Rockissue

Rhythm and Blues Includes Early Rock-and-Roll: Setting the Records Straight

If anyone needs confirmation that the halcyon early years of the Worldwide Web can still exist, however indirectly, one need look no further than Spontaneous Lunacy, a web site documenting what its author maintains is every song that qualifies as Rock-and-Roll music from 1947 to... when? We do not know, it is an ongoing project, launched in 2017: the seventieth anniversary of this supposed birth of Rock. Though taking the form of a blog, a format to be associated for eons to come with the late Aughts, everything else about the site suggests the anarchic, amateurish playland of the Nineties' Web, right down to the author being apparently pseudonymous (or authors being collectively pseudonymous). Or perhaps "Sampson" is a mononym.

This mysterious webmaster states plainly enough in his introductory essay: "Rock 'n' roll did indeed emerge, fully formed, in late 1947." Put aside for a moment that Rock music was certainly not "fully formed" in 1947, unless of course one is working with a strict interpretation of what comprises Rock music: nothing after 1954, or definitely '64. That is, without further elucidation from the author regarding where he draws the line between Rock and non-Rock, we can only assume that he is talking about early Rock: before the Folk Revival, Beatlemania, and Psychedelia. In that introductory essay, though at times he resorts to hackneyed expressions and well-worn historical tropes, and is especially prone to exaggeration with regard to historical causality, Sampson overall effectively describes the factors that led to the rise of Rock. The two major historic forces at work: in the background, the economic prosperity of the war years and, after a brief post-war slump, the Cold War era that would last until the early Seventies; in the foreground, the rising position, at least relative to their previous status, of both African Americans, who had come in great numbers to Northern and Western cities since the First World War and were making greater inroads in Southeastern cities as well, and other ethnic minorities, or at least Jewish Americans, who, as Sampson notes, played an important role in establishing record labels that would release the exciting new post-war music that most commentators define as Rhythm and Blues but some of which Sampson insists is better defined as Rock.

With this early begin date, compared to the standard histories of Rock that position 1954 or '55 as Year Zero, the reader may assume that Sampson proffers a liberal, inclusive approach to defining Rock music. But, no, he relies on a few vague traits that nonetheless narrow down quite sharply the number of songs that he studies in great detail, one article per track. Though the site includes all the expected Doo Wop groups of the late Forties-early Fifties, artists generally defined as Blues are not included. B. B. King, for example, despite his mammoth significance to the Memphis scene that played a central role in birthing Rock, is out of the picture; so are John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, who did so much to pioneer the use of electric amplification, making distortion, feedback, and other "noise" elements crucial to Rock music.

Perhaps we can suss out more clearly how Sampson uses vague terminology to define the Rock that he hears emerging in 1947 by turning to the first recording analyzed at Spontaneous Lunacy: Roy Brown's ‘Good Rockin' Tonight’, Sampson's "point of no return." Brown composed the song, but at first had his trumpeter, Wilbert Brown, sing it, as the latter often handled the Blues-ier material that R. Brown, influenced more by the likes of Bing Crosby, initially had little interest in. But, as Sampson and numerous other historians of this era of popular music have related, the trumpeter was sick one night, forcing the bandleader to take the lead vocal. The audience liked his version, in part because (at least in Sampson's take on the story) of the "soulful" approach of R. Brown's singing, reflecting the possible influence of the former's younger years, when he and his mother sang Gospel music in church. Right way, confusion arises: was not the infusion of Gospel vocal styling into Rhythm and Blues a major characteristic of the Soul music that emerged toward the end of the Fifties and would flourish in the Sixties? In other words, how does Brown's vocal performance make this record Rock, instead of Rhythm and Blues? Describing the recorded version of the song, which Brown made after offering the song to Wynonie Harris (he turned it down, but another R. and B. favorite of the time, Cecil Gant, liked it and connected Brown to DeLuxe Records), Sampson argues that "the sound of someone wailing so brazenly outside of a revival meeting was a revelation. That he was doing so not on a Sunday morning to worship a spiritual god but rather on a Saturday night to celebrate earthly pursuits of dance, drink and devilment (okay, sex), was shocking." This sounds much like the story regularly heard, of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and other Soul singers so boldly bridging the gap between holy Gospel and back-to-Earth Rhythm and Blues.

Continuing his analysis of ‘Good Rockin' Tonight’, Sampson asserts that the horns on the recording were too close to the pop and R. and B. "standards" of the day, even suggesting they come close to "sabotaging" the performance. Overall, though, Sampson's explanation of how the song marks the "point of no return" is less specific:

"The passionate and increasingly unrestrained leads, the growing prominence of the beat, the lyrical odes to wild celebration of the music, as well as of love, life and lust, and more than anything the freedom that songs like this represented, and he delivered all of that while conveying a sense of social and cultural camaraderie that reflected the audience's own experiences back at them and allowed them to share in its glory."

Indeed, Sampson emphasizes the song's artistic representation of the song's "Black" audience:

"The world that's offered up here was strikingly different than anything the popular music of the day had ever presented, yet it was one that most in the listening audience at the time were eminently familiar with, though they probably never expected to hear it depicted like this in a commercial recording. For an audience today it's a chance to peek in at a colorful slice of life that otherwise would have been lost to the passing of time. No movies ever delved into this world, few books would ever try to accurately describe its environment, even its participants simply took these scenes for granted, probably never thinking of the need to capture and preserve it to show how vibrant everyday black life was at a time when the surrounding world looked down upon you, that is if they ever noticed at all."

This is another way of saying that the quick growth in the number of independent record labels like Chess and Specialty allowed for a wider variety of "Race" music to be recorded, especially that which had been considered too raw or uncouth for the pop mainstream. Any history of Rock, though, would interpret this development as a prerequisite for the rise of Rock, not a landmark of Rock's actual birth, which supposedly came with "White" appreciation of this new Rhythm and Blues music—as it was renamed by Billboard in 1949—that grew and diversified in the early Fifties, otherwise regarded culturally as a dark time dominated by the Korean War and McCarthyism. Moreover, looking back to Sampson's list of the characteristics of Rock, were not "unrestrained leads" and a "growing prominence of the beat" linked to Rhythm and Blues more broadly, or to the electric Blues also developing in these years?

That said, while I have trouble understanding how we could tell the story of Rock without electric Blues, I can conceive of a distinction between Blues and R. and B., given the clear musicological terminology available for describing Blues structures (which, after all, are very common in Jazz too), and also based on the lyrics, especially because of the themes of teenage life commonly associated with Rock. But having adopted such a strict cordoning-off of—let's call it—Blues-and-Blues-only, could we not then simply insert the phrase, Rhythm and Blues, into Sampson's texts whenever he writes, "Rock 'n' Roll"? Especially since Doo Wop music also came to be linked with younger audiences' concerns, and few would argue that Doo Wop is not in some way part of Rhythm and Blues. But of course, as we have seen, for Sampson the Jazz/ pop element of R. and B. serves as the other crucial factor distinguishing it from his early, 1947 version of Rock. This is all well and good for the Fifties. The music of Atlantic Records and similar labels, especially that of Ray Charles, kept the Jazz element in "Black" popular music alive throughout the Fifties. Nonetheless, the genre called R. and B. continued, into the Sixties, Seventies, and beyond, with less Jazz influence as the years passed (at the same time that plenty of Rockers were eager to maintain a connection to the genre, including its Jazz element, most of all the Rolling Stones, but plenty others as well). Again, the lines are blurry—they're supposed to be—so why pretend they're not?

Among the general histories of Rock that rank as perennial favorites of the genre, James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977, as its subtitle suggests, also points to 1947 as a starting point. He too specifically focuses on ‘Good Rockin' Tonight’ as a crucial turning point, but Wynonie Harris's version, not Roy Brown's. With Brown's version a hit, Harris finally belatedly his own version on December 28th, 1947. As Miller relates, Harris was a leading Rhythm and Blues singer, "the band [on ‘Good Rockin' Tonight’] consisted of seasoned musicians, most of them jazzmen," and the recording possessed as its "musical backbone [...] a relaxed kind of boogie-woogie"; in short, it is "an epitome of the jump genre"—that is, Jump Blues, the dominant style of R. and B. at the time, as played by Louis Jordan. After all, as Miller notes, Jordan already had a hit, ‘G. I. Jive’, top the Race, Folk, and regular charts, the very trifecta that the great early Rock sides of 1954-1956 would accomplish—and he did it in 1944! But Miller also explains that the success of Harris's ‘Rockin'’ was limited by the risqué nature of the word, rock. As with "jazz" decades before, the word signaled to its behearer the topic of sexual relations, and this association—such blatant "filth"—meant that many radio stations shied away from it. As with the "soulful" vocals of Roy Brown that Sampson pointed to, we arrive at a trait associated with R. and B. (and Blues-and-Blues-only), not exclusively Rock-and-Roll.

Clearly, this question of what is (early) Rock-and-Roll and what is Rhythm and Blues continues to bedevil listeners. These discussions, we must persistently remind ourselves, should proceed in order to encourage more listening, especially listening of a more diverse, unpredictable nature. Generally, the rigidity of lines separating genres has only benefited those who profit by making and promoting music that uncreatively hews to those lines. As for my own take on this question... first of all, I do not follow the tendency of some writers to distinguish between Rock and Rock-and-Roll (as I choose to inscribe the name, as compared to the common Rock 'n' Roll, or even "Rocknroll," as Philip Ennis, author of a major study of Rock's development as a commercial genre, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music, preferred it). For these writers, "Rock" refers only to the post-Sixties version of the music, when Heavy Metal, Soft "Singer-Songwriter" Rock, and Progressive Rock became dominant. As noted above, Sampson's exclusion of music that either fits the industry's standard of Rhythm and Blues or is commonly defined as simply Blues suggests that he could be part of this critical tradition. Often unspoken among these critics is the uncomfortable fact that the later "Rock," compared to original Rock-and-Roll, was more distant from African American culture or, for that matter, any kind of popular, folk, or "street" culture considered to be more open to, and reflective of, a broader segment of any given population. In other words, Rock became bourgeois, academic, yet also commercialized, crass. This shift undoubtedly was a landmark change. However, semantically "Rock" does not differ enough for the distinction between it and Rock-and-Roll to work; it is an obvious abbreviated version of the longer term.

While race is the glaringly obvious of any distinction between Rock-and-Roll and Rhythm and Blues, as we get into the Sixties the electric guitar begins to play a bigger role in the former. This crucial factor was a dividing line in the Seventies as well: comparing, for example, the music of the Philadelphia International label to artists on Virgin Records, or Earth, Wind and Fire to the Eagles—or, even more pointedly, Parliament to Funkadelic. However, given that both Rock-and-Roll and Rhythm and Blues are rooted, at least to some extent, in Blues music, which in its archetypal form featured an individual singing and playing the guitar, complications immediately come to mind. Was Funk—not just that of Funkadelic, but of the Ohio Players, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and others—given that it featured the electric guitar, closer to Rock than Rhythm and Blues? In other words, why is Funk generally considered a branch of Rhythm and Blues instead of a hybrid form? However, if the electric/ urban Blues of Waters, et al., are also "Rhythm and Blues," then apparently the term extends far enough to include Funk. On the other hand, if we take the approach considered above—clearly demarcating Blues-and-Blues-only from Rhythm and Blues—then presumably we could also distinguish Funk from Rhythm and Blues. Either way, although certainly a lot of early Rhythm and Blues, from Bessie Smith to Louis Jordan, presented a melding together of Blues and Jazz, or the incorporation of Blues structures into the mainstream, nonetheless the word, blues, was made part of the term Rhythm and Blues as concocted by Billboard for an obvious reason: the guitar was often still present in what was considered to be strictly Blues, as compared to the Jazz-based "Jump Blues" of Louis Jordan, which provided the "Rhythm" half of the new term.

This brings us back to racial issues, and to the notion of Rock-and-Roll having a separate identity (at least before 1965) only because "White" musicians produced it, and the prevailing standards of a nation that practiced "White" supremacy, as the U.S. certainly was in the Fifties, did not segregate musicians obviously of European descent into their own chart, like the R. and B. charts did for those who were coded Black. Nevermind that the Country and Western chart tended to be "White" to a greater extent than the R. and B. charts were "Black." (That genre also experienced a name shortening at Billboard; the chart having made its debut as Folk in 1944, before briefly switching to Hillbilly in 1947, only to then became Country and Western in 1949 then merely Country in 1962. This later formal shift is, for me, as unhelpful as the informal switch from Rock-and-Roll to Rock.)

As soon as "White" artists made what was essentially Rhythm and Blues music, and made both that "Black" chart and the mainstream Top 100 (later, Hot 100) chart, social and commercial pressures compelled those involved in the business as well as commentators and fans to name a new genre, to help foster new "White" talent who may want to play the same kind of music. If Rhythm and Blues had not been the formal name for the "Black" chart, could the music of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Wanda Jackson, or Link Wray simply been classed under that genre? Or were both the unique nature of their music and the pressures of racial segregation too strong even for that, meaning that "White" artists playing what was perceived to be "Black" music would, regardless if there were racially-coded charts, result in a new name? To this day the enforcers of consensus like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame accept the Rock's starting point as almost exactly the middle point of the Fifties, with all the familiar tropes brought into play: Alan Freed, ‘Rock around the Clock’ and Blackboard Jungle, Fats Domino's ‘Ain't It a Shame’, Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard's astounding run of records in the years, 1954-1956, and so on. Granted, to go back to one of Sampson's defining traits, the subject matter of what gets called Rock, compared to Rhythm and Blues, veered more towards themes of interest to the happy-go-lucky teenager: young, immature love; cars and racing; surfing. That is one of the selling points that enabled certain African American artists—Berry, Domino, Richard—to achieve "Rock" status. Again, though, Doo Wop also skewed toward younger audiences. It also, like Rhythm and Blues, attracted "White" listeners who in turn became "White" performers. Either way, despite the new name, when British bands launched their own style of Rock music it more closely matched the styles of Rhythm and Blues, or strictly Blues, even featuring more covers of songs originally performed by African Americans. The Rolling Stones initially focused on covers; the Who called their music "Maximum R & B." As has been told by countless histories of the British Blues scene, Englishmen felt less awkward about calling their music Blues or Rhythm and Blues. They did not have a segregated, yet significant, portion of their popular-music marketplace already creating that kind of music.

Here is another summation of the historical development of this non-genre of early Rock and Roll, from Preston Lauterbach's The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll:

"Billboard renamed its African-American music bestseller list from "Race Records" to "Rhythm and Blues Records" in the summer of 1949. The chart change belatedly confirmed what industry players already knew—the sound Louis Jordan pioneered and popularized in the early part of the decade had all but pushed jazz out of the black pop picture. The typical Harlem Hit Parade chart during 1942-1943 included light pop fare such as the Ink Spots, big-swing-band tunes from Duke Ellington and Earl Hines, plus torch songs from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. By 1944, Louis Jordan dominated the list, typically with numerous titles appearing throughout the top 15, while the other leading black small band, the King Cole Trio, and bluesy chitlin' circuit big bands led by Cootie Williams and Buddy Johnson nudged their way into the parade. After the war, Louis Jordan rode highest as more cool small bands, Roy Milton and His Sold Senders, and Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers[,] joined the party. By the fall of 1948, rockers had almost fully taken over the Race Records chart with Bull Moose Jackson, Charles Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Memphis Slim, and Wynonie Harris crowding Jordan out of the top spots. The last race charts in early 1949 read like the results of a revolution. Even the mighty Jordan had been toppled. Amos Milburn, Roy Brown, and Wynonie Harris pushed Jordan, Ella, and Billy Eckstine to the end of the list, and relegated Ellington and the swing generation to nostalgia.

"The recognition Billboard gave chitlin' circuit music at the time was monumental; however, the semantics of "rhythm and blues" have muddied black music's rock 'n' roll legacy since. Influential gatekeepers have tended to treat "rhythm and blues" as a genre-defining term rather than what it was, a marketing phrase, shorthand for black popular music in whatever form happened to be selling. The standardized definitions of rock 'n' roll, courtesy of institutions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Rolling Stone magazine, emphasize a fusion of black rhythm and blues and white country-western sounds, as if the two styles brought distinct elements to a new mixture. While that certainly applies to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, some of the first rock 'n' roll stars as such, it implies a shared primacy that simply didn't exist at the true dawn of rock 'n' roll. While black music was clearly rockin' by 1949, country and western fans delighted to the sounds of yodels, waltzes, accordions, fiddles, and steel guitars—great stuff, but not the stuff of rock 'n' roll" (pp. 162-163).

In Lauterbach's estimation, then, "rockers" like Brown and Harris dramatically changed popular music, doing so coinciding with the official adoption of the term, Rhythm and Blues. He also shares with Sampson the notion that Louis Jordan, though extraordinarily influential in pushing African American music away from big Jazz bands, was not as directly responsible for the development of Rock, whenever it may have started, than were the likes of Brown, Harris, Gant, Ivory Joe Hunter, Amos Milburn, Bull Moose Jackson, Wild Bill Moore, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, the Dominoes, the Orioles, the Ravens, et al. While he clearly does not think much of R. and B. as a genre designation, in his view the artists classed under the term were the driving forces behind not only their own genre but also what would be called Rock-and-Roll in the second half of the Fifties. And again, why was the term, Rock, used instead of Rhythm and Blues, other than the need of artists and their handlers, for commercial and broader social purposes, to avoid the connection with "Black" music that would render their music less popular than it would be when marketed as something "White" and new?

Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin's chapter on Alan Freed (‘Copyrighting “Rock and Roll”’) confirms that we should not dismiss the role of racial or ethnic categories in naming and defining music genres. Freed, soon after he had moved his radio program from Cleveland to New York, organized the Rock 'n' Roll Ball in New York, held January 14th and 15th, 1955. The high ticket sales of these concerts, which featured Domino, Ruth Brown, the Drifters, and others, and especially the large number of "White" attendees, estimated to be about half of the total despite the artists being mostly African American, gave the genre name that Freed did so much to promote new credibility among in the music business. In short, an arguable interpretation is as follows: Freed renamed Rhythm and Blues but, after Presley's dramatic rise, "Black" artists had difficulty laying claim to "Rock and Roll" status, as they increasingly found themselves facing stiff competition from "White" artists who had access to performance venues, record stores, television and radio appearances, etc., that were closed off to the "Black" side of society. And as the Sixties progressed and those racial barriers began to fall away, the artists categorized as Rock pushed the genre in new directions, so that by 1969, when Rock was taking giant steps toward being "big business" (e.g. the rise of large outdoor festivals, the establishment of Warner-Elektra-Atlanta, the new concept of "super groups" like Blind Faith and Crosby, Stills and Nash), R. and B. largely remained the "Black" ghetto of the music trade, compelling artists who wanted to breach the mainstream—as Motown Records had done in the early Sixties or Soul stars Franklin and Otis Redding had done a few years later—to play catch-up. The Temptations' Psychedelic phase, Marvin Gaye's and Stevie Wonder's breaking-free from Motown's regimented production methods, and the sheer novelty of Funkadelic in the R. and B. world... all form part of a story in which "Black" artists found themselves left behind by the new sounds and attitudes propagated by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Doors, the "San Francisco Sound," Pink Floyd, etc.

What if we took the opposite approach, arguing that Rock-and-Roll was the superior term, that the Rhythm and Blues chart should have been renamed, if not to Rock-and-Roll then something else, and thus all the artists that we define now as R. and B., whether the Midnighters or Jackie Wilson or whoever, were instead to be classed as Rock-and-Roll? This is such a wildly-alternate history that it is hard to imagine. If Billboard had made that change in, say, 1954, would the term, Rock-and-Roll, come to be closely associated with "Black" music so that yet another term would have been invented? Either way, in this scenario Motown's productions would be seen as a cross-over from Rock to the mainstream, as compared to being a cross-over from R. and B. or Soul. However, the subgenres of Soul and Funk would largely stay the same, classed under Rock instead of R. and B. This hypothetical brings to mind some of the thorny results of racial integration: some "Black"-only businesses and organizations struggled as their clientele were able to patronize "White" establishments; and as African American communities continued to struggle with rising poverty, and in some places the stunning destruction of whole districts by Urban Renewal programs, they found that a certain kind of social cohesiveness that had been achieved in the face of oppression began to wither away. This counterfactual history could have presented a similar scenario: the attention that R. and B. music received because of its status apart, even if it obviously at times took the form of condescending paternalism on the part of "White" do-gooders eager to show that they love "Black" music, also helps give that a music a consistently-defined position in any broader history.

Putting this hypothetical aside.... The gist of all this, when interpreting Rock's history, especially in delineating the genre from its ancestors and related forms, is the following: Rock before 1969, and especially before '65, can hardly be considered separate from Rhythm and Blues. Instead, as Lauterbach argues, the Rockabilly of Presley, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash was more like a variant of Rhythm and Blues (or a Country-R. and B. hybrid), as was electric Blues or Doo Wop. That is, if (contra Lauterbach's suggestion) Rhythm and Blues is a genre—since it has been conceived of as a genre for decades, and to be frank a writer hardly deserves the privilege of defining genres; some are extremely precise and localized, others are global and will always prompt debates regarding whom to include—then many of the artists commonly deemed to be early Rock: Berry, Domino, Haley, Richard, and so on, cannot be distinguished clearly from other Rhythm and Blues artists except perhaps by their success on the pop charts. If we emphasize the electric guitar, then we would give Waters, King, Hooker, and numerous others seats at the table and dismiss Domino, Richard, and Haley as being too Jazz-based. As noted above, if we focus on the songs' subject matter, Doo Wop complicates the neat division of music into periods before and after the mythical birth of Rock in the years, 1954-1956. In fact, the historiography on Doo Wop is similar to that of Rock music: aficionados like Anthony J. Gribin and Matthew M. Schiff, authors of The Complete Book of Doo-Wop, find fully-formed Doo Wop music by 1950, with the genre blossoming soon after. In Flowers in the Dustbin, however, Miller follows the likes of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Rolling Stone in focusing more on commercial success on the mainstream chart as a deciding factor in a genre's birth; his chapter on Doo Wop covers the astounding success of ‘Sh-Boom’ in 1954, as recorded by the African American group the Chords then quickly covered by a "White" group, the Crew Cuts.

On the other hand, the distinct path that the music that had been deemed "Rock" later took demands recognition. After '65, due to the influence of the Folk Revival, most of all Dylan, and especially after '69, Rock developed in the complexity and diversity of its structural forms and themes to such an extent that its distance from all other popular-music genres became its defining feature. Although an exploitative, or at least appropriative, relationship between musics that were primarily African American (Hip Hop) or Gay and African American (Disco, House), on one hand, and mainstream popular music, on the other, continued to be a troubling concern for popular music well into the Twenty-First Century, it was less so in the mature Rock-and-Roll of the Seventies, a period of extraordinary productivity that has not been matched since, or the "Alternative" Rock music birthed by Punk and Indie cultures of the Seventies and Eighties.

The Punk-Indie scenes were populated by artists more likely to be middle and upper class and having attained some higher education, and have accordingly faced misinformed critiques for their supposed insensitivity or obliviousness to both "Black" music specifically and, more generally, all peoples' supposed desire for good-time, feel-good music. Of course, these scenes did develop initially amid the Seventies peak of Rock as a commercial entity, which accompanied renewed racial divisions on the charts and in consumer purchases. Having been formally segregated by the "color line" in the past, Rock music's audience splintered more indirectly and roughly not only in 1965 but again in 1976 with the rise of Punk. The success of artists like Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and Tina Turner in the Eighties halted that trend, but only for a few years before Hip Hop's success made racial differences even starker while at the same time causing quite a generational divide within African American audiences. Meanwhile, many artists associated with Punk and Indie labels (more formally in the U. K., with its Independent Albums and Singles charts), were indeed oblivious to, or scornful of, the mainstream of popular music in the Eighties, at least after 1984, by which point the commercial heights achieved by Punk-linked artists who had been designated "New Wave" seem to have found their ceiling (e.g. Blondie, the Cars, the Police). In the States, what came to be known as Indie Rock was more likely called College Rock, reflecting the importance of the university student-run radio stations and their trade publication, the College Media Journal (later the C. M. J. New Music Report). If this did not make the middlebrow/ highbrow nature of the music clear enough, one only has to note the lack of common subject matter in the songs produced by Punk and Indie artists. There are few standard love songs, or songs about teenage social activities, or ballads in the traditional sense of that term. Songs were crafted as if they were works of art, an intermedia form stuck between literature and music. The Rock listener had already ceased following song lyrics word by word as rhythmic complexity and timbre came to the forefront of popular music with the passing of the Folk Revival and recording-technology advances allowing for a greater density of arrangements. Now, in addition to those developments, lyrics were more oblique, more likely to hint at possibilities of multiple meanings instead of clearly possessing a direct singular topic.

The ramifications of an interpretation of Rock history, of positioning early Rock as part of Rhythm and Blues, and later Rock as more of a separate genre, may seem hard to delineate but are manifold. They entail a shift away from the argument of many historians, such as Ennis noted above, who interpret Rock as a melding-together of Rhythm and Blues, Country, and the pop mainstream. As informed as that interpretation may be, especially in Ennis's work, it is based upon "social science" studies of the tripartite division of popular music corresponding to the official charts instead of a critical evaluation of the music itself. As in Lauterbach's interpretation above, we do not automatically conflate a commercial category with a genre. But we can see that one commercial category, originally "Race" then "Rhythm and Blues," due to a combination of sociopolitical and musical factors in the long run served well enough as a genre. Indeed, the pivotal genre of Twentieth-Century popular music. Decades of criticism and scholarship have left us with the undisputed conclusion that Jazz and Blues, as both genres and conceptual frameworks, and even as simple building blocks of instrumentation and notation, overwhelmed all other similar forms of music or terms of discourse about music, in part because the two genres, among other paths of development, took on the form of Rhythm and Blues in the Forties. Rhythm and Blues, then, ultimately ensured popular music would not be largely based on, or defined in relation to, Classical standards; Country and Western or the Folk Revival could barely have attempted such a revolution. Jazz, meanwhile, as laid out most adroitly by Bernard Gendron in Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde, brought Modernism to the masses, presenting the possibility (however unfulfilled) of "high" art music being created outside academia. Having said all that, beginning in the Seventies and Eighties, forces of reaction not dissimilar from broader political and economic shifts challenging post-war social democracy have consistently sought to undermine the promise of Blues and Jazz. They have done so by codifying it: bringing it into the academy, in the case of Jazz; and, in the case of song-based popular music, turning into an adjunct to visual entertainment from the Eighties to the present, accompanied by persistent nostalgia for a lost youthful utopia of Rock's past.

This take on the history of the term, Rock-and-Roll, also reframes the different phases of Rock history. First, while I have little to no interest in mainstream Rock music after, roughly, 1994—which to my ears is the aural equivalent of the Wal-Mart/ Amazon cheapo plasticland marketplace developing concurrently—the highest-selling Rock artists of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies are in my opinion worthy of extensive, serious study, almost without fail. Second: the apparent disconnection between Rock and R. and B. (for which the occasionally-used term, Urban, seems to fit better once the Jazz influences begin to fall away in the Eighties) that started in the late Sixties-early Seventies from my perspective suggests artists both "Black" and "White" pursuing their individual paths as effectively as they could. The major setback of the music industry's stagnant growth in the years, 1979-1982, only intensified this trend, with younger, experimental artists pioneering new routes to achieve their goals: namely, the independent labels that were so important not only to the new Punk-Indie phase of Rock history but also to the new genres of House and Hip Hop. The "centre cannot hold," and thus the mainstream by the end of the Eighties came to be populated by music that was anodyne, well suited to replace Muzak, ultimately distorting the Country and Western genre beyond recognition (except for the exaggerated "southern" accents and fashion choices) and pushing real Rock to the fringe, so that by the Twenty-Teens one of the more prominent online music publications, Pitchfork, having begun in the Nineties by covering Indie Rock, was explicitly ignoring some of the best, innovative Rock artists in favor of a non-Rock mainstream. Precisely to the extent that Hip Hop and electronic dance genres have infiltrated the mainstream, giving it much-needed vibrancy, contemporary popular music is largely beyond the scope of such a publication and its social milieu, no matter how hard its writers may try to suggest otherwise.

Third: for those who came of age in the early glory days of Rock, the Baby Boom-ers and their predecessor, the “Silent Generation,” the later phases of Rock cannot be so easily dismissed as pretentious divergent paths if their beloved early Rock is actually a variant of Rhythm and Blues. They too must confront—as, indeed, many of them have, for decades now—the sad fact that there was a great deal of music not made easily available to them at the time because it was made by African Americans, because it was Blues or Jazz, too serious or salacious. If they do not care for post-1965 Rock, they do so not because artists failed to live up to some promise made by early Rock, but rather because they have a limited appreciation of what Rock artists accomplished in those heady days when the music was at its peak creatively and commercially. On that note, we can also not only dismiss the influence of surly, jealous contemporaries such as Dave Marsh, Robert Christgau, and Jann Wenner, who romanticize pre-1965 or pre-1969 Rock, but also move away from the absurd spectacle, especially prevalent in the late Seventies when Punk came along, of critics rebuking Rockers for not being "Black" enough. Perhaps if they looked into contemporary controversies in the Jazz world, they would see the strange parallels between their dismissals of Progressive Rock, Heavy Metal, and Punk-Indie, on one hand, and the scorn directed at the Jazz avant-garde, on the other, especially artists who came out of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians (A. A. C. M.): African American artists accused of... you guessed it... not being "Black" enough.

In the end, despite the incredible detail of Spontaneous Lunacy's song-by-song history, and the appreciation for Rhythm and Blues/ early Rock that we hope it engenders, its unstated limits on the definition of Rock music causes it to perpetuate the endless saga of the Rock listener and critic agonizing over what gets named Rock and what does not. This is terribly unfortunate. If we position the broad category of Rhythm and Blues as a major form of pre-1965 popular music, with Rock being distinct only in that it tends to cross over into Country and the "pop" mainstream and features "pop" performers like Pat Boone testing the R. and B. waters, then we can give Blues and Doo Wop artists their rightful place; they are still often deprived of this. The seeds of post-1965 Rock are indeed present as early as 1947: especially the melding of genres for the sake of commercial appeal overlapping curiously and fortuitously with the drive of artists to overstep artistic and social barriers; and the privileges that came with being "White" encouraging those who were born into and grew up in such communities not to limit themselves to the rhythms, themes, and instrumentation strictly associated with either Rhythm and Blues or the pop mainstream. The Folk Revival's influence also must not be understated. Artists like Doc Watson who would have been Country found a new place in the music industry's taxonomy, as did artists who would have been considered Blues, such as Gary Davis. Of course, at the height of post-1965 Rock's commercial success and artistic stature, artists from the R. and B. world like Wonder, Franklin, and Bill Withers, not to mention again most Funk music, transcended artistic and social barriers as well. These artists must be part of any history of Rock, even when the term is being interpreted fairly strictly. In the end, all of these centrifugal forces do not discount the underlying fact that it was Rhythm and Blues songs, as performed by Presley and a few others, that flooded all three Billboard charts and provided the spark for decades of innovation that would, in history's typical ironic fashion, leave behind both Rhythm and Blues and Rock-and-Roll behind.

–Justin J. Kaw, May 2022