organically, according to a folk model. Belz places rock ‘n’ roll in the context of the 1950s youth movement:
Rock emerged in response to a series of changing values and vital needs…but it did so in its capacity as voice of the people rather than an art which talked about them from a detached and self-determined vantage point. On the immediate level as well as in its ultimate significance, the music has been a confrontation with reality rather than a confrontation with art. This distinctiveness of function marks rock as a folk art rather than a fine art. (5)
Or, as Richard Meltzer put it, “rock ‘n’ roll was the upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s. Not a cause, a catalyst, a cipher…the whole shebang in itself” (pers. comm.).17←21 | 22→
The increased mediation of music—through radio, recordings, and television—dramatically altered the relationship between musician and audience, and rock music would not exist without electricity and other twentieth century technologies. Robert Albrecht is among numerous scholars who trace the evolution of rock music from blues and country forms that were firmly rooted in oral traditions, noting that “the most significant performers were themselves products of an oral culture” (161). Despite its utter reliance on electro-mechanics and mediation, rock ‘n’ roll retains the features of direct communication and pre-literate expression that makes it an example of what Walter Ong identified as secondary orality. This evolutionary model reminds us that orality—direct communication through sound and speech—has been diminished (made “secondary”), but not obliterated, by electronic media.
If popular culture is understood as the interaction of audiences with products or ideas (with the emphasis on derived meanings), and mass culture is broadly defined as products or ideas disseminated by electronic technologies and intended for a broad, unspecified audience (with the emphasis on the medium), then rock ‘n’ roll is an expression that belongs to both popular (folk) and mass culture. The music emanates from a youth community steeped both in orality (gleaning news by word-of-mouth) and technology (receiving information through mass media sources). For most fans of the music, the distinction between popular and mass culture may seem irrelevant, but the dichotomy is brought into sharp relief when rock is mediated through television.
Notes
1. According to the editors, the first use of the term “teenager” in print appeared in Popular Science in 1941 in an article about young filmmakers.
2. This model is personified by William H. Whyte’s Organization Man.
3. This angst is captured compellingly