WORDS BY DAVID BURKE
The advent of rock’n’roll in stiflingly conservative 50s America, caused a generational rift, pitting parents against their children, principally on the battleground of morality. The songs were loaded with sexual innuendo, the performers were raunchy and rebellious, and the whole thing was, well, just a little too black. But this new cultural phenomenon also brought together previously polarised youth on both sides of the racial divide, and arguably made the country more inclusive. And it absorbed the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley into the mainstream, putting them on an equal footing with their white contemporaries.
Of course, without the influence of so-called black music, there would have been no rock’n’roll in the first place. Jazz, blues, boogie-woogie, swing and R&B all stoked the sound that shook America out of its post-World World II torpor. Fats Domino, discussing rock’n’roll’s origins during a 1950’s television interview, said it was “nothing but rhythm and blues, and we’ve been playing it for years down in New Orleans”. Or, as Robert Palmer clarified in a 1990 Rolling Stone piece, “As far as Fats Domino was concerned, rock’n’roll was simply a new marketing strategy for the style of music he had been recording since 1949.” Essentially, what happened was, white America got hip to R&B, infused it with some country blood and conceived the hybrid of rock’n’roll. In doing so, white America legitimised this trope of black American culture, assimilating it into the national culture, and, in celebrating some of its pioneering figures, made possible, on a fundamental level, the erosion of racial boundaries by opening up a dialogue between the races.
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