The phrase, "rock and roll", a new take

Cafe Society
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I guess most of us know Alan Freed was credited with at least making the phrase famous. And it is listed as first being used in 1922. But I came across a version of it in the famous ballad written by Wallace Saunders, “The Ballad of Casey Jones” from 1900-1909. Not the exact phrase but certainly the same sense about it. This article about Saunders lists the lyric as, "The engine rocked, the drivers rolled, Fireman hollered, “Save my soul!”

A problem arises as he never copyrighted the lyrics in 1900. It was copyrighted in 1909 by someone else and by that time there were numerous versions.

From the Wiki article, "Poet [Carl Sandburg] called the song “Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer” the “greatest ballad ever written”. It’s a dramatic ballad and I wonder how it fits into the “rock and roll” story.

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You know, the cadence, number of sounds, whatever it is called fits, “Casey Jones was a son of a bitch, wrecked his train in a whorehouse ditch” etc.

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He was mistaken. This is:

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Rocking and rolling is way older than 1922. Wikipedia has a whole section of 19th century usages.

The alliterative phrase “rocking and rolling” originally was used by mariners at least as early as the 17th century to describe the combined “rocking” (fore and aft) and “rolling” (side to side) motion of a ship on the ocean. Examples include an 1821 reference, “… prevent her from rocking and rolling …”, and an 1835 reference to a ship “… rocking and rolling on both beam-ends”.

The hymn “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep”, with words written in the 1830s by Emma Willard and tune by Joseph Philip Knight, was recorded several times around the start of the 20th century by the Original Bison City Quartet before 1894, the Standard Quartette in 1895, John W. Myers at about the same time, and Gus Reed in 1908. By that time, the specific phrase “rocking and rolling” was also used by African Americans in spirituals with a religious connotation.

On April 25, 1881, comedian John W. Morton of Morton’s Minstrels performed a song entitled “Rock and Roll” as part of a repertoire of comic songs at a concert at the Theatre Royal in Victoria, British Columbia. A comic song titled “Rock and Roll Me” was performed by Johnny Gardner of the Moore’s Troubadours theatrical group during a performance in Australia in 1886, and one newspaper critic wrote that Gardner “made himself so amusing that the large audience fairly rocked and rolled with laughter.”

The earliest known recordings of the phrase were in several versions of “The Camp Meeting Jubilee”, by both the Edison Male Quartet and the Columbia Quartette, recorded between 1896 and 1900. It contained the lyrics “Keep on rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms/ Rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms/ Rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms/ In the arms of Moses.” “Rocking” was also used to describe the spiritual rapture felt by worshippers at certain religious events, and to refer to the rhythm often found in the accompanying music.

At around the same time, the terminology was used in secular contexts, for example to describe the motion of railroad trains. It has been suggested that it also was used by men building railroads, who would sing to keep the pace, swinging their hammers down to drill a hole into the rock, and the men who held the steel spikes would “rock” the spike back and forth to clear rock or “roll”, twisting it to improve the “bite” of the drill. “Rocking” and “rolling” were also used, both separately and together, in a sexual context; writers for hundreds of years had used the phrases “They had a roll in the hay” or “I rolled her in the clover”.

tl;dr The phrase rocking and rolling referred to movement of a ship as early as the 17th century and of course took on a suggestive manner. It was incorporated into songs as dance moves in the 19th century and as a sexual euphemism before the 20th century.