So its fairly well known that rock and roll was scandalous when it first appeared, and even what sounds rather tame to us today (such as “Rock Around the Clock” and Elvis) made a lot of hearts skip a beat and twisted a lot of knickers.
My Mama was telling me recently about growing up in her small town on the Mississippi Delta, and how her daddy was the ‘rebel’ of the town – he always had to have the newest radio, the first black-and-white television, he never went to church, and he LOVED ‘the devil’s music’ – rock and roll. She recalls how he used to turn on the radio and dance to the rock music when she was a little girl (this would’ve been the late '50s or very early '60s).
What did your grandparents (or parents, if you’re of a certain generation) think of the newly-born genre of rock? Were they fans? Outraged? Come around eventually? Cling to their big band records determinedly?
My dad was born in '38, so he was a teenager for most of the early rock era. He’s also a classically trained guitarist. He maintains that there was no good music made between the 19th century and 1960.
My paternal grandparents were born in 1919 and… 21? So they were adults when rock and roll hit. I have never heard them mention it.
My maternal grandparents arrived in Canada in 1925 or so(as children) and i believe my grandpa died in 67 or so. I never met him. I only met grandma twice.
So… I dont know.
Moms favourite Guns and Roses song is “sweet child O’ Mine” though. We made sure she was exposed to lots of heavy metal.
I’ve never heard that my grandparents had any kind of reaction to rock, although my Baby Boomer parents (especially my dad) are huge music fans and loooooove rock.
My maternal grandparents definitely liked the big band music, though, I know that.
My paternal grandparents were not your stereotypical grandparents, so who knows, they might have liked it. They were radical communists (my bubbe, my only living grandparent, was ranting to my dad just the other day about how the free market has failed and communism is the way to go), so I can see them thinking anything that was against The Man was cool.
My mom took her mom to see Elvis in Little Rock in about '56. My mom was already married and in her 20s…she liked rock n roll, though. My grandmother was more put off by the screaming than the music, I think.
My parents had a good friend who was a DJ, and they got a lot of records and recommendations from him at the time (late 50s/early 60s).
My grandfather (born 1911) once surprised the hell out of my dad - a college student at the time - by informing him that he had purchased a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and that he had liked it. His favorite song, apparently, was “She’s Leaving Home”; he claimed it had something important to say about parents and children.
Let’s see–my dad’s parents were pretty permissive, so they didn’t care at all. Mom’s parents were a little different. I know that Grampa doesn’t really like music in general, but I don’t know about Memaw, as she was really big in not wanting to start trouble. But I believe it wasn’t allowed when Mom was a kid.
My mom was not only born in 1906, but a strict fundamentalist, religion-wise. Rock N Roll was not allowed at our house. I secretly bought 45s and stored them in a hidden place. I couldn’t let her know or they would have been destroyed, along with a lecture about how the Debil works.
And when I listened to the radio, I used headphones.
Apparently, my moms dad once walked past my door while visiting and heard some of The Dark Side of the Moon. His comment to mom was, “Did you hear what that boy is listening to?” My moms uncle, on the other hand, was the one who gave me a hard time about listening to “jungle music.”
Last Christmas my niece got Rock Band Beatles. She was apologetic to me about it, saying “I know you don’t like the Beatles.” Buh?!? Whuh?!? “I LOVE the Beatles!” Her jaw dropped to the floor. My mother said “I love the Beatles too.” MY jaw dropped to the floor.
My mother once said that rock music was nothing more than organized noise. Ten years later she was a big Kate Bush fan.
When she was a teenager, she saw some young sex fiend named Elvis on TV. Her great aunts were scandalized.
My grandfather was a classical music aficionado (and played the violin with Benjamin Britten and Albert Einstein). He had me go to classical concerts in the area, but I don’t recall him saying anything about rock music. He just ignored it.
My parents preferred showtunes, and I liked them, too. Again, they never expressed any particular antipathy to rock.
Although the music was often casually mocked, it was the cultural changes it celebrated and helped to form that was really bothering the older folks. They mostly focused on long hair–small minds need issues small enough to fit within them–but after MAD magazine, rock music was the only influence calling for the examination of previously unquestioned institutions, and such challenges to the status quo are always perceived as threatening.
Mine were born in the late forties so they were the right age for 60s rock & roll and they loved it, from what I’ve heard they were right into the scene. The question is, what did their parents think of it, which is interesting. I might ask my Nana next time I see her.
African-Americans did invent rock-and-roll, more or less. And that really was a strike against it in the 1950s. I remember hearing a clip of a Southern demagogue ranting that rock was an attempt to seduce white kids into “the immorality of the nigras.” Also another calling it a “Communist conspiracy” (pronounced "con-SPY-ra-see). Of course, in those days white Southerners (and not they alone) believed the civil rights movement (to which avowed American Communists were, in fact, openly sympathetic) was a Communist plot.
My grandfather, born 1918, was a jazz piano player and swing band leader who loved most genres of music if they were played well. He liked Art Tatum, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Prima, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and even Jerry Lee Lewis and openly mocked Lawrence Welk and Pat Boone.
He also thought that the Beatles were not only talented song writers but sophisticated composers.
