5. The spell was so strong that families were lured away from the hearth, taking a toll on family dynamics and discourse. Reinforcing the new orientation, the Swanson Company introduced the “TV Dinner” in 1953.
6. Although Robert Pielke says the term “generation gap” originated in the early 1950s (8), Sarah Chinn claims that the term was in common use decades earlier among immigrant families to describe the tensions between immigrant parents and their Americanized children (Inventing Modern Adolescence, 2008). OED points to a July 28, 1962 headline in the←22 | 23→ Daily Record (Stroudsburg, PA), “Generation Gap Affects Parent-Child Relations” as the first published citation. The phrase turns up for the first time in The New York Times on March 2, 1964 in an article entitled “Merman’s Magic Enchants Britain,” in which Ethel Merman is said to have “done what no other entertainer has managed since The Beatles and the rock ‘n’ roll groups came on the scene. She has bridged the generation gap.” By 1967, the term was in wide usage.
7. Hall’s groundbreaking tome was published with the encompassing title Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Hall is also credited with bringing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to America.
8. Salinger’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, was fond of using the word “phony” to describe adult interactions. As Edmund Carpenter notes, the advent of this term is directly linked to widespread use of the telephone and the disembodied voice and depersonalized communication it engendered. See the film Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (Media Generation, 2003, directed by John Bishop and Harald Prins).
9. Nicholas Ray’s film took its title from Robert Lindner’s 1944 book Rebel Without a Cause: A Hypno-analysis of a Criminal Psychopath, although it did not adapt Lindner’s influential view of juvenile delinquency as a mass psychosis.
10. A possible exception is the experimental composition, such as several composed by John Cage, the purpose of which is to create the tension that arises when the tendency toward form and structure is defied.
11. The meaning of rock ‘n’ roll has shifted with the passage of time. Since this book covers several decades, the distinction between “rock ‘n’ roll” and “rock” needs clarification. Although the term “rock music” is sometimes used as a non-discriminating catchall, “rock ‘n’ roll” generally refers primarily to music of the 1950s, while “rock” connotes styles and cultural meanings adopted in the 1960s and beyond, with increased technical capabilities and proficiencies, and more self-conscious composition.
12. Musicologists John Storm Roberts and Ned Sublette have traced this rhythm to several sources. The fountainhead is probably the Juba dance, which migrated from West Africa with slavery, in which the rhythm is created by feet and hands, similar to clogging and the jig. Slaves were often forbidden to use rhythm instruments because slave-owners feared the communication properties of drums. This rhythm echoed throughout the Caribbean and West Indies, particularly in Cuba, where it was called clavé. Sublette goes so far as to declare the rhumba, mambo, and cha-cha the cornerstones on which rock ‘n’ roll was built (79–83). The music of Bo Diddley offers compelling supporting evidence.
13. Kansas City jazz guitarist Eddie Durham is cited as the first to plug in, which he did to liberate the guitar from the rhythm section, allowing him to pick out notes and take solo leads instead of just strumming. With amplification, guitarists could also be heard in bands with horn sections.
14. A similar misimpression also persists regarding bluegrass music. Although considered to be “as old as the hills,” the bluegrass genre didn’t exist until Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys introduced it on the Grand Ole Opry stage in 1946. In Bluegrass Breakdown (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), Robert Cantwell characterizes bluegrass as a “representation of traditional Appalachian music in its social form” (xi).←23 | 24→
15. For more on gospel music, see Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1975.
16. Although Black church music continues to evolve, the gospel style remains popular. The obvious explanation is that the music is grounded in spiritual tradition but, unlike rock ‘n’ roll, gospel music has never achieved any level of exposure on television beyond local public access stations, leaving it free of pressures for change imposed by TV broader, undifferentiated audience.
17. Richard Meltzer, email message to author, August 15, 2011.
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