“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” General Motors adopted that advertising slogan in the 1980s to revitalize one of its storied brands, and the formulation has sprouted like mushrooms after the rain ever since. The 2009 J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek reboot billed itself as “not your father’s Star Trek,” for instance. It’s safe to say that we have accumulated enough years of “not your father’s” that it was about darn time for its opposite to arrive.
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Which brings us to the 800th entry in Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, Elijah Wald’s Rock ’n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction. This slim volume is your father’s rock ’n’ roll experience in book form, assuming your father was American or possibly British and born anytime between, say, 1945 and 1965.
Oxford prizes academic credentials for contributors to its Very Short Introduction series, and the publisher has found a few to pin on Wald. He has a doctorate in “ethnomusicology.” He has taught at universities in some capacity or other. More promisingly, the jacket copy leads with the fact that he’s a Grammy Award-winning musician. He’s also the author of a previous Very Short Introduction on the blues.
Fittingly, he is back for an encore. His earlier effort sketched the history and composition of the blues, and though it wasn’t stuffy, his rock ’n’ roll follow-up is far more freewheeling. The book concludes with a paean to the experience of encountering “Tutti Frutti” for the first time, with Little Richard’s “gloriously raw, young voice and the unconfined and ineffable energy of Whop-bop-a-lu-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”
Wald includes some technical descriptions, and the closer we get to the author’s wheelhouse, the deeper it goes. The book explains what rock owes to the blues by showing how the instrumental parts of blues songs are constructed with a 12-bar chord pattern “consisting of four measures of the tonic, two of the subdominant, two of the tonic, one of the dominant seventh, one of the subdominant, and two of the tonic.”
For non-musicians who got lost just now, I suggest that you do what I did and call up an explanatory YouTube video. You will likely nod along in no time and be able to “see” it better. The book points out that those blues bones are what countless early rock ’n’ roll standards were built around, including “Johnny B. Goode,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
When readers push past the few wonky parts, what we have here is a social history of rock ’n’ roll. The stage where most of that happened was an American one. Even The Beatles weren’t really “The Beatles” until they hit it big here. That was because of the unique social conditions in the United States at the time, including widespread postwar prosperity, significant internal migration, and the persistent push for racial integration.
English is an odd sort of language, as many linguists have pointed out. It has very few hard rules, making spelling sort of a nightmare. It functions as more of a verbose vacuum cleaner, sucking vast swaths of hundreds of other languages into it. Rock ’n’ roll did something similar in the U.S. starting around the middle of the 20th century: It sucked in blues, gospel, folk, and other kinds of music, remixing them into something new.
It wasn’t just midcentury broadcast censors and parents that this new music annoyed. The “roll” part of “rock ’n’ roll” did, in its earliest incarnations, have to do with sex — as in, “a roll in the hay” — which did not endear it to many listeners who were conservative by temperament. Nowadays, Lefties like to fret over cultural appropriation, but it turns out that many of their forebears didn’t much like it in the world of rock ’n’ roll either.
We can see this in fan protests over the musical development of Bob Dylan, who came out of the folk scene and decided to embrace the format and tools of rock. At one concert in the mid-1960s, he faced audience cries of “Judas!” for this shift. The details of what happened after that are disputed. In rock lore, Dylan told his backup band to “play f***in’ loud” and launched into a particularly spirited rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
In Wald’s estimation, the label of “rhythm and blues” was essentially a marketing fiction. It operated in parallel with the label of rock ’n’ roll to sell broadly similar music to black and white audiences, respectively. However, the gospel and blues genres didn’t always play well together in that space, as blues was “regarded as the antithesis of church music.”
Stubborn bastard that he was, Ray Charles forged ahead anyway. In 1954, he rewrote and rerecorded the song “It Must Be Jesus,” created by the Southern Tones, as “I Got a Woman.” He also rewrote “This Little Light of Mine” as “This Little Girl of Mine,” and injected religious language into secular songs such as “Hallelujah I Love Her So.”
These secularized Charles songs elicited a great deal of criticism from various quarters. The Southern Tones clapped back by rewriting his rewrite as “I’ve Got a Savior.” The objections weren’t limited to churchgoers. Chicago blues legend Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, protested, “You shouldn’t sing blues with a Christian tone. … I know that’s wrong.”
Still, Charles’s brazenness paid off, making him “one of the decade’s top R&B stars, form[ing] the basis of what would come to be known as soul music, and prompt[ing] some ambitious young gospel stars to take their skills to the secular world,” Wald notes.
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There is a huge amount of rich rock history crammed into this short volume, along with some curious omissions. “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” sang Larry Norman in 1972, and Wald doesn’t attempt an answer.
Norman and others created the Christian rock movement, which was rooted in American evangelical Christianity in roughly the same way that gospel was rooted in America’s black churches. Out of that scene eventually grew contemporary Christian music labels. These deserved at least a mention here, if for no other reason than for the influence they exerted over artists and groups such as Dylan and U2. Perhaps Oxford will fill this gap with a future stand-alone Very Short Introduction.
Jeremy Lott (@jeremylottdiary) yells like teen spirit.
