Rock and Roll of the 50's

Essay by Anonymous UserHigh School, 11th gradeF, November 1996

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During the late 1930s, the young saw their fathers and brothers enrobed in uniforms and disappeared to places far away while their mothers left the primacy of home to fill the void in the work force created by Dad's departure. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fathers and brothers returned home around 1945. Society became more advance and people were anxious to build homes and raise families in the world to which they had given so dearly to make free. The products of these desires began to come of age in the mid-to-late 1950s and with them came the glorious roar of rock & roll.

During the early 1950s the music of black rhythm-and-blues artists became known as rock and roll. But white musicians, such as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, brought rock music to the American mainstream. The 1955 release of Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets met with resounding success, especially among teenagers.

Rock and roll emerged at a time when the phonograph disc had finally replaced sheet music as the chief medium of circulation of popular music in the United States. It is often considered to have begun in 1955, when in the week beginning 29 June Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets was judged by Billboard magazine to be the most popular recording in the United States on the basis of sales and radio play. The term Rock and roll was claimed to have coined by a disc jockey named Alan Freed in 1951. Rock and roll of the mid 1950s evolved from the rhythm and blues of a few years earlier.

From the unique synthesis of musical traditions of the United States rock and roll began as an American phenomenon and grew...