Why's it called Rock 'n' Roll? - The History of Rock Music (Part 1)

1:04 What's good everybody? Scoobert Doobert here. I'm excited to share this new little series that I am working on

1:30 And it is all about different musical genres the history the bands the things that went into it culturallyThe just time periods and all the good stuff that turned into the music that we know love today and

1:44 One of my favorite things about doing this is I'm finding all of the stuff that either I forgot or I never even heard of because I'mBasically climbing down the musical family tree if you will of all the stuffThroughout recorded music history and I'm starting with rock music rock and rollIt's like vaguely the music that I make andOne could argue that pop music comes out of rock and roll

2:10 And maybe that's another another podcast for another dayBut I think that rock is just an interesting look at like okay guitar basedWhat even is it?

2:20 It's evolved so much and it splintered off and is so many different categoriesIncluding my alternative slash indie pop whatever the heck I make Could be vaguely considered rock as I have been on many of the indie rock playlists and things like that. So like what even is that and

2:38 To get to that we have to go to the beginning, right just like anything you got to go to the root andTo get to the root of all of these thingsWe first have to consider why are we even talking about musical history and that's what I'm saying is it's aboutgetting out of our shell and

2:57 Broadening our perspective and also recognizing that we are standing on the shoulders of giantsWho are these giants?Nobody knows their namesThat's the coolest thing to me about

3:13 Popular music part of the reason why I love popular music of which I would consider jazzEven though a lot of people wouldn'tIs it it comes fromBlack music in America

3:29 The origins of rock are also the origins of blues and jazz and hip-hop and funk it comes from the human spiritovercoming tragedyuniting itself and preserving culture through song andof an oppressed peopleinAmericabecomingAmerican culture andCelebrating that andRecognizing that I think is very important because

3:58 It is who we are as Americans and this is our main cultural export to the rest of the worldOne of the greatest gifts of humanity comes from one of the greatest tragedies of humanity

4:11 But that's that's beautiful right like that. This is the means of carrying on this is the means of hopeAnd this is where it all comes from so I did a sub stack post and I'm gonna reference this a lot

4:23 Throughout this whole series of all of these different rock things because it's kind of hard to talk about music without playing the musicBut but because this is a podcast with in AIGenerated copyright strikes and all that nonsense. I'm not gonna be able to play all of these songs in real timeSo instead I'm gonna refer you to my sub stack.

4:42 It's love music more dot sub stack dot com where you can find these videos And you can even you know as you're listening to this podcast scroll along tap those videos and watch the little clipsThen I'm gonna refer to and I'm gonna go in order of the sub stack so that you can kind of keep track of what I'm referring toOf course because it's a because it's a spoken word

5:00 I'm going to make mistakes but hopefully that'll be funAnd I'll be able to give you some diversions so that I wasn't able to do in writingSo where it all comes from it comes from the work song it comes from field chants it comes from the idea of just making life lessBrutal, right?

5:19 It's like making the monotony of working in a field as a slave Less monotonous and creating community even in those most dire of circumstancesEven in like the most abominable

5:33 Situation the human spirit remains and from that the beauty of call and response comes and this is like one of the key elements of what I thinkdefines pop music and what defines the methodology and ideology ofarranging a pop song andyou have this idea inClassical music of imitation

5:56 Where you pass like a melody from one to the next to the next to the next you have a little bit of this call and responseBut it's a it has its own unique kind of flavor when you hear somebody in a field singing out a lead and then a group of the gang vocalwhatever calling back to it

6:12 Improvising with it pushing it and that give and take of the soloist and the groupcontinues on in terms of like guitar solo and then the group or the theDiscussion between a harmonica and a vocalist it is aIt is not a static like I'm gonna pass the melody over hereAnd now you're the focus and you're gonna develop a little bit and then I'm going to do some fancy

6:38 Composing thing to it over here. It is a true and honest gritty conversation between the two and that is a distinctionI really want to make because that isThe root of these things. It is using different source of rhythmsimported from AfricaCombining it with that call and response

6:57 Vocal driven melismatic melismatic as in the like vocal run a little bit more like fluid style rather thanYou're locked into these notes asIndividual units you are blending and scooping and drawing out from themAnd you're also painting in between them using something of the blue noteWhich I'll do an entire post on but the blues scale uses this blue noteIt just kind of lives in between the major and the minor third

7:27 Which if you listen to my other podcast the major in the minor third is the happier the sad definitionWithin a chord and when the vocal is living in between that something magical happens

7:39 It's the same thing with is it really happy or is it really sad or is it's like life itself?So listen to that call and response check it out the firstReal like rock star though that I want to talk about and this is not me.

7:56 This is a rock and roll hall of fame talking hereAll the Cleveland, Ohio's behind themRobert Johnson is the first rock star According to them and I happen to agree because he he's like this mythological figureIt's like George Washington chopped down a cherry tree kind of kind of thing like deified where

8:18 Robert Johnson said that he wanted to learn how to play guitar really well. So he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroadsAnd to this day this is one of my absolute favorite blues songsIt's been reworked a million different times. I've played it a bunch of times.

8:35 I played it at my weddingYou know it's like It's such a cool song and it is a gnarly song too or it's you're you're talking about like what are you giving up?To gain ability or talent is very soleThis style though1936 to kind of root us this is early recording right 1936Is the delta blues?

9:00 So this is a Mississippi delta so inInside of America because I do have quite a few international listeners We've got a long long river called the Mississippi that's very hard to spellAnd it also is about the length of time that it takes to be a second one Mississippi two Mississippi three MississippiThat is our inland waterway kind of the thing that makes America

9:28 Incredible is this the fact that you can push you can push stuffYou can make stuff you can build stuff you can grow stuffAnd you can get it on a waterway really really easily from pretty much anywhere in the country

9:41 This river is super long and one of my guests that I had on the podcast JW Francis.

9:46 He's actuallyCanoing the entire Mississippi river right nowIn a bug bug suit because he's getting eaten up alive bymosquitoesBut yeah, he's somewhere in the middle of the Mississippi right now literally as I'm recording canoeing awayBut the Mississippi where it ends up just like the Nile Delta You know the determinus of this thing is the Mississippi delta in the state of Mississippi

10:08 And that is where we hear the delta blues the delta blues is the kind of blues that you can like picture somebody sitting on a porch playingIt's usually unaccompanied just a guitar and a singerAnd it that's like the bluesiest of blues it is sad.

10:24 It is rawIt is aggressively just emotional and it's wonderfulAnd there's there's quite a few of these recordings They're not particularly well recorded again. This is super earlyBut there's so much vibe in them because they are scratchy because they are they're like historical act artifacts.

10:44 These arecoincidental with the Like invention of the phonograph and then being able to get this recording equipment just out into the worldAnd luckily you were able to actually sit down, you knowLike a hundred years later and listen to listen to this workSo there's a great one from 1930 from Geeshie WileyUh, who's also a contemporary and just awesome

11:09 Awesome, and you can hear how the harmonica that uh Geeshie's playing is like the call and response

11:17 Is that leader and then the group you can now apply that to the instruments and you can hear that same thing withRobert Johnson on his his guitarSo he's got the slide guitar going and he's hitting that guitarAnd it is as though that guitar and he are having a conversation in musicAnd they're not repeating each other's words. They're really reallyFighting it out at the same time.

11:43 We also have jazz music So jazz music also coming out of this traditionAnd adding in some of the New Orleans stylemixture of people so it's it's primarily it's black musicBut you're also adding in this French influence. You've got this LouisianaYou know like the Louisiana thing where there's a little bit of French like Creole kind of speakUm, you got French in there.

12:05 You've got Latin music coming in with the clave rhythms all of these things are mixing togetherAnd they're mixing together and things called funeral funeral dirges where people are walking down the streetcelebrating lifein the face of deathAnd still happens to this day.

12:24 You know, you can you can go check this out in New OrleansI hope to do this someday but it is it is the idea of like swing.

12:33 Uh, I did a whole podcast on what is swingBut it's basically take a triplet instead of doing four notes per um little segmentYou do three so instead ofduu duu duu duu duu duu du duu du duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duuThat, you know three triplet for whateverSixteenth octUm But that subdivision.

12:53 You don't have to play every single one of those three right you can just play Every other where you can play you can omit the second oneso that creates a thing called swaying so instead of duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duu duuYeah? That swing sensibility is like part of that New Orleans style marching band.

13:17 It's instead of it sounding like a marching band for an army, like playing, you know, in verymartial sense, it's got a little bit of a lilt to it. You know, it's like it's moving andit's grooving. It's not like something you literally march to. It's something you danceto. It's something you party to. It's something you rejoice to.

13:42 And that sensibility mixed in with the field song now starts to splinter off into a few different ways. We have the blues,and then we also have like Boogie Woogie. We've got jazz stride piano. So it like picture like thekind of music that you would hear in a silent movie theater, like a silent film, like one of theold ones where they're it's all in black and white.

14:04 And there's a pianist off in the corner of the actual music movie theater plans and stuff. Some of that would be like stride piano orpicture a saloon and like a western. There's just a piano off in a corner of a smoky old bar.And that pianist is probably playing something like the stride piano or the Boogie Woogie.That is fun dancing music.

14:27 There's kind of like a pattern to it where just like that that swing dance that we had in those funeral dirges. We've got that same kind of sensibility,that dance, that fun, that playfulness going on between the right and the left hands of the piano.When you start to speed that up, it starts to sound a lot like rock and roll.

14:50 During my research, I find out that there's a West African word called Boogie, which meansthe dance. And some people think that's where Boogie Woogie comes from. I don't know, maybe.

15:00 From there, though. So now like we've got Mississippi, we've got New Orleans. All of the stuffstarts to influence and come into the big cities. So these bastions of grittiness and freedom

15:16 away from the colonial and like slavery legacies that obviously exist in the South to this day.They start to go to the big city like New York City. And that's where we get someone likeSister Rosetta Tharpe. So Sister Rosetta is known as the Godmother of rock and roll.

15:41 And she did a gospel crossover song in 1945 that historians consider the first rock recording. Not everybody,but a good chunk of them do. It's a really, really great song where you can hear the combination ofdifferent things. You've got Boogie Woogie piano. You've got danceable rhythms. You've gotcall and response between a group vocal and a lead vocal.

16:01 And then you've got guitar rhythms going and flowing that are matching and playing with the piano. And you're getting this ensemble sensibility.So that's where it's going from, you know, Delta Blues and individual things. You're merging it withthe ensemble of New Orleans and Boogie Woogie.

16:19 And now it's all coming together and mixing together to become something new. And some would call this maybe the Chicago Blues. That's where Muddy Waterscomes in. So Muddy Waters is recording his first singles in Chicago with the electric guitar. Soit's always so interesting to me how musical genres are tied at the hip with technological innovation.

16:44 You can literally look out any, any serious like, wow, that's a new style of music or that's a newepoch. Something new changed. You know, it's like, oh, a piano was invented or a harpsichord wasinvented or like people started tuning their instruments together. Like these, wow, these arecrazy. Or churches got built better.

17:04 So then you're able to actually hear the notes instead of them just being some weird soup. Those kind of ideas where it's the technology and the venueand the instrumentation that helps fuel the genre shifts. It's a conversation between the both,just between the two. It's just like that call and response in the music.

17:26 And so Muddy Waters, electric guitar, awesome. And so this is a new thing and it's in Chicago. It's got everything thatChicago even has to this day. Chicago's awesome, where it's just it's energetic. It's it's it'sindustrial. It's dirty. It's edgy. It's awesome. It's electric. And a really cool thing alsostarts to happen is that record labels become like a thing.

17:51 So we used to have these publishing houses and those were kind of the big dogs and music. Publishing houses would be the ones that wouldwrite out the sheet music and sell the sheet music so people could go home and play their favoritesongs. It's part of the reason why so many people bought like player pianos and stuff like that.

18:07 So they didn't know how to play music but they wanted music at their house. So get a playerpiano and feed it the cards you buy from the publishing house. Now that you're getting records,now that that's like becoming a thing, people don't really have a ton of record playersin their homes at this time like what 1945. But there are, you know, there's radio.

18:27 And then eventually there's going to be jukeboxes. You go to like a place and listen to it. So music isbecoming more accessible. That's another one of those technological innovations. It's happeningall in real time. It's influencing the genres. It's influencing the profitability of all thestuff too. It's like now you can start making money.

18:42 So now there's going to be more business and then there's going to be more entertainment and more artists because you can actually do thisinstead of having to do something else and who wouldn't pick music. So the first records

18:54 by muddy waters are released on aristocrat records, which then gets bought out by chess records.So chess becomes this big imprint that is very important. Chess starts a joint venturewith this guy named Sam Phillips. And he started a thing called Sun Records. I'll get to thatin a little bit. But muddy waters is this electric, just aggressive, awesome music.

19:20 Hoochie Coochie Man is like the song that I put in the substack just is like a, if you're only going to listen to onemuddy water song, I think it should be that one. I would recommend you listen to more. Fun fact,though, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and muddy waters.

19:35 They toured together in Europe in the early 60sand a bunch of people that ended up becoming famous later, like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones. They were at that concert.

19:50 I just love stuff like that where it's like you're passing the baton, you're inspiring the nextgeneration. You don't even know it. You're changing the course of music history just because you decidedyou're going to go play in this random train station in Europe, in England. Amazing.

20:09 That's like setting the scene, right? These are the people that are in proto-rock-and-roll.

20:16 When does it really become rock-and-roll? So the first time I actually heard rock-and-roll

20:23 in the music is there's this one by the Boswell sisters song called Rock-and-roll. It's about therocking and rolling of a boat. And what I think is interesting is that those rhythms of the strideboogie-wogie, New Orleans, that swing, that, that, that, that thing is seeping into the popular culture.

20:48 And that wasn't quite like, that wasn't really a thing. And there's a really funny clip. I don'tremember. I may be able to track it down somehow, but regardless. It's a bunch of orchestralmusicians talking about the first time they ever had to swing.

21:03 They ever had to play those rhythms.And originally they were writing out all the rhythms very complicated, like all sorts of nonsense and rests. And it just was like all sorts of ink on the page.

21:16 But then somebody realized that they could just write at the top swung. And then it gets reallysimple. It's like, you just have to put on a different set of, like, like, sensibility.

21:31 You just have to shift your thinking. And then it's simple. But that's a very complicated thing to do.

21:38 I digress. The rock-and-roll thing, though, that's like what a lot of people perceive swingto be uneven. It's like pushing you into the next thing and you're just kind of flowing. And Ilike, you probably hear this in a lot of hip-hop music. Like, it's like the triplet thingis still, we're obsessed with it. It's amazing. It's such a cool rhythm.

22:02 But at the time they're like, what does this sound like? It kind of sounds like you're rocking and rolling in a boat. And thensister Rosetta, she had a song called Rock Me. And billboard, magazine used the term rock-and-rollspiritual singing.

22:24 And again, you can hear that swing, but where things really, really came into clarity with Elvis Presley. How do we get there? That's Sam Phillips. I was talking about himnot too long ago when I was talking Muddy Waters. So Sam Phillips, he entered into that partnership.With Muddy's record label, Chess.

22:46 And then through that, he was able to start Sun Records in Memphis Tennessee. So just kind of like trying to paint the geographic picture of, you got this Mississippiriver that's going up the country. And just like the Mississippi we're going up, we're going down.

23:02 We are going from the Mississippi Delta all the way up to Chicago and already New York back to Chicago.Chicago now down to Memphis, Tennessee. And Sam, he is just like this, he's a pivotal behindthe scenes figure that helps pull the strings to make all this happen.

23:21 He's a branding genius, he's an incredible A&R guy, and he's fearless. A lot of what was going on at the time was the fearof playing black music to a white audience or white music. It was like this weird,

23:38 oh people aren't ready for that. But it's funny because every time that anybody's ever said that,they've been wrong. And what a horrible mistake and what a thing to have missed out on at the timeto be one of those DJs that go, oh no, that's black music, that's ridiculous. But that's how it was.

23:59 But Sam Phillips didn't have any of that. He was into music, he liked it, he liked the energy.

24:08 So he went for it. And there's some stuff going on, right? The music market, like I was saying,it's growing. And there's this little thing called the LP, what you might know of as a vinyl record.That comes out of the scene in 1948.

24:26 And with that now, music gets a lot cheaper. You're able to listen to it and picture the fans from Happy Daysbanging on the jukebox. And that's how I picture this era. It's the jukebox era. And there's this,also this other kind of thing going on, we're out of the Great Depression in the United States,so there's a little bit more money going on. And black Americans had fought in the war.

24:51 And there's always this thing with like, you know, you go to war, you go across the world, you fight for yourcountry, you come back and then people don't want you to like go back to where you were. It's like,no, like you're a world traveler, you fought for your country, you want to go expand your network,you want more social mobility as you should.

25:10 And so because that happened, it made this shift, where now the, you know, lines between black and white start to blur, which is great. And thesethings lead to things like the civil rights movement, but they also lead to the integration of

25:25 culture and of listening to each other's music, and then eventually entering each other's music.And that's where rock really starts to take off as like, everybody starts making it, everybody lovesit. Because it's awesome. So Sam, Sam starts Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. And in his veryfirst year, he finds BB King and Howlin' Wolf, two of the greatest to ever do it in blues.

25:51 And then from there, he records what he, he has very successfully branded the very first truerock and roll record. Is that true? Yeah, but he did a good job of branding it. And it's a reallycool song. And it does sound like rock and roll. So to, to his credit, this is the contemporary orcommon wisdom is that rocket 88 is the very, very first one.

26:14 And rocket 88 is really cool because there's a, you know, great saxophone part. And it's taking a lot of the same things we're talkingabout. We've got the stride piano kind of influence. We've got Delta Blues influence. We've got ChicagoBlues influence. And then we've got these triplets. You know, just like pushing.

26:33 And now we've got that swing. Really cool song. And it's also written by Ike, co-written by Ike Turner, who ends upbecoming, you know, massively influential and important figure and, you know, infamous in somemany ways in music history, especially in R&B.

26:53 But he, he became a talent scout and session musician, production assistant for Sam Phillips, and helped power all of this stuff too. So Ikemet Elvis Presley in West Memphis. And he said Presley was just a white boy that would come overto the black clubs. He would come in and stand behind the piano and watch me play.

27:14 I never know, he never knew he was no musician. When Elvis, like, came around 1954, he walked into Sun Studios. Hewas recording a demo for a gift for his mother. I better get this right because my grandpa's notgoing to be happy with me if I don't. But Sam Phillips was impressed by his voice and arrangedrecording session.

27:37 And that is when he started playing, that's all right by Arthur Crudup in a break in their recording session. And that spontaneous moment ends up becoming the bigthing that captures Sam Phillips' attention. They record the track, becomes his first officialrecording session. And he becomes the king.

27:59 The cool thing about what, you know, what Elvis really brought to that table in the beginning was we've got all of that influence of black music.They were going to add in a little bit of country and western music and some of that melodramatic

28:16 blues and put it in extremely charismatic, great vocalist who's dancing and young and attractive.

28:28 And then boom, you've got Elvis, you've got sensation. You combine that with, you know,

28:36 everything else that was happening, where it, like, the LP record, the money after World WarII, the American kind of, like, feeling of exceptionalism and winning the war and all that kind ofstuff. And then you add in vinyl record players at home in 1955 when Philco begins mass production.

28:55 Now people are buying records, people are going to hear records in the jukebox, the radio is poppingoff. And you start to get other charismatic figures, like Little Richard in 1955. So Little Richard,

29:13 one of the Beatles' primary influences, along with Elvis, along with Buddy Holly, who we willcertainly get to, Little Richard was, like, the most electric person imaginable, just a bundle ofenergy and somebody that brought this intensity to the piano, where you had kind of the pump

29:36 primed with all that boogie, boogie music. So people were like, knew the feeling of swung piano.But then you bring in Little Richard who's playing all those triplets, who's just bombastic and bigand you've got Elvis kind of doing the same thing in a very different way. And now people arereally starting to, you know, kind of like, stop and take notice of what is going on in music?

29:59 Like, it used to be so reserved and so demure, or it used to be like blues, like, like,

30:06 music that was specifically for a certain type of person or from a certain type of person.And now you've got these personalities that are trying to make music to take over the world.And they did. Chuck Berry also, he's, you know, I got a shout about because he's one of my favorites.He also is not without scandal. We will get to that as well.

30:29 But Chuck Berry was, somebody that like, he took and adapted and learned all of the early rock piano stuff.And he put it on the electric guitar, adding in like the influence of muddy waters.

30:42 And that kind of Chicago style where Chuck Berry had that same electric kind of sensibilitythat little Richard had on the piano, he's having that on the guitar and he's innovating.And he's using bends to be very vocal about the ways that he's playing his electric guitar.

31:01 And it's that, it's that articulation where you are transferring from a piano that doesn't havebends to a guitar that does have bends. And that really, like, fundamentally changes the natureof that instrument. And then, again, stage presence. Chuck Berry, he had this thing called the DuckWalk.

31:16 You should just look it up, Chuck Berry Duck Walk, or watch, I think I have it on the video on the sub-stack. But basically, like, he will basically dance moves. And they're awesome. They're hilarious.But I'm sure they didn't feel like hilarious back then, because they were so innovative.They thought, but it probably seemed like the coolest thing ever.

31:32 And it's like, you know, the people that do the air walk dance. If you don't know this, look that up. But basically,it's like an optical illusion as though they're walking on air. Chuck Berry kind of had a littlebit of that in his Duck Walk move. And, again, just an electric person, and he's on Chess Records, Muddy Waters label out of Chicago. So, that's kind of like laying the scene.

31:57 That is when it starts to feel like something. That's when it starts being called rock and roll.And these are some of these main figures that are larger than life. It kind of just like,

32:10 imagine what it would be like to be there, where all of a sudden a genre is like it's Earthfrom nothing, with these dynamic, bombastic personalities that will have careers that span decades.

32:24 That's a really special thing. And I feel like that might actually be an important part of a genreeven existing. Like, I feel like hip hop had the same thing, where it's just like out the gate,first five to ten years, it was just like, here's the legends. As though there was an unseenforce propelling it.

32:43 And I would argue that a lot of the unseen forces, and I think you could say the same thing about hip hop, was technological innovation, the giving the painters the paintthat they can use, where the LP record, the jukebox, the end of the war, the predominance of radio,

33:03 the musical setting and tradition of New Orleans and jazz and delta blues and field song.All of that coalescing, and then you get the electric guitar. And you get all of these coolinnovations too. This is actually something like, that's kind of crazy. The war had a tonof innovation in recording gear.

33:25 There's like a thing that people still talk about, like, Soviet recording gear, or the different kind of tubes that came from World War II. And a lot ofthis stuff ends up powering, like you can build bell labs and these different research organizationsthat end up coming up with like really cool things primarily for war purposes.

33:45 Didn't later, people figured out like, hey, we could distort this. We could push this thing too farnow. Our guitar tones, our guitar tone is super cool. All of those little things start to comeout of the technological innovations as we have all the surplus stuff that we were using forcommunications or for radio or propaganda or whatever, like, what if we rig a guitar into it?

34:08 See what happens. So on the next episode of this little mini series on rock, I will talk aboutthe guy. The guy, yeah, my favorite guy, so a little biased, that helped make that happen.And that guy is Les Paul, an absolute genius in terms of innovator and musician.

34:26 And I want totalk about how he kind of helped lay some of that technological groundwork so that people, like the Beatles, could pick it up and sprint with it. So next time we will talk about Les Pauland we will talk about Buddy Holly, again, just a seminal figure.

34:45 And then eventually we willtalk about the tragedy, kind of that first phase of rock and how it all comes crashing down, literally, very tragic. And on that note, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Love Music More.

35:02 It's going to be fun to dig into this historical stuff. Please let me know if you if you'reenjoying it, leave me a comment, and check out the sub-stack. Feel free to comment on there as well.And let me know just like, what do you find interesting? Are there other genres you'd like me to diginto? Any guests that you think would be good on these topics? Love to hear from you.

35:20 And with that, please invite you to rate the show Five Stars on Apple and on Spotify. And I hopeto see you again next week. Be sure to check out scoobertdoobert.pizza for all of my links and lovemusicmore.substack.com to read more. Thank you.