In Rockin’ in Time, David P. Szatzmary discusses the working-class origins of rhythm and blues and rockabilly music, each of which influenced the development of rock and roll. According to Szatzmary, how did work, poverty, and other race- and class-specific experiences shape early rock and roll music?
February 27, 2019 at 12:28 pm
In Rockin in Time, David Szatzmary claims that the blues served as the basis for what would become rock-and-roll. He notes that the blues was a creation of black slaves who adapted music from their African heritage to the American environment. Szatmary states that blues involves repetitions and rose and fell, which was used to decrease the monotony of work. Slaves would sing in a call and response pattern when working in the fields. In blues, rhythm was emphasized over harmony, as slaves had no access to instruments and could recreate rhythm with their bodies. Blues eventually spread from the south to the north during World War I, as many African-Americans migrated north. Szatmary claims that the Illinois Central Rail Road brought the blues to Chicago, as thousands of workers from the south came to work in massive meat packing and steel plants there. The blues continued to flourish in northern cities after WWII, when thousands of Southerners searching for work flocked to Norther cities. A Chicago blue collar worker by the name of Muddy Waters was one of the first to combine the blues with and electric guitar, making music that represented the optimism of African Americans, who had finally escaped the South, post WWII. This style of music became know as rhythm and blues, or R&B. When R&B records started being released, the market was for the majority black, but by 1950, the genre began gaining popularity with the white youth in the US. The two pioneers of rock- and roll, were Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, both of whom combined white hillybilly music with the upbeat rhythm of R&B, while adding a wild flare. According the Szatmary, by the mid-1950’s these two had bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and created rock-and-roll which proved popular to teens, especially white teens. The popularity of two black musicians amongst America’s white youth elicited a racist back lash from some parts of society, especially amongst record producers who feared “the economic consequences of a new popular music they did not control.” To prevent this, record producers would have white singers cover the music of African American artists, and market them to suburban markets, which rocketed the labels profitability. The white washing of the rock-and-roll genre can be in part be contributed to Elvis Presley, who as Szatmary put it, combined a white country past with African-American sounds, and largely appealed to white teenagers from poor souther backgrounds. Szatmary’s account of the rise of rock-and-roll is entrenched in poverty and reflective of racial relations in the US at the time. It is unfortunate yet unsurprising that as soon as the genre appealed to the white market , the artists shifted from African-American to white, because of white record producers in a position of power controlling record distribution.