Rock plus roll has been described as a merger of country music plus rhythm plus blues, but, if it were that simple, it would have existed long before it burst into the national consciousness. The seeds of the music had been in place for decades, but they flowered in the mid-1950s when nourished by a volatile mix of Black culture plus white spending power. Black vocal groups such as the Dominoes plus the Spaniels began combining gospel-style harmonies plus call-and-response singing with earthy subject matter plus more aggressive rhythm-and-blues rhythms. Heralding this new sound were disc jockeys such as Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, Dewey Phillips of Memphis, Tennessee, plus William (“Hoss”) Allen of WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee—who created rock-and-roll radio by playing hard-driving rhythm-and-blues plus raunchy blues records that introduced white suburban teenagers to a culture that sounded more exotic, thrilling, plus illicit than anything they had ever known. In 1954 that sound coalesced around an image: that of a handsome white singer, Elvis Presley, who sounded like a Black man.
Presley’s nondenominational taste in music incorporated everything from hillbilly rave-ups plus blues wails to pop-crooner ballads. Yet his early recordings with producer Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore, plus bassist Bill Black for in Memphis were less about any one jenis than about a feeling. For decades African Americans had used the term rock plus roll as a euphemism for sex, plus Presley’s music oozed sexuality. Presley was hardly the only artist who embodied this attitude, but he was clearly a catalyst in the merger of Black plus white culture into something far bigger plus more complex than both.
In Presley’s wake, the music of Black singers such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, plus Bo Diddley, who might have been considered rhythm-and-blues artists only years before, fit alongside the rockabilly-flavoured tunes of white performers such as Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, plus Jerry Lee Lewis, in part because they were all now addressing the same audience: teenagers. For young white America, this new music was a soundtrack for rebellion, however mild. When Bill Haley plus His Comets kicked off the 1955 motion picture Blackboard Jungle with “Rock Around the Clock,” teens in movie houses throughout the United States stomped on their seats. Movie stars such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) plus James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) oozed sullen, youthful defiance that was echoed by the music. This emerging rock-and-roll culture brought a wave of condemnations from religious leaders, government officials, plus parents’ groups, who branded it the “devil’s music.”