1948 and the Birth of Rock and Roll Music
When was rock and roll born? Some scholars of popular music would say in 1935, the year Elvis Aron Presley entered the world, the year hillbilly fiddle tunes began to meet African American country blues in the music of popular entertainers such as Jimmie Rodgers. Some would say 1928, when Henry Thomas recorded “Bull Doze Blues,” which Canned Heat would record forty years later as “Goin’ Up the Country.” Still others would push the date up to 1952, when Clyde McPhatter recorded the first of several jumped-up versions of Stick McGhee’s “Wine Spo-De-O-Dee.”
But if one year is to be declared rock’s birthdate, it might well be 1948, when technology and popular culture coincided to produce the makings of a new kind of music.
To judge by the charts, 1948 belongs to the big band and swing eras. That year saw the debut of Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King’s lovely crooner “Tennessee Waltz,” with which Eddy Cochran would score a pop hit and Patsy Cline a country-chart smash a little more than decade later. Among the nation’s favorite tunes that year were Frank Loesser’s “On a Slow Boat to China” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Kim Gannon’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’s “Buttons and Bows,” George Morgan’s “Candy Kisses,” and assorted hits by the Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra.
But in 1948, thanks to the mixing of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds and from different parts of the country during World War II, a new kind of music was finding its way onto the airwaves and in roadside truck stops and juke joints. A mixture of white and black musical forms from the Mississippi Delta, country music with the grinding of machinery and automobiles implicit in its grinding beat, rhythm and blues spread across the nation from its birthplace, Detroit. When white pop music entered the idiom in the immediate postwar era, rhythm and blues became rock and roll.
Rock and roll had many midwives. The first, and arguably most important, was another product of 1948, when the California instrument maker Leo Fender released the first mass-produced electric guitar. Called the Broadcaster, this solid-body wonder was affordable, if a little on the expensive side: $169.95 retail, worth about $1,500 in early 2008 dollars—though an original Broadcaster runs in the tens of thousands of dollars today. Renamed the Telecaster in 1950, Fender’s guitar quickly became a favorite of jazz and big-band musicians who had for twenty years been experimenting with ways to add amplification to their hollow-body guitars so that they could be heard above the trumpets and saxophones.
Fender, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, would never take sole credit for his invention—no one knows who made the first electrified guitar, which appears to have been an accidental byproduct of acoustic research during World War II—but he was quick to recognize a good thing. Fender went on to produce many other guitar makes, but the Broadcaster and its close kin, the Stratocaster, remained favorites of rock musicians from Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton on to today’s generation of performers. Fender would later add the tone-control amplifier to the arsenal, allowing individual musicians to add bass and treble to their sound, and further assuring his important place in the annals of rock music.
Another invention of 1948 helped assure that rock and roll would be heard: the invention, by engineers at Columbia Records, of the 12-inch long-playing phonograph record. Earlier discs were recorded to be played at 78 revolutions per minute and could hold only eight to ten minutes’ worth of material. The larger, and slower-playing, 12-inch records would eventually contain more than half an hour’s music on each side, enough to let musicians extend themselves beyond the one-hit-wonder formula. Fans of classical music—who may have agreed with the mathematician-musician Tom Lehrer that rock and roll should be shelved with children’s records—were pleased by the development as well, for now whole symphonies could be issued on single discs, and at a tonal quality superior to any other medium on the market. The 45 rpm disk soon followed, furthering the sonic and cultural revolution by inaugurating the three-minute single.
As important as the electric guitar, a third innovation of 1948 brought rock and roll within hearing of anyone with ears, even though the listener might be far from Detroit, far from the Mississippi Delta. The transistor, patented by Bell Labs researchers John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, would replace the bulky vacuum tubes that had powered radios and televisions up until that time. A few years later, transistors were being mass produced, and with them smaller consumer appliances—especially the transistor radio, made popular by several electronics companies, notably the then-unknown Japanese firm of Sony.
Inexpensive, readily portable radios for a nation constantly on the go demanded an equally portable kind of music. More than any other form, rock and roll, with its emphasis on short, snappy, memorable singalong melodies and—at least in the early days—not especially deep lyrics that required no analysis, was perfectly wedded to the electronic revolution the transistor wrought.
It may seem strange that so profound a cultural influence, for better or worse, as rock and roll should have such murky origins. But in its wedding of postwar technology and postwar popular sensibility, this wholly American kind of music went on to change the world. Armed with even newer technologies, and speaking to still newer sensibilities, rock and roll is changing the world still.
Read entire article at Gregory McNamee at Britannica Blog
But if one year is to be declared rock’s birthdate, it might well be 1948, when technology and popular culture coincided to produce the makings of a new kind of music.
To judge by the charts, 1948 belongs to the big band and swing eras. That year saw the debut of Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King’s lovely crooner “Tennessee Waltz,” with which Eddy Cochran would score a pop hit and Patsy Cline a country-chart smash a little more than decade later. Among the nation’s favorite tunes that year were Frank Loesser’s “On a Slow Boat to China” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Kim Gannon’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’s “Buttons and Bows,” George Morgan’s “Candy Kisses,” and assorted hits by the Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra.
But in 1948, thanks to the mixing of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds and from different parts of the country during World War II, a new kind of music was finding its way onto the airwaves and in roadside truck stops and juke joints. A mixture of white and black musical forms from the Mississippi Delta, country music with the grinding of machinery and automobiles implicit in its grinding beat, rhythm and blues spread across the nation from its birthplace, Detroit. When white pop music entered the idiom in the immediate postwar era, rhythm and blues became rock and roll.
Rock and roll had many midwives. The first, and arguably most important, was another product of 1948, when the California instrument maker Leo Fender released the first mass-produced electric guitar. Called the Broadcaster, this solid-body wonder was affordable, if a little on the expensive side: $169.95 retail, worth about $1,500 in early 2008 dollars—though an original Broadcaster runs in the tens of thousands of dollars today. Renamed the Telecaster in 1950, Fender’s guitar quickly became a favorite of jazz and big-band musicians who had for twenty years been experimenting with ways to add amplification to their hollow-body guitars so that they could be heard above the trumpets and saxophones.
Fender, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, would never take sole credit for his invention—no one knows who made the first electrified guitar, which appears to have been an accidental byproduct of acoustic research during World War II—but he was quick to recognize a good thing. Fender went on to produce many other guitar makes, but the Broadcaster and its close kin, the Stratocaster, remained favorites of rock musicians from Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton on to today’s generation of performers. Fender would later add the tone-control amplifier to the arsenal, allowing individual musicians to add bass and treble to their sound, and further assuring his important place in the annals of rock music.
Another invention of 1948 helped assure that rock and roll would be heard: the invention, by engineers at Columbia Records, of the 12-inch long-playing phonograph record. Earlier discs were recorded to be played at 78 revolutions per minute and could hold only eight to ten minutes’ worth of material. The larger, and slower-playing, 12-inch records would eventually contain more than half an hour’s music on each side, enough to let musicians extend themselves beyond the one-hit-wonder formula. Fans of classical music—who may have agreed with the mathematician-musician Tom Lehrer that rock and roll should be shelved with children’s records—were pleased by the development as well, for now whole symphonies could be issued on single discs, and at a tonal quality superior to any other medium on the market. The 45 rpm disk soon followed, furthering the sonic and cultural revolution by inaugurating the three-minute single.
As important as the electric guitar, a third innovation of 1948 brought rock and roll within hearing of anyone with ears, even though the listener might be far from Detroit, far from the Mississippi Delta. The transistor, patented by Bell Labs researchers John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, would replace the bulky vacuum tubes that had powered radios and televisions up until that time. A few years later, transistors were being mass produced, and with them smaller consumer appliances—especially the transistor radio, made popular by several electronics companies, notably the then-unknown Japanese firm of Sony.
Inexpensive, readily portable radios for a nation constantly on the go demanded an equally portable kind of music. More than any other form, rock and roll, with its emphasis on short, snappy, memorable singalong melodies and—at least in the early days—not especially deep lyrics that required no analysis, was perfectly wedded to the electronic revolution the transistor wrought.
It may seem strange that so profound a cultural influence, for better or worse, as rock and roll should have such murky origins. But in its wedding of postwar technology and postwar popular sensibility, this wholly American kind of music went on to change the world. Armed with even newer technologies, and speaking to still newer sensibilities, rock and roll is changing the world still.