Until the 1950's, American popular music was divided into three separate styles. Each had its own performers, musical content, and audience. One style was called pop. Pop songs came from movies, Broadway musicals, and pop composers. The songs were mainly simple 32-bar melodies with lyrics about love. They were played by bands in dancehalls, restaurants, and nightclubs and on radio. The bands consisted of anywhere from six to more than twenty musicians playing combinations of trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and clarinet, with a rhythm section of drums, guitar, string bass, or piano. Soloists or small vocal groups generally accompanied the bands.
In the late 1930's and 1940's, there were hundreds of "big bands." The most popular included the white bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, and Woody Herman. There were also the more jazz-style black bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Lionel Hampton. After World War II, individual singers such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat ("King") Cole, Doris Day, Patti Page, and Jo Stafford, most of whom had been band singers, became much more popular than the bands themselves.
The second style was rhythm and blues. It came from the blues sung by black performers, along with the fast dance music that had grown out of ragtime and boogie-woogie. It was the popular music of the black people of the United States. It was played and sung in taverns and clubs or listened to on records in jukeboxes. Later, it was called soul music. A few of the most popular rhythm and blues performers of the 1940's and early 1950's were Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, B. B. King, Dinah Washington, and Willie Mae Thornton. Both the white pop bands and the black rhythm and blues musicians were influenced by jazz and by black spirituals and gospel music.
The third style is now called country and western, or country music. But before World War II it was often called hillbilly music. It includes the commercialized folk music of the rural southern and southwestern parts of the United States. The main center of this music has always been Nashville, Tennessee.
How Rock Began
Rock and roll was the name given to the music that developed when these three separate styles came together in the early 1950's. It is widely believed that the term "rock and roll" was first used by a Cleveland disk jockey, Alan Freed. He was one of the first persons to bring rhythm and blues to white audiences. He did this on his radio program and through concerts he produced, beginning in 1952. These presented both black and white performers to audiences of black and white teenagers. But not any one person created rock and roll. Rock was born as a result of changes in the music, broadcasting, advertising, and entertainment industries.
Before World War II the music industry was centered in New York. Music publishers printed the words and music of songs, and people all over the country bought this sheet music to play the songs on their guitars, pianos, or accordions. A hit song might sell 1 million copies. But most songs made little or no money. No one really knew what made a hit, but most people believed in a few rules. One was that success in the immediate past meant success in the immediate future. If last week's hit was about apples, then next week's songs would be about oranges or pears. If last week's hit was sung by Perry Como, next week the music industry would have new songs for him. Or they would be looking for someone who sounded just like him. Another rule was just the opposite--find a new and different song; find a new and different performer.
But finally, only public response could make a hit. Enough of the public had to hear a song often enough to distinguish it from the rest and become familiar with it. So the publishers brought songs to bands playing in and around New York--especially bands that had radio programs. In that way, not only would more people hear the songs, but the newspapers of the entertainment industry could keep count of how often they were played. The publishers also arranged for as many recordings of their songs as possible. Sheet music was still more important than records. But by the early 1950's several things had happened to change this.
First came the disk jockeys. Just before World War II, the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates United States broadcasting, authorized the licensing of new radio stations. These stations needed three things to be successful--inexpensive, interesting material; advertisers who would buy time from them; and a large audience. The answer was found in disk jockeys. They designed programs consisting of pop records with a playing time of about three minutes. They also read "spot" commercials and held the program together with talk.
