Today I tell the story of Good Old Fashioned Rock N’ Roll. Both Jazz and Blues migrated from the south up to places like Chicago and New York in the early 1900s, giving black musicians a wider outlet to develop these musical styles and exposing white audiences to this music. Audiences who developed an increasingly insatiable appetite for it. By the 1930s swing bands were all the rage in America, and white audiences would line up outside of clubs for hours to come in and dance to the music of black musicians. Desegregation wouldn’t happen for another two decades with Brown v Board of Education in 1954, but all over clubs in the Northeast in the early decades of the 1900s, the faint melding of racial barriers was beginning to happen through music. As the commercialization of jazz music continued, the music was getting louder and more dance oriented. The boogie woogie beat was taking hold and you can hear the beginnings of the rock n roll sound in songs like “Roll Em Pete” by Big Joe Turner as early as the late 1930s. During World War II, as Americans and industrial wares were all redirected overseas, there wasn’t enough resources or audience members to justify touring huge swing bands around the country, so bands started simplifying their lineups to make gigging more economical. This means they ditched the whole horn section and often times even the pianist to go for a bare bones rhythm section of guitar, bass, and drums. This opened up the door for the AGE OF THE GUITARIST. Suddenly the guitarist went from an auxiliary part of a huge band that you barely noticed, and put him front and center as the star of the show. Amplifiers were getting louder and budgets were getting smaller, so this new outfit of playing dance music with a small band, but at extreme volumes made a lot of sense. Chuck Berry must have realized this when he adopted many of the blues and boogie woogie styles onto electric guitar. Notably, the person who ultimately championed Chuck Berry in Chicago was none other than blues pioneer Muddy Waters, effectively passing the torch to this more electrified and louder version of the music that was created on a Mississippi Delta. Chuck Berry would go on to sexually thrust his Gibson across stages all around America and the rest is history.
Now here’s Maybellene by Chuck Berry.
#musichistory #knowyourhistory #rocknroll #chuckberry
Also shout out Bo Diddley.
