First, I didn’t say “lead guitar”, I said “rock guitar”. Not the same thing. Maybelle Carter didn’t play solos, she fused traditional European-derived folk music into an original guitar style that influenced everything that came later in both rock and country music except lead guitar as a solo playing instrument. Chord structures, rhythm playing, all of it comes directly from Mother Maybelle.
Lead guitar comes from the blues tradition. Which is a heck of a lot older than Rosetta Tharpe. I mean no disrespect to Rosetta, but if you think she invented blues guitar, let alone rock guitar, you need to listen to acoustic music from the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it. The Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers are an excellent place to start for the folk/country side of rock music, and Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson are my recommendations for early examples of the blues influence on rock guitar playing.
Nothing about rock music was invented after WW2 except the electric guitar.
**Shakester **- you need to come visit the Great Ongoing Guitar Threadand tell us about your gear, your band experiences, etc. - you clearly know your guitar.
I’d say that Creedence was a bit late to fit into the imaginary slot the OP hinted at.
To further muddy the waters I’d like to name The Wrecking Crew–LA sessions musicians who played on many a hit record. By such artists as the Beach Boys & the Byrds–guys cute enough to make the teenyboppers scream weren’t always such great musicians. Especially at the beginning of their careers.
Some of the Crew went on to successful careers. But guys like Mack Rebennack & Leon Russell were never pinup boys! Glenn Campbell was also a member–he substituted for Brian Wilson at the Beach Boys show I saw in Houston; Chad & Jeremy & The Lovin’ Spoonful also played, after a few local faves…
Thank you, WordMan. I think I may have made a comment or two in that thread at some point, but maybe not. I tend to talk guitar on guitar forums, if anywhere, and I like the Dope because it’s more of a general knowledge thing. But, since you ask so nicely, perhaps I should make more of an effort to contribute there.
As you correctly surmise, I’ve spent much of my life playing in rock bands, though I have little profit or glory to show for it.
Which proves you’ve really spent much of your life playing in rock bands… We can always use the perspective of a journeyman player. I like discussing guitars here, in the right threads, vs. guitar boards because there is so much less “noise” - flame wars over brands, or stoopid arguments about “which is better” in any number of categories. There’s a flame war (well, as much as a flame war as those polite folk will engage in;)) going on on the Acoustic Guitar Forum about bolt-on vs. dovetail neck joints - sigh…
Well, let’s just say that amplification of instruments, be they stringed, keyboard, or other, is the one part of rock music that was really invented after WW2.
My point was that the playing styles already existed in the 20s and 30s, it was really only the volume (and distortion) of electronic amplifiers that enabled rock as we now know it to develop out of the acoustic music of the 20s and 30s.
Obviously this question is the crux of this thread. For me personally (having no formal musical background, just being a fan), it’s similar to the definition of pornography: I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it (or hear it, respectively). But comparing the following definitions, I strongly prefer WordMan’s take.
Re the OP: I’d vote for either the Beach Boys (mainly because of their format, success and importance) or the Kingsmen (because, as another poster mentioned, their version of “Louie Louie” is the archetypal rock song.)
… I got me an eyeball at a Mr. Charlie Christian an’ his ES-150 that begs to differ bout that there last sentence.
(Do enjoy)
And Sister Rosetta was playin in her own special way back in the 20s and 30s as well. And when I talk about her playin lead, I mean the whole thing down to the proto-windmill she was known to do, the slidin’ and rocking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9beFIankmBY This is '44, and if you can’t hear the rock in it, I dunno what you’re listening to.
Now, I’m not gonna take a thing away from Mother Maybelle, but the key in rocking was the shift from rhythm to lead, and both women did a lot there. As well as Mr. Charlie Christian, lord knows.
But it’s hard to find early recordings for some people, because they just weren’t there. So who did what first, I can’t say.
Now, what I’m crediting Sister Tharpe for is the flourishes, the dynamic lead, the showmanship that made rock, rock. Mother Maybelle added a good amount of her own special technique, including her famous scratch, without which we wouldn’t have a good amount of what we do these days, but… well, let’s agree both women did a heck of a lot during the same time period.
Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were considered an R&B group but many music historians consider their Rocket 88to be among the- perhaps the- first rock song. It had a similar sound to other Turner compositions. Would they be classified as crossover?
Yeah, the timeline for the electric guitar? In the 1970’s, the hippie newspaper I worked for interviewed Mr Floyd Tillman, pioneer of honky tonk. He reminisced about the days when shellshocked war vets would share their “special” government cigarettes with the guitarists, to inspire their “takeoffs”–what we now call “solos.” They were veterans of The First World War. (Honky Tonk & Western Swing are there at the roots of Rock & Roll.)
Anybody studying the impact of the Beatles in US music should also look at the bands that weren’t so successful. Check out Nuggets, issued in LP back in 1972 & reissued in various media since then. These were hit singles (at least regional) from various garage bands, inspired (in part) by the British Invasion. Some of the guys went on to music careers & others kept their day jobs. (Or died young or had serious mental issues.) The original compilation was influential on the Punk movement–proving that ragged energy had something that the later overblown “Rock” genre sometimes lost.
There are, literally, whole books devoted to examining what the first rock song was. Time-Life also did a nice double album compilation of contenders. Roots Of Rock: 1945-1956 and the companion Roots of Rock II - Rock N Roll Era, which overlaps in time.
Most of those are good driving beat songs, starting from the earliest: 1945’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris. “Rocket '88” is from 1951. But they don’t sound like rock as we know it today. Most of them don’t even sound like rock ‘n’ roll in the 50s sense. They were a lot more R&B.
You have to draw a line somewhere. Something that just occurred to me. The R&B and Rock ‘n’ Roll eras had in common the names. Virtually every name attached to a song was a front man/woman, a set of vocalists, or a Singer and the Band combo. Fats Domino, The Clovers, Bill Haley and the Comets.
That started to change somewhere around 1960 with instrumental groups like The Ventures. The Beach Boys, who started as The Pendletones for an instant in 1961, and the 4 Seasons, who were the Four Lovers until 1960, were among the first groups to be a complete band that didn’t use a back-up band but also sang the songs. (Some folk groups operated this way as well, and had for a long time, so the big folk commercial revival of the time may have been an influence.)
The shift to band names feels like a real dividing line. You started thinking of bands rather than individuals. The Ventures had it all. They just didn’t sing. I wouldn’t complain if anyone used them as first. (The Kingsmen didn’t chart until late 1963.)
And that also eliminates Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. C’mon, Sam Stone, do you really want to make that argument? I thought Canadians hated it when Americans stole the birthright of entertainers from you.
I’ll cheerfully concede that when I looked up the Hawks in my Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits I somehow missed the entry for Ronnie Hawkins and his “Mary Lou” that went all the way to #26. I also typoed R&B as R@B in a recent thread. It’s hell growing old.
Expanding on Exapno’s excellent post - I was thinking some more this morning about the delineation between rock & roll and rock, and one of the factors seems to me to be the shift of emphasis from singles to full albums.
In the early days, it was all about the single, and albums were basically a way to repackage a few key singles along with some filler tracks, being more “greatest hits” compilations than coherent works. Not much attention was paid to track order, or overall packaging and presentation - throw it all on wax, stick a generic picture of the artist on the cover, get it out the door, and exploit the momentum that a given single might have.
When artists started going into the studio with the intention of making a single contiguous work of art (something the Beatles started doing with George Martin straight away, possibly as a matter of efficiency rather , made up of separate songs, but designed to stand as a whole, that may be a point of demarcation - in this way, rock was borrowing a lot from the post-bebop jazz artists like Mingus and Coltrane, where listening to an album all the way through was often more rewarding than cherry-picking the “best” tracks.
And BTW, the Ventures took this to the next level back in the early 60s, with their quasi-concept albums like Colorful Ventures ('61) and Ventures In Space (‘64), where the songs all had a consistent theme (at least in title, if not in tone). The Beatles’ first So again, Ventures FTW.
Sorry, something got lost in the intertubes there. I meant to say that the Beatles’ first “concept” album was Sgt. Peppers’, and that was only because the album was bookended by the two title songs - the rest of the album was a collection of fairly disparate tracks.
I guess my point being that since the Beatles (rightly or not) seem to be used in this thread as a bellwether vis-à-vis the transition between r&r and rock, I wanted to illustrate that American bands were ahead of the curve in some regards. But if we want to use the Mothers as a benchmark, the Ventures still win (I assume you’re referring to Freak Out! in '66).
(I assume you’re referring to Freak Out! in '66).