I was listening to Ian Hunter’s “Cleveland Rocks” yesterday, which includes the lines:
I got some records from World War Two
I play 'em just like me granddad do
He was a rocker and I am too
So, what do you think is on those records?
I’d say jump blues.
Yes, Louis Jordan for sure. Cab Calloway was plenty wild. Big Joe Turner was known for “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” but he was around much earlier and playing boogie with the likes of Benny Goodman.
This Louis Jordan tuneis from a few years after World War II (1949), but it gives a good idea of what’s being referred to.
Indeed. T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan. A lot of boogie woogie was just a distorted guitar and jittery drumbeat away from being rock n’ roll…
I don’t think that line should be taken too literally. As far as I can tell no one would have been described as a “rocker” in this sense during the WWII era; the word wasn’t used in that way until the '50s. However, “rock and roll” was used as a description for jazz and swing music with a strong beat well before the emergence of rock and roll as a specific genre.
The earliest known usage of “rock and roll” to refer to a type of music is in the 1938 song “Rock It To Me”, with the line “Today the rage is rhythm and rhyme, so won’t you satisfy my soul with a rock and roll”. Here’s an Ella Fitzgerald recording of it on YouTube. Since that’s the same year as the annexation of Austria, granddad might well have been listening to music he thought of as rock and roll throughout the war period.
Absolutely. What I imagine from the lines is a young punk-rock afficianado in the late '70s discovering his grandfather’s old records and saying, “Whoa! Granddad was a rocker!”
I’m trying to get a handle on what might evoke that reaction, what was edgy like that in 1942 or so.
Some good stuff listed in this thread already that I’m anxious to check out further.
My original post actually did have the disclaimer “if you want the literal progenitor of rock” but I decided to edit it out. If you want to use the word “rocker” metaphorically in the manner that say “punk” is used metaphorically, you can also probably throw bebop or any of a number of jazz stylings in there. Any sort of blues. Heck, you could throw in Shastakovich, Stravinsky, Orff, or some classical composer of that ilk in there, too, I would think.
Some good answers already. My 2c:
Blues and country/folk music is the basis for rock music. You can find music that goes back beyond the dawn of recorded music that’s clearly proto-rock.
However, that’s acoustic music. Electric guitars? Charlie Christian was the first electric lead guitarist. He died in in 1942.
What we now think of as the classic rock sound with electric guitars really didn’t start happening till the late 40s. Hank Williams’ Move it on Over is, in my opinion, very early rock music. In 1947.
Around the same time Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf started recording electric blues music, and by 1950 Chess Records was founded. And that stuff is rock music DNA.
Electric guitar certainly perks a song up.
Besides Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, listen to some Memphis Minnie and some Big Bill Broonzy. I think someone who discovered his grandfather listened to that stuff would call grampa a rocker.
On that note, rock was formed (in a broad sense) by combining African-American musical stylings with white country music. So, if I found grandpa had a collection of old blues records, some bebop, along with country/western classics, (and, hell, you can throw in some classical records in there, too), I’d call might describe him as a “rocker.”
And a little bit of gospel?
Absolutely. I’m not trying to exhaust all the possible African-American styles of music, just throwing out a couple of examples.
There’s also Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Her “Strange Things Happening Every Day” is sometimes called the first rock and roll single and came out in 1944. She was doing things with a similar sound from the late 30s. She was also one of the first electric guitar heroes – that’s her playing lead. Some have credited her with inventing the Pete Townsend windmill, but I haven’t found a video of her doing that; she did, however, move her hand outward from the guitar as the played some chords.
Her first hit, BTW was titled “Rock Me” in 1938.
Except that Ian Hunter made his name as Glam Rocker in the early '70s, well before punk.
Well, the song is from 1979 and has a definite punkish vibe, so that’s where my head was going with it. Not really taking Hunter’s entire body of work into account… It’s just a song.
You could always ask Ian about the records yourself–he responds to fan’s questions regularly on The Horse’s Mouth.
While Sister Rosetta Tharpe has the early beginnings of the rock n roll sound, Hank Williams’ Move it on Over is the first (that I have heard)where it is there, rock n roll but it hasn’t been named yet. It just** is** Rock n Roll.
Actually, before they started having hits with the glam stuff, Mott The Hoople were doing stuff that sounded very much like what punk would sound like, five years later or so. They used to close their act with a high-energy instrumental version of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me. You could easily mistake it for The Jam, or even, at a pinch, The Clash or The Sex Pistols, if you did not know.
I’m more intrigued by the part about “living in sin with a safety pin.”