Bringing together everything from minstrel shows to Delta blues to hillbilly music to elements of jazz, what we now think of as rock ‘n’ roll is little more than a jumbled gumbo of popular American musical styles. Indeed, rock ‘n’ roll historian Ed Ward went so far as to title his attempt at a comprehensive overview of the form The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963.

Of course it’s easy to be a revisionist historian, looking back over the whole of the spectrum of popular music, hoping to pinpoint an exact starting point, and this is why the discussion has become so heated in recent years. The difference is the culture within which each came to the greater public attention, one in which race played a deciding role in who would receive credit for having done what. Considering that the music itself relied on the same basic I-IV-V chord progression within a 12-bar blues format, the similarities are plain as day. The fact of the matter is, the music of black artists playing jump blues and similar forms in the ’40s doesn’t sound all that much different from what would be labeled rock ‘n’ roll in the next decade. It’s easy to argue that what was considered rock ‘n’ roll in the wake of Elvis Presley and others was really nothing more than white-washed (literally) R&B with a mix of hillbilly music for good measure. Part of the problem is that there isn’t necessarily a line of delineation as to when rock ‘n’ roll became rock ‘n’ roll, as the disparate elements that came together to make the sound of what is commonly thought of as the genre were in existence for decades prior to its ’50s heyday. Ask five different rock ‘n’ roll scholars what the first rock ‘n’ roll song was and you’ll likely get five different answers ranging from songs from as early as the mid-’20s up through the early ’50s. The history of rock ‘n’ roll and its myriad “firsts” is about as convoluted and controversial as things can get when it comes to determining who originated what, when, where and why.

Principios del rock and roll Hillbilly