Just 70 years ago, on April 12, 1954, the group Bill Haley & His Comets entered the studio to record what would become the first “rock’n’roll” song in history: Rock Around the Clock. A catchy rhythm that invites you to dance, lyrics that celebrate the party and speak to the younger generation. A tune which may seem very outdated nowadays, but which at the time had the effect of a bomb. A veritable media tidal wave that will set America ablaze and soon the entire world.
How did this single and other factors allow the emergence of what became much more than just music? A true counterculture, art of living, one of the societal symbols of the 20th century, rock’n’roll is celebrating its seven decades.
The voice of a generation
At the end of the Second World War, baby boomers aspired to freedom, joy of life, carefreeness and wanted to stand out from their elders. Music is one of the means of emancipation, especially when it sings of Saturday night parties, romantic flirtations or the passion for cars.
Rock Around the Clock was released in May 1954, the month following its recording, but it was especially highlighted the following year in the film Seed of violence (Blackboard Jungle in VO).
The feature film by Richard Brooks with Glenn Ford deals with the difficult relationship between a beginning teacher and his students in a vocational high school. The conflict of generations is what rock’n’roll was based on in the first place.
This reissue of the song placed it at number one in the United States for eight weeks in a row. It’s the explosion of a new musical genre, and Rock Around the Clock thus officially becomes the first rock’n’roll single in history, according to authoritative works on the subject.
The Elvis Presley wave
But the King’s fans argue that their idol broke through before Rock Around the Clock not be at the top of the charts.
Indeed, the young Elvis Aaron Presley recorded in Sam Philipps’ Sun studios in Memphis on July 5, 1954. His adaptation of That’s All Right (Mama) by bluesman Arthur Crudup was released two weeks later and constituted the second cornerstone of the birth of rock’n’roll.
Elvis will achieve much greater notoriety than that of Bill Haley, to the point of being nicknamed the king of rock’n’roll. He is undoubtedly the most famous artist of the genre, and one of the major icons of popular culture of the 20th century.
Its phenomenal success in terms of record sales, 120 million album sales, still makes you dizzy today.
A musical style at the crossroads of cultures
So, Bill Haley or Elvis Presley? Of course, rock’n’roll was not born in a day, nor in a single piece. Before Rock Around the Clockwe had already heard dancing rhythms, wriggling pianos and guitars eye-catching.
In 1951, Jackie Brenston released the single Rocket 88, which some also consider to be one of the very first rock’n’roll songs. We hear a young guitarist named Ike Turner, who co-wrote the composition with Brenston, although he is not credited.
The term rock’n’roll appeared in the early 1950s, notably in the radio show of disc jockey Alan Freed. Moondog’s Rock And Roll Party. It is a double meaning slang expression that means both dancing and making love. But if it quickly became used, it was also to distinguish white rock’n’roll from black rhythm and blues.
However, rock’n’roll owes everything to the blues: its harmony on three chords, its structure in twelve measures, and its favorite themes which will forever connote rock as a music not acceptable to puritanical mentalities.
Muddy Waters summed it up perfectly in one of his songs: The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Rollor literally “the blues had a child and they called it Rock’n’roll”.
The country of white settlers was married to the blues of African-Americans. Rock’n’roll was born from a crossbreeding, but it was not until the 1960s and the Stax label group Booker T. and the MG’s to see a mixed group on stage with black and white musicians playing together.
The fathers of rock’n’roll
However, it is a black musician who best embodied rock’n’roll. If Elvis was the king, Chuck Berry created many musical codes, starting with these famous intros and these instantly recognizable solos.
He is undoubtedly the first guitar hero and influenced several generations of six-string aficionados. We can no longer count the artists who have regularly paid tribute to him, considering him “the father of rock’n’roll”.
If we renamed rock’n’roll, we’d call it Chuck Berry.
Proof of his immense influence, Johnny B. Goode is the only rock’n’roll song featured on Voyager Golden Record sent on the Voyager I probe in 1977, a disc containing sounds and images, in order to present to possible extraterrestrial beings the quintessence of living production on Earth, in the form of an inventory of the arts and sciences. A pride that his son confirmed to us in an interview a few weeks after his father’s death.
Beyond blues artists, we can add alongside Chuck Berry names such as Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly. This same Buddy Holly who popularized a model of electric guitar that was completely new at the time.
If the month of April 1954 also marks the birth of rock’n’roll, it is with the appearance of the prototype of what still remains the archetype of the electric guitar today: the Fender Stratocaster.
:quality(50)/2024/04/12/strat1954-6618f9972ad16412440060.png)
When picturing an electric guitar, the Stratocaster body shape is the first that comes to mind. The double notch at the neck was completely innovative at the time, when the first prototype was released in April 1954. Leo Fender had already hit it big with the Esquire/Broadcaster/Telecaster in 1949-1951.
Unlike Gibson, which displayed a luthier aesthetic that could seem elitist, Fender on the contrary relies on a popular, simple and effective approach: the body of the Telecaster was a “end of board”, that of the Stratocaster will be barely more designed with a cutaway for greater comfort.
If, at the beginning, the Stratocaster represented the quintessence of clear and crystalline sound with, among others, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, Jimi Hendrix made much more of it than what it was initially intended for, and it quickly became over the following decades the most used guitar. In the wake of the divine left-hander will follow Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Rory Gallagher, Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Ry Cooder, Mark Knopfler, Chris Rea, Mike Oldfield, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Mayer, Popa Chubby… impossible to name them all.
A guitar that has become legendary, an iconic single, yes this month of April 1954 undoubtedly heralded a cultural revolution which still carries all its aura today. As the Rolling Stones sang in 1974, half a century ago, “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll but I Like It!”