The Origins of Rock and Roll Music

Rock n Roll has never just been music. Heavy metal, Rhythm & Blues, Art Rock, New Wave, and the rest may be primary styles or genres but as sub-categories of rock, or rockin roll they do not cumulatively add up to the whole. Rock n’ Roll is a movement, a lifestyle, in many ways a belief system and all that Rock n Roll is today it owes to history: two years, no more than three when the fabric of American popular culture was torn apart and rewoven, and a new era explosively began.

Rock n Roll started with slavery. To understand we must understand what slavery was and where it left the sons and daughters of African who knew nothing of European rods of American culture. Every society has its indigenous music, which serves as entertainment, story teller, and accompaniment to Ritual and Ceremony. It is not nearly sufficient to identify black musical heritage from slave work songs through Rag Time, Blues, Jazz, Gospel, R&B, and the like, and simple extrapolate the line further to encompass Rock n Roll.

Rock n Roll starts from these foundations, but adds more, and what it principally add is white America, both in music and in the audience. White America slowly discovered endearing, inspiring, musical heritage that had become central to African Americans lives, and establishing a tradition that is protected this day, began to imitate and adapt black music. Thus this hub rid forms arrived at one time or another, Rock n Roll has incorporated Country and Western, Swing, Classical, Big Band, Folk, and even Tin Pan Alley musical elements, just as it has incorporated Blues, R&B. It would be wrong, therefore, to claim that Rock n Roll is an inherently “black” music, although clearly without the presence of although clearly without the presence of African