1. Where does the term 'rock ’n’ roll' come from?

2. When was it first used for a type of music?

3. What was the audience like?

4. Who were the baby boomers?

5. What was peculiar of young people in the 1950s?

6. What characterised that decade?

7. How did rock ’n’ roll music create new connections and relationships among audiences?

 

 

The advent in rock ’n’ roll music in the mid-1950s brought enormous changes to American popular music, and eventually to world popular music – changes whose impact is still being felt today. […] This new audience was dominated by those born into the so-called baby boom generation at the end of, and immediately following, World War II. It was a much younger audience that had ever before constituted a target market for music, and it was a large audience that shared some specific and important characteristics of group cultural identity. These were kids growing up in the 1950s, a period of relative economic stability and prosperity […] following the enormous destabilizing traumas of World War. In terms of the entertainment industry, this was the first generation to grow up with television as a readily available part of its culture; this powerful new mass medium proved a force of incalculable influence and offered another outlet for the instantaneous nationwide distribution of music.

Yet the 1950s was a period characterised by its own political and cultural traumas. Cold war tension between the United States and the Soviet Union […], fears induced by the introduction of atomic weapon and their further development by the American and Soviet – and eventually other – superpowers, new levels of racial awareness and tension in America […]

Perhaps the most important factor of all for adolescents during the 1950s was simply their identification by the larger culture itself as a unique generational group, even as they were growing up. Thus they quickly developed a sense of self identification as teenagers (many ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds participated fully in ‘teen’ culture). Naturally, such a group had to have its own distinctive emblems of identity, including dance steps, fashions, ways of speaking, and music. The prosperity of the 1950s gave these young people an unprecedented collective purchasing power as millions of kids started to buy leisure and entertainment products geared especially to this generation’s tastes and sense of identity. Rock ’n’ roll music emerged as an unexpected musical choice by increasing numbers of young people in the early to mid-1950s; it then became a mass- market phenomenon exploited by the mainstream music industry in the later 1950s; and eventually it was to some extent reclaimed by these teenagers themselves in the 1960s as they grew old enough to make their own music and, increasingly, to assume some control of the production and marketing of it.

The term 'rock ’n’ roll' was probably first used for commercial and generational purposes by disc jockey Alan Freed in the early 1950s. The term itself was derived from the many references to 'rockin’' and 'rollin’' (sometimes separately, sometimes together) that may be found in rhythm & blues songs, and on race records dating back to the 1920s. 'Rock and roll' are clearly associated in these song with sexual implications, but they faded as 'rock ’n’ roll' increasingly came to refer to a type of music.

The purchase of rock ’n’ roll records by kids in the 1950s proved a relatively safe and affordable way for kids to assert generational identity through rebellion against previous adult standards and restrictions of musical style and taste. Thus the experience of growing up with rock ’n’ roll music became an early and defining characteristic of the baby boom generation. Rock ’n’ roll records accompanied the boomers in their progress from preadolescence through their teenage years. It is consequently not surprising that this music increasingly and specifically catered to this age group, which by the late 1950s had its own distinctive culture (made possible by abundant leisure time and economic prosperity) and its associated rituals: school and vacation, fashions, social dancing, and courtship. Some rock ’n’ roll songs became emblems of a new aesthetic and cultural order, dominated by the tastes and aspirations of youth.

There was a period in the later 1950s when much of the same popular music – rock ’n’ roll records – would be played for dances at inner-city, primarily black, public schools, for parties at exclusive white suburban private schools, and for socials in rural settings catering to young people. This was a new kind of situation, especially in the society of the 1950s, which was in most respects polarized in terms of race, class, and region. […] Rock ’n’ roll music seemed to offer a bridge connecting supposedly exclusive audiences (black and white, rural and urban, upper and lower class). If you were young in the 1950s, no matter where you lived, no matter what your race or class, rock ’n’ roll was your music.

 

(Adapted from Larry Starr, Christopher Waterman, «American Popular Music», OUP 2003)