A number of factors converged in the decade following the end of World War II that enabled rock and roll to develop: (1) rapid changes and growth in the music and related media industries, including recording, radio, and television; (2) the rise of teenagers as a new consumer demographic; and (3) a new cohort of creative individuals who captured the imaginations of teens.
THE MEDIA
Changes in the media in the 1940s and 1950s included the growth of independent radio stations, disc jockeys, and Top 40 formats; the addition of another performing rights organization (BMI); the entrance of two new distribution formats for audio recordings (vinyl albums and singles); the growth of television; and the growth of independent record labels (Peterson 1990). They all contributed to opening up the access of rhythm and blues and country recordings to broader audiences.
In the 1930s the Federal Communications Commission tightly restricted the number of radio stations licensed to broadcast, which typically resulted in five or fewer stations broadcasting in each local market: the major networks—NBC (Red and Blue), CBS, and Mutual—plus one independent station.4 In effect, there was a single national market with four networks competing for that audience. In 1940, when the FCC temporarily stopped licensing new stations, there were 813 licensed AM stations. In 1947 the FCC began approving a backlog of applications, and by 1949 the number of AM stations jumped to 2,127, with small independent stations making the biggest gain. In February 1953 Variety (1953) magazine featured a front-page story—“Negro Jocks Come into Own: Play Key Role in Music Biz”—noting that five hundred black R&B disc jockeys were working across the country, with twelve in New York City alone. Their standing in the community pointed to a new role for disc jockeys, beyond just playing records. By 1956 the total number of AM stations grew to almost 3,000, and by the end of the decade about one hundred autonomous local markets had materialized,, with each having 8 to 12 or more stations competing for local audiences.
White teens could hear R&B in the early 1950s through local disc jockeys like Alan Freed, whose Cleveland radio program the Moondog House, beginning in 1951, drew many listeners. When Freed moved to WINS in New York City in the fall of 1954, soon calling his show Rock ‘n’ Roll Party, he became one of the most influential deejays in the music business. Other disc jockeys in the early 1950s, such as Dick “Huggy Boy” Hugg in Los Angeles and Rufus Thomas and Dewey Phillips in Memphis (who played Elvis Presley’s first recordings in 1954), fueled the growing interest. A Top 40 radio format, wherein radio stations would play a limited list of the forty most popular songs in the nation each week, dates to the mid-1950s. The format is credited to station director Todd Storz, in Omaha, who noted people repeatedly putting coins in jukeboxes to hear the same songs over and over (Fong-Torres 1998; Rasmussen 2008).
A 1939 dispute over increased licensing fees that radio stations should pay to ASCAP (representing composers and publishers) led to radio station owners forming their own competing Broadcast Music, Inc., performing rights organization. BMI attracted songwriters working in genres that were underrepresented or excluded from ASCAP, such as rhythm and blues and country. Throughout much of 1941 network radio stations played BMI-licensed music exclusively, giving a strong boost to previously ignored musical styles.
The debut of ten-inch (soon to be twelve-inch) 33⅓ rpm long-play records from Columbia in 1948 and seven-inch 45 rpm single records from RCA in 1949 (both made from vinyl) immediately displaced the heavier and fragile ten-inch 78 rpm shellac records and had a major impact on the industry. The LP became the primary medium for jazz and classical recordings and the 45 was the one for pop music and jukeboxes. The smaller, lighter, and virtually indestructible 45s enabled independent record labels to affordably and reliably ship their product nationwide.
The growth of television had both direct and indirect effects on rock and roll. Television had made significant inroads into U.S. homes by 1949, and 65 percent of U.S. households had a TV by 1955. Thinking that television would displace radio, the major broadcast networks loosened their objections to licensing additional radio stations, and local radio exploded by the mid-1950s. While the major radio networks were using live bands for their music broadcasts, independent stations were playing recordings. Cheap lightweight compact Japanese transistor radios flooded the market about this time, further contributing to the growth of radio.
In 1948 the four major record labels—RCA, Columbia (CBS), Capitol, and American Decca (MCA)—released 81 percent of all records that reached the weekly Top 10. Independent record labels grew exponentially beginning in the late 1940s (see figure 14), and by 1959 the major labels’ share of the Top 10 pot had dropped to 34 percent. Record sales grew steadily during the first part of the 1950s and then almost tripled between 1954 and 1959, when it reached $604 million. Rock and roll releases, including those on independent labels, fueled much of the growth (Gillett 1996: 39).
YOUTH CULTURE
Post–World War II economic prosperity in the United States led to teenagers having the time and means to participate in and influence American consumer culture by the 1950s. The Wild One (1953), starring thirty-year-old Marlon Brando; Rebel without a Cause (1955), starring twenty-four-year-old James Dean; and Blackboard Jungle (1955), with twenty-eight-year-old Sidney Poitier in his breakout role, reflected a growing concern about post–World War II youth culture. Toward the end of the decade, however, a series of films featuring rock and roll began to show a lighter side to teen life, and rock and roll had become the soundtrack for this generation.
Desegregation of the U.S. armed forces ordered by President Harry S. Truman in 1948 also contributed indirectly to the birth of rock and roll. Of the 5.7 million U.S. military personnel involved in the Korean War (1950–53), six hundred thousand were African American, a significant number in a country with a population of 150 million in 1950. Whites were exposed to the listening tastes of their black counterparts during the war, and when they returned home some of them passed those new listening experiences to their younger siblings.
NAMING A STYLE
The definitive arrival of the term rock and roll to name a multifaceted musical phenomenon can be tracked to late 1954, just after Alan Freed moved to WINS in New York and was forced to drop the label Moondog for his show (a local artist with that name had sued him). Freed began calling his program the Rock and Roll Show by December (Billboard 1954), and by January 1955 the term had caught on, as can be seen in two Billboard notices.
Disc Jockey Alan Freed’s first ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’ Ball in this city was a complete sell-out for both nights at the St. Nicholas Arena [capacity six thousand]. (Billboard 1955a: 13)
[Advertisement for Alan Freed’s WINS radio program:] America’s #1 ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’ disc Jockey (Billboard 1955b)
The profile of the new style by the mainstream Life magazine in April 1955 provided a brief explanation as to how the style arose: “During the past years as the big record companies concentrated on mambos and ballads, the country’s teen-agers found themselves without snappy dance tunes to their taste. A few disk jockies filled the void with songs like Ko Ko Mo, Tweedlee Dee, Hearts of Stone, Earth Angel, Flip, Flop, and Fly, Shake, Rattle and Roll, and the name rock ‘n roll took over. On a list of 10 top jukebox best-selling records last week, six were r ‘n r” (Life 1955: 168). All the songs named were R&B hits in 1954, except “Flip, Flop, and Fly,” which was released in early 1955. By early 1956 rock and roll was no longer a novelty; in a trend that would forever mark rock, it had gained respectability and was being co-opted, as Billboard had noted: “The shouting and tumult has