1950s: The Birth of Rock and Roll

Rhythm and blues had been rocking for years. Wynonie Harris sang about good rockin’ in 1948, and Jackie Brenston’s "Rocket 88" hit number one on the R&B chart in 1951 with a distorted guitar and a boogie piano. What happened in the 1950s was that a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed started calling those records "rock and roll" on a powerful station, and white teenagers found them.

Three cities made three versions of it. In Memphis, Sam Phillips put a country boy in front of a blues song and got Elvis Presley, then Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis: rockabilly, all slapback echo and hiccup. In Chicago, Chess Records took Chuck Berry’s country-flavored guitar and Bo Diddley’s hambone rhythm and cut the records that taught every future rock band what a guitar was for. In New Orleans, Fats Domino rolled a boogie-woogie piano into pop gold and Little Richard screamed "Tutti Frutti" over the same rhythm section until the tape ran out.

The core is simple and that is the point: twelve-bar blues changes, a backbeat on two and four, an electric guitar or a piano doing the talking, and lyrics written from inside a teenager’s head about cars, school, dances and being told no. Buddy Holly added a melodic sense that pointed straight at the Beatles. The Everly Brothers added Appalachian harmony. Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent added the leather jacket.

It looked finished by 1959. Little Richard was in the ministry, Elvis was in the Army, Jerry Lee Lewis was in disgrace, Buddy Holly was dead and Chuck Berry was in court. It was not finished. It had just been exported.

R&B in the 1950s was raw, danceable and getting louder. It grew out of jump blues and big-band shouting, and it became the pulse under everything else: the doo-wop groups on the street corners, the rockabilly boys copying its beat, and the gospel-trained singers who would turn it into soul.

Atlantic Records in New York was the label that treated it as an art form. Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler recorded Ruth Brown, whose hits paid for the building, LaVern Baker, Big Joe Turner, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, and a blind pianist from Georgia named Ray Charles. In 1954 Charles took a gospel song, changed the words from God to a woman and cut "I Got a Woman." The church was scandalized and a new music was born. By "What’d I Say" in 1959 he had the whole thing: call and response, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a groove that would not quit, and a lyric that said almost nothing and meant everything.

Doo-wop was the sweet side. The Orioles, the Penguins, the Platters, the Five Satins, the Flamingos and thirteen-year-old Frankie Lymon sang harmony learned in church and on stoops, and "Earth Angel" became the sound of every slow dance in America. Songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller turned the Coasters into a comedy troupe with a saxophone and then, in 1959, put a string section behind the Drifters on "There Goes My Baby." That record is where soul learned to dress up.

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, a former convict named James Brown recorded a song that was one word repeated until it hurt. "Please, Please, Please" (1956) is gospel begging with the sacred taken out, and it is where funk begins. Sam Cooke left the Soul Stirrers in 1957 and had a pop number one within months. Jackie Wilson brought the acrobatics. By the end of the decade Berry Gordy had borrowed $800 in Detroit. The 1960s were already written.

The blues moved north with the people who sang it. Muddy Waters had come to Chicago from Clarksdale in 1943; by the early 1950s he had an electric band with Little Walter on amplified harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on second guitar, Otis Spann on piano and Willie Dixon writing the songs and playing bass. Chess Records, run by two Polish-born brothers on the South Side, put it on wax. "Hoochie Coochie Man" (1954) is the template: a stop-time riff, a boast, a band that hits like a fist.

Howlin’ Wolf came up from Memphis and was cutting for Chess in Chicago by 1953 with a voice like a tire on gravel and became Muddy’s only real rival. Little Walter’s "Juke" (1952) made the harmonica a lead instrument and sat at number one on the R&B chart for eight weeks. Elmore James took Robert Johnson’s "Dust My Broom" and turned its slide riff into a siren that every rock guitarist would eventually steal. Down in Memphis, B.B. King, a disc jockey on WDIA, had his first number one with "Three O’Clock Blues" in 1952 and began the long career that would make single-string lead guitar a language.

This is the music the Rolling Stones would name themselves after. It is also the music Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry were sitting in the Chess waiting room to make, and Sam Phillips had recorded Wolf and Ike Turner before he ever met Elvis. The line from the Delta to the arena runs straight through 2120 South Michigan Avenue.

Bebop had blown the music open in the 1940s; the 1950s spent ten years deciding what to do with the pieces. One answer was to cool it down. Miles Davis’s nonet sessions of 1949 and 1950, collected as "Birth of the Cool" in 1957, and Dave Brubeck’s college concerts made a jazz of quiet dynamics and odd meters that filled campus gyms. The other answer was to heat it up. Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins played hard bop: bebop with the blues and the church put back in, loud and swinging.

The long-playing record changed the music. A tune could run ten minutes. Sonny Rollins’s "Saxophone Colossus" (1956), Thelonious Monk’s "Brilliant Corners" (1957) and the Duke Ellington band’s twenty-seven-chorus explosion at Newport in 1956 were album-length statements that a 78 could never have held. Newport itself, founded in 1954 on a Rhode Island tennis lawn, made jazz a summer festival music. Verve’s Ella Fitzgerald songbooks and Sinatra’s Capitol records with Nelson Riddle turned the American popular song into an art of the album.

Then came 1959, the year the decade put everything on the table at once. Miles Davis recorded "Kind of Blue" in two sessions in March and April, built on scales rather than chord changes. John Coltrane, who played on it, recorded "Giant Steps" in May, a tune whose chords move so fast that saxophonists still practice it like scripture. Ornette Coleman recorded "The Shape of Jazz to Come" the same month with no piano and no fixed chords at all. Charles Mingus made "Mingus Ah Um," and Brubeck cut "Time Out," a jazz record in 5/4 and 9/8 that sold a million copies. Billie Holiday and Lester Young both died that year. Charlie Parker had gone in 1955. An era ended and three new ones began in the same twelve months.

Country entered the decade as honky-tonk: fiddle, steel guitar, a shuffle beat and songs about drinking and cheating written for jukeboxes in bars. Hank Williams was its poet, and he wrote faster than he could live. He was fired from the Grand Ole Opry in August 1952 and died in the back seat of his Cadillac on the way to a New Year’s Day show in 1953, at twenty-nine. His songs had already crossed to the pop charts through Tony Bennett’s "Cold, Cold Heart." His ghost hangs over everything after.

Kitty Wells answered Hank Thompson’s "The Wild Side of Life" with "It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" in 1952 and became the first woman to top the country chart, proving that women could sell records to an industry that had decided they could not. Patsy Cline sang "Walkin’ After Midnight" on Arthur Godfrey’s television show in January 1957 and a career began. The Louvin Brothers brought close-harmony gospel fire; Marty Robbins wrote cowboy ballads; Ray Price invented a shuffle that still carries his name.

Then rock and roll ate country’s young audience, and Nashville answered in two ways. Some of its own sons, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, simply became rockabillies at Sun. And on 16th Avenue South, producer Owen Bradley built a studio in a Quonset hut in 1955 while Chet Atkins took over RCA’s Nashville operation. They pulled out the fiddles and steel, added vocal choruses and strings, and built the Nashville Sound: country records that could sit on a pop station. Music Row was born there. So was the argument about authenticity that country has had ever since.

The decade opened with the Weavers at number one. Their 1950 recording of Lead Belly’s "Goodnight, Irene," six months after his death, sold two million copies and put a leftist folk quartet on the pop charts. Then the blacklist caught up with them. Pete Seeger was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and refused to answer. For most of the decade, folk music in America was something you did quietly.

Two records kept the flame. Harry Smith’s "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952) gathered eighty-four commercial 78s from 1927 to 1932 into three double LPs on Folkways, and a generation of city kids learned the old songs from it. Harry Belafonte’s "Calypso" (1956) took Caribbean folk song to the top of the album chart for thirty-one weeks and became the first LP by a single artist to sell a million copies. Odetta’s big voice and Alan Lomax’s field recordings did the rest of the teaching.

The commercial break came in 1958. Three clean-cut college boys from California called the Kingston Trio recorded a two-chord North Carolina murder ballad, "Tom Dooley," as filler for their first album. It went to number one, sold millions and won the first Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording. Every coffeehouse in America suddenly had a banjo. In Britain, Lonnie Donegan’s skiffle version of Lead Belly’s "Rock Island Line" had done the same thing two years earlier, and the teenagers who bought cheap guitars because of it would matter very much in the next chapter.

Gospel’s golden age ran straight through this decade. Mahalia Jackson, whose "Move On Up a Little Higher" had sold in the millions in the late 1940s, signed to Columbia in 1954, sang at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 and became the first gospel singer most white Americans had heard. The quartets were at their peak: the Soul Stirrers with a young Sam Cooke on lead, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi with Archie Brownlee screaming, the Swan Silvertones, the Dixie Hummingbirds. Clara Ward’s Ward Singers put on robes and drew crowds like a revival. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had been playing electric guitar in church since the 1930s, toured Britain in 1957 and left a mark on every skiffle kid who saw her.

And gospel broke out. Every trick of the soul singer, the melisma, the shout, the call and response, the sermon in the middle of the song, was learned in church and carried across the street. Ray Charles did it first and most openly. Sam Cooke did it most successfully, leaving the Soul Stirrers in 1957. James Brown did it most violently. The Staple Singers, a Chicago family with Pops on a tremolo guitar and teenage Mavis on lead, made "Uncloudy Day" (1956) sound like the blues and got on the R&B chart with a hymn. Gospel did not lose these singers. It sent them.

On Broadway at 53rd Street in Manhattan, the Palladium Ballroom ran the biggest dance in America. Machito’s Afro-Cubans, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez, the "Big Three," played mambo to mixed crowds of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Italians, Jews and Black New Yorkers who came to see the dancers as much as the bands. Puente’s "Dance Mania" (1958) is the sound of that room: timbales up front, a brass section that punches, a beat that will not let you stand still.

Mambo went mainstream through Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado, who worked out of Mexico City and had a number one American hit for ten weeks in 1955 with "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," a trumpet instrumental with his trademark grunt. Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney sang about mambo; the cha-cha-chá, a slower step invented in Havana by violinist Enrique Jorrín, followed it into the dance schools. In Havana itself, Celia Cruz joined the Sonora Matancera in 1950 and became the voice of the island, while bassist Cachao’s late-night descargas of 1957 turned Cuban dance music into a jam session.

Two things at the decade’s end changed the map. Ritchie Valens, a Mexican-American teenager from Pacoima, rocked up a Veracruz wedding song called "La Bamba" in 1958 and put Spanish on the rock and roll charts. And on New Year’s Day 1959 the Cuban revolution took Havana. Within a few years the traffic of musicians between Cuba and New York would close, and the New York Puerto Ricans who inherited mambo would build salsa from what was left.

Electronic music in the 1950s was made in radio stations, universities and one married couple’s Greenwich Village apartment. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer had already cut and looped recordings of trains into "musique concrète." In Cologne, the West German radio studio went the other way, building sounds from pure electronic tones, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1956) fused the two, splicing a boy soprano into a sine-wave landscape spread across five loudspeakers. It is the first electronic piece most people would still call beautiful.

In New York, Louis and Bebe Barron built circuits designed to overload and burn out, recorded their death throes to tape and assembled them into the score for MGM’s "Forbidden Planet" (1956): the first all-electronic film score, credited as "electronic tonalities" because the musicians’ union would not call it music. Uptown, RCA engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar built the Mark II Sound Synthesizer, a room-sized machine programmed with punched paper tape, and installed it at Columbia University in 1957, where it became the centerpiece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

None of this was pop. But Les Paul was already using tape to stack guitars in 1951, Raymond Scott was building sequencers to write commercials, and Sam Phillips was making slapback echo a lead instrument. The idea that a record could be a thing built in a studio rather than a performance captured in one starts here, and it leads through the Beatles and Kraftwerk to every beat made on a laptop.

While the singles chart went to the teenagers, the adults got the album, and the album got good. Frank Sinatra, washed up at thirty-seven, signed to Capitol in 1953 and with arranger Nelson Riddle made the first great concept LPs: "In the Wee Small Hours" (1955), sixteen songs about being alone at 3 a.m., and "Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!" (1956), its opposite. Ella Fitzgerald began her songbook series with Cole Porter in 1956, one composer per album, and made the case that Tin Pan Alley was a body of classical music. Nat King Cole was the most-heard voice in America and the first Black performer with his own network television show.

The pop mainstream also did the thing it always does: it copied. Pat Boone’s "Tutti Frutti" outsold Little Richard’s. Georgia Gibbs took LaVern Baker’s "Tweedle Dee." The Crew-Cuts cleaned up "Sh-Boom." Those covers were where a lot of white America first heard the songs, and they are also why the originals’ songwriters and singers spent decades fighting for their money. By 1957 the kids had learned to ask for the original. The first Grammys, handed out in 1959 for the records of 1958, found room for exactly one rock and roll winner, the Champs’ instrumental "Tequila", and gave the big awards to Modugno and Mancini.