1940s: The Roots of Rock

The decade opens with the Delta blues as it had been: a voice, a guitar, a world of hurt. Charley Patton had died in 1934 and Robert Johnson in 1938, leaving twenty-nine recordings that guitar players would treat as scripture. Son House, the preacher turned blues prophet, was still farming in Mississippi. Blind Lemon Jefferson's high, fluid Texas style had been gone since 1929 but lived in every Texan who picked up a guitar. In the summers of 1941 and 1942 Alan Lomax and Fisk University's John Work drove into Coahoma County with a recording machine and found both the past and the future on the same plantation: Son House with his hard, hypnotic slide, and a young field hand named McKinley Morganfield who called himself Muddy Waters.

Then the migration moved the blues to the city, and the city was loud. In Chicago, Big Bill Broonzy had already been bridging country blues and a small-band, urban sound through the 1930s. Muddy arrived in 1943, put a pickup on his guitar so a bar could hear him over itself, and by 1948 was cutting "I Can't Be Satisfied" for a tiny label called Aristocrat with nothing but that electric guitar and a slapped bass. The record sold out in a weekend. This is the moment the blues band, and with it the rock combo, is invented: a small group, amplified, urgent, built around a riff.

The same thing was happening in three other cities at once. In Los Angeles, T-Bone Walker, who had led Blind Lemon around Dallas as a boy, played a hollow-body electric guitar held flat across his chest and made it phrase like a horn. "Call It Stormy Monday" in 1947 is the first electric blues guitar solo that every later guitarist had to learn. In Detroit, John Lee Hooker stamped out "Boogie Chillen'" in 1948 on one chord and a piece of plywood. In Houston, Lightnin' Hopkins spun street-corner poetry over a loose, jazz-touched guitar. Four regions, four electric styles, one decade.

Why it matters: everything called rock a decade later is one of these records played faster by someone younger. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song. B.B. King built his whole approach on T-Bone. ZZ Top and Canned Heat lived inside Hooker's boogie. This decade is the roots of rock, and this essay is the root system.

In 1940 jazz was the most popular music in America. Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and Duke Ellington led big bands that filled ballrooms and sold millions of 78s. Basie's rhythm section gave swing its walk and its swagger; Ellington's orchestra dipped deeper into blues than anyone, and in 1943 he took a fifty-minute suite about Black American history to Carnegie Hall. Boogie-woogie piano, the eight-to-the-bar left hand that Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson had brought from Chicago and Kansas City to New York in 1938, was the dance floor's engine and would become rock and roll's.

The war killed the big band as a business. The draft took the players. Gas rationing took the tours. A federal tax on dance rooms took the ballrooms. Then the musicians' union recording ban of 1942 to 1944 stopped new instrumental records entirely, and when the bands came back the singers, who had kept recording, were the stars. In December 1946 eight of the biggest leaders in the country, Goodman, Dorsey, Harry James and Woody Herman among them, folded their orchestras in the same month.

Meanwhile, after hours in Harlem, a new music had been growing where nobody was recording it. From early 1941 the house band at Minton's Playhouse, drummer Kenny Clarke and pianist Thelonious Monk, hosted jam sessions where Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian and a young alto player from Kansas City named Charlie Parker played standards at impossible tempos over chords stacked with extra notes, partly to make music they could hear in their heads and partly to run the amateurs off the stand. They called it bebop, or just "the new thing". Its tempos were too fast to dance to; that was the point. Jazz stopped being pop music here and became art music, and the split never healed.

Because of the ban, bebop reached records all at once in 1945: Gillespie and Parker's "Salt Peanuts" and "Shaw 'Nuff", Sarah Vaughan's "Lover Man" with both of them behind her, and in November Parker's "Ko-Ko", a solo over the chords of "Cherokee" that sounds like a door being kicked open. Bud Powell translated Parker's lines to the piano. Monk recorded his own strange, spacious compositions for Blue Note from 1947. By 1949 Miles Davis, who had been the nervous nineteen-year-old trumpeter on "Ko-Ko", was leading a nine-piece band with arranger Gil Evans toward something cooler. The 1950s would call it cool jazz, then hard bop, then modal. All of it starts at Minton's.

And a word for the singers, because the decade's great jazz records are as often vocal as not. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole are all in this chapter. They are where jazz, blues and pop stopped being separate rooms.

Take a swing band. Cut it down to six or seven players. Turn the volume up, put a honking tenor saxophone out front, a boogie-woogie piano underneath, and a singer who is half comedian and half preacher. That is jump blues, and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five were its kings. From 1942 to 1950 Jordan had more number one records on the Black charts than anyone, and songs like "Caldonia" and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" crossed to the white pop chart too. Chuck Berry said he wanted to be Louis Jordan. Listen to the guitar on "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" and you will hear the intro to "Johnny B. Goode".

If Jordan was the party's host, the shouters were the ones who made it dangerous. Big Joe Turner had been a singing bartender in Kansas City with pianist Pete Johnson; his voice could flatten a wall, and it was already rocking in 1938. Wynonie Harris screamed like a rock star before the term existed. Amos Milburn's piano boogies got the floor moving in Los Angeles. Roy Brown, a New Orleans singer who had wanted to be Bing Crosby, brought gospel phrasing and suggestive swagger together on "Good Rockin' Tonight" in 1947. Harris turned it down, then covered it when it took off, and his 1948 version with a handclap backbeat is the record most historians reach for when they need a first rock and roll record and do not want to say "Rocket 88".

The industry that sold this music was new too. The major labels had mostly given up on Black audiences during the war, and the space filled with independents: Savoy in Newark, King in Cincinnati, Apollo in New York, Modern and Specialty and Aladdin and Imperial in Los Angeles, Aristocrat in Chicago, DeLuxe in New Jersey, and in October 1947 Atlantic, started in New York by a Turkish ambassador's son named Ahmet Ertegun. Atlantic's first star, in 1949, was Ruth Brown; they would call it the house that Ruth built. In New Orleans that December a twenty-one-year-old pianist named Fats Domino cut "The Fat Man" for Imperial, and the next decade was already rolling.

In 1949 the trade magazine Billboard renamed its Black music chart. "Race records" became "rhythm and blues", a term its young writer Jerry Wexler had proposed; he would go on to produce Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin at Atlantic. The name was catching up with a sound that was already everything the next decade would need: a backbeat, a riff, a saxophone, a shout.

Gospel was the emotional powerhouse of the decade. In storefront churches and Baptist conventions, singers were taught to soar, shout, moan and shake in ways secular music had not yet dared. Thomas A. Dorsey, a former blues pianist who had written "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", had spent the 1930s building the gospel song into an industry out of Chicago. The 1940s were when its singers became stars, and when their style crossed over.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the blueprint. An Arkansas-born guitarist who played electric in church and in nightclubs, she recorded "Strange Things Happening Every Day" for Decca in September 1944 with pianist Sammy Price, and in the spring of 1945 it reached number two on the race chart, the first gospel record to climb that high. Listen to the guitar breaks: the bends, the drive, the swagger. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Elvis all heard this, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted her in 2018 as an early influence. Her 1947 duets with Marie Knight, "Up Above My Head" among them, are just as electric.

Mahalia Jackson is the voice. Born poor in New Orleans, she followed the railroad to Chicago and sang Dorsey's songs on the church circuit for a decade before a last-chance session for the tiny Apollo label in 1947. "Move On Up a Little Higher" sold in the millions and made her the first gospel singer white America knew by name. Aretha Franklin grew up with her in the house.

And the quartets: the Golden Gate Quartet's jubilee harmonies, the Dixie Hummingbirds' hard-driving lead swapping, and the Soul Stirrers, whose R. H. Harris invented the ad-lib lead over a repeating chorus. In 1950 the Soul Stirrers would hire a nineteen-year-old named Sam Cooke. Soul music is what happens when this decade's gospel singers walk out of the church door. Ray Charles was already trying it by 1949.

Country music in 1940 was still called hillbilly music on the charts, and its big sound was Western swing: Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, a Texas dance band with fiddles, steel guitar, horns and a jazz drummer, at the peak of their powers with "New San Antonio Rose". Wills was the first country bandleader to put drums on the Grand Ole Opry stage and had to fight to do it. His music is jazz with a fiddle, and it fed straight into rockabilly.

Honky-tonk was the war's country music. It came from the Texas beer joints where oil workers and soldiers drank, and it needed to be loud enough to hear over them. Ernest Tubb's "Walking the Floor Over You", recorded in Dallas in April 1941 with an electric lead guitar played by a Fort Worth sideman named Fay "Smitty" Smith, is the record that named the style; when Tubb joined the Opry in 1943 he brought the electric guitar with him. The songs were about drinking, cheating and walking the floor at night, and they were written for adults who did those things.

Then two things happened almost at once. In December 1945 a North Carolina banjo player named Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, alongside singer and guitarist Lester Flatt, fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts. Scruggs picked with three fingers, fast, rolling and syncopated, and the Opry crowd came apart. Monroe's Columbia session of September 1946, which produced "Blue Moon of Kentucky", is the first bluegrass record; the style took its name from the band. In 1954 a Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley would cut "Blue Moon of Kentucky" as the flip side of his first single, sped up into 4/4 time.

And in 1949 a thin Alabama singer with a bad back and a drinking problem, Hank Williams, took a 1922 Tin Pan Alley song called "Lovesick Blues", put a yodel and a Cincinnati studio band behind it, and held number one on the country chart for sixteen weeks. His Opry debut that June got six encores. In three years he wrote the songbook country music still lives in, and in four he was dead. Kitty Wells cut her first, unnoticed sides for RCA in 1949; her answer to honky-tonk's men would arrive in 1952.

In 1940 the singer was a band's employee, seated at the side of the stage until the vocal chorus. By 1945 the band was the singer's employee. The man who made that happen was Frank Sinatra. He left Tommy Dorsey in 1942, opened at the Paramount Theatre in Times Square that December, and found that teenage girls in rolled-down white socks screamed at him the way nobody had screamed at a singer before. When he came back to the Paramount in October 1944 the crowd outside was estimated at thirty thousand and the police called it a riot. The bobby-soxers were the first teen fandom. Everything Beatlemania did, they did first.

Bing Crosby, the singer Sinatra grew up on, sang the decade's biggest record: "White Christmas", from a 1942 film, a song about missing home released to a country whose sons were all away. Crosby also, almost by accident, changed how records were made. In 1947 he put his radio show on magnetic tape so he would not have to perform it live twice, and put his own money into the company that built the machines, Ampex.

The recording ban of 1942 to 1944 shaped pop in strange ways. Singers were not in the musicians' union, so vocal groups kept recording with nothing behind them: the Mills Brothers' "Paper Doll" and the Ink Spots' ballads owned the wartime charts, and Sinatra signed with Columbia in 1943 and cut his first solo hits with a choir. The Andrews Sisters, three sisters from Minneapolis who sang tight, swinging harmony, were the sound of the home front and the USO; "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" from 1941 and "Rum and Coca-Cola" from 1945 are both here, and the second one is a Trinidadian calypso whose writer had to sue to get paid.

Nat King Cole, a jazz pianist who sang almost as an afterthought, became the biggest Black pop star in America on the strength of the King Cole Trio's "Straighten Up and Fly Right" in 1944 and "Nature Boy" in 1948. Doris Day, Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford and Perry Como all began the decade as band singers and ended it as names. In 1948 Patti Page, denied the budget for backing singers during the second recording ban, harmonised with herself by overdubbing, a trick Les Paul was already using on guitars. In Paris, Édith Piaf sang "La Vie en rose" and made the chanson, the French art of the confessional song, an international export. The 1950s crooner and the 1960s singer-songwriter both start here.

Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in a cheap New York hotel in February 1940, sick of hearing Kate Smith sing "God Bless America" on the radio. He did not record it until April 1944, in a marathon of sessions for Moses Asch, the engineer whose Folkways label would become the folk revival's library. The verse about the private property sign and the verse about the relief office were left off the famous version; they are the point of the song.

In 1941 Guthrie joined Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers, a loose group living in a Greenwich Village house and singing union songs at strikes and rallies. Seeger's banjo had "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" written around the head; Guthrie's guitar said "This machine kills fascists". The Almanacs broke up when the war came. Lead Belly, the Louisiana twelve-string player Alan Lomax had recorded in prison in the 1930s, spent the decade in New York on radio and on Asch's label, and died in December 1949 of Lou Gehrig's disease, a few months before the Weavers' version of his "Goodnight, Irene" became the biggest record in America.

The Weavers were Seeger and Hays again, with Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, formed in 1948 and struggling until Seeger got them a booking at the Village Vanguard in December 1949. Their success in 1950 and the blacklist that ended it in 1952 are the next chapter. But the folk revival that Bob Dylan walked into in 1961 was built by these people in this decade: Asch's label, Lomax's field recordings, Guthrie's songs and Seeger's insistence that a crowd could sing.

In December 1940 a Cuban singer named Frank Grillo, called Machito, held the first rehearsal of his Afro-Cubans in a Harlem ballroom. His brother-in-law Mario Bauzá, a trumpeter who had played with Chick Webb and Cab Calloway and had introduced Dizzy Gillespie to Calloway's band, took over as musical director a month later. Bauzá's idea was simple and nobody had done it: put a real Cuban rhythm section, congas, bongos and timbales, under a jazz big band's horns. His "Tanga" in 1943 is the first Afro-Cuban jazz composition.

Gillespie had been listening. In 1947 Bauzá introduced him to Chano Pozo, a conga drummer and dancer just arrived from Havana who had learned his rhythms in Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies and carnival street bands. On 29 September 1947 Pozo walked onto the Carnegie Hall stage with Gillespie's big band. That December they recorded "Manteca", Pozo's bass riff and Gillespie's screaming trumpet on top of it, the record that made "Cubop" a word. Pozo was shot dead in a Harlem bar fourteen months later. He was thirty-three.

The dance floor had its own revolution. In 1948 the Palladium Ballroom on Broadway at 53rd Street switched to an all-Latin policy, and Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez turned it into the home of the mambo, a faster, hornier development of the Cuban danzón. In Mexico City, a year later, a Cuban pianist and bandleader named Dámaso Pérez Prado was arranging mambos with grunts and stabbing brass; his "Mambo No. 5", recorded for RCA Victor's Mexican branch in 1949, would make him the King of Mambo across the Americas in the decade to come. Salsa, boogaloo and Latin rock all descend from these two rooms, the Palladium and Carnegie Hall.

Nobody in the 1940s made a rock and roll record, because the phrase did not exist as a genre. But if you line up the records historians argue about as the first one, most of them are in this chapter. Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944): electric guitar, boogie piano, a gospel shout. Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947) and Wynonie Harris's cover (1948), with the word rocking used the way the next decade would use it and a backbeat you can clap to. John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), a teenager sneaking out to a club on one chord. Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" (December 1949), a New Orleans piano playing triplets over a snare. Big Joe Turner had been doing it since 1938.

What these records share is the machinery. Electric guitar, from T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters and Ernest Tubb's sideman. Boogie-woogie piano, from Pete Johnson and Amos Milburn. The honking tenor saxophone, from Louis Jordan's band and Illinois Jacquet's solo on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home". The backbeat, from gospel handclaps and jump blues drummers. The shout, from the church and the Kansas City bars. And the independent label with a distributor in the trunk of a car. The 1950s did not invent any of it; the 1950s found the teenagers.

Two technical strands run underneath. Les Paul spent the decade building a solid-body electric guitar out of a four-by-four fence post and recording himself eight times over on "Lover" in 1948; his name would be on the guitar that Jimmy Page and Slash played. Bing Crosby's tape machines made overdubbing and editing normal by 1950. A distorted guitar through a torn speaker cone, the sound of "Rocket 88" in 1951, was an accident waiting for this decade's tools.

The most important instrument invented in the 1940s was not a guitar. It was the tape recorder. German engineers at AEG had perfected the Magnetophon during the war; in 1945 an American signals officer named Jack Mullin found two of them at a radio station near Frankfurt, shipped them home in pieces, and in 1947 demonstrated them to Bing Crosby. Crosby's Philco radio show went out from tape that October, the first network program to do so. In April 1948 the first Ampex Model 200 machines, built with Crosby's money, were delivered. Within five years every studio in the country would record on tape, and the ability to cut, splice and layer sound would change what a record was.

Les Paul got there first with discs. In his Hollywood garage in 1947 he recorded a guitar part onto an acetate, then played along with it while cutting a second acetate, then a third, until "Lover" had eight guitars on it, some of them recorded at half speed so they played back an octave high. Capitol released it in 1948 and the trade papers did not know what they were hearing. It is the first multitrack pop record, and with tape and his wife Mary Ford he would turn it into a string of hits in the 1950s. Patti Page did the same trick with her own voice on "Confess" in 1948.

In Paris, meanwhile, a radio engineer named Pierre Schaeffer asked what would happen if the recording itself were the instrument. On 5 October 1948 French radio broadcast his "Concert de bruits", including an "Étude aux chemins de fer" built from the recorded sounds of locomotives, looped, cut and reversed. He called it musique concrète. Sampling, hip-hop production and every record built on a loop are its grandchildren.