The Persistence of Listen (A Rock 'n Roll Timeline) The Prelude, pre 1951

I get asked all the time if I know everything about music and the answer is a resounding NO! Nobody does, and there are many out there who share the same passion for music that know far more about it than I do. Don't get me wrong, I know a lot, but like anybody I have my preferences and I tend to spin around Rock and Country, Rap and R&B. If you ask me anything about Opera that didn't drop into my head from old Warner Brothers Cartoons (What's Opera Doc?) or much of any pop music that came out after the invention of Autotune, I'm totally lost. I have mad respect for Jazz Musicians and I recognize the foundational bits of the genre that were layered into the building blocks of Rock n' Roll, but if you go much beyond Django Reinhardt (Which I picked up from reading Harlan Ellison) or Chic Corea or The Yellowjackets, you will not find very deep waters. And Classical Fans, I cannot match the unbridled, mouth-frothing, bite the head off a bat, utter bugfuckedness (It's an Ellison word. You could look it up.) of you Classical Music Fans.

Like I said, I know a lot and I thought I might try an experiment of sorts. I wondered if I could pick at least 10 songs from every year starting at 1951, the year that the guitar became all unclean and fuzzy. Some years are longer than 10 songs but all are at least that long. These are just songs that I like, and the list is by no means complete (especially when we get to the 70's and 80's) and these aren't albums... we're talking singles here. Think of this as a cool rock radio station or a real juggernaut of a jukebox organized by the decade.

This first list is a mix of Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Jump Blues, and Up-Tempo Country  all of which I feel could fall neatly into the infinite mixtape of Rock n' Roll.

1. Pinetop's Boogie Woogie by Clarence "Pinetop" Smith, 1929.

2. Rhythm Is Our Business by Jimmy Lunceford, 1935.

3. Old Joe's Hittin' the Jug by Stuff Smith and the Onyx Club Boys, 1936.

4. Do You Wanna Jump, Children? by Count Basie, 1941.

5. Rock Me by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, 1938.

6. Caledonia (Caledonia Boogie) by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, 1945.

*7. That's All Right Mama by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, 1949.

8. Ravin' At The Haven by Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, 1947.

9. Boogie Chillin by John Lee Hooker, 1948.

10. Saturday Night Fish Fry by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, 1949.

11. The Fat Man by Fats Domino, 1949.

12. Boogie at Midnight by Roy Brown, 1949.

13. Pony Express by Freddie Mitchell, 1949.

14. Hot Rod Race by Arkie Shibley, 1950.

15. Boogie In The Park by Joe Hill Louis, 1950.

16. Sugar Lump by Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers, 1945.

17. R.M. Blues by Roy Milton and His Solid Senders, 1945.

18. The Honeydripper by Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers, 1945.

19. Good Rockin' Tonight by Roy Brown with Bob Ogden and His Orchestra, 1947.

20. Rock It For Me by Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb and His Orchestra, 1938.

21. Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues by Jim Jackson, 1927.

*That's All Right Mama will crop up later in the timeline but for now It will have the honor of being RCA's first RnB record issued on the new 45 rpm format.

Rock n' Roll Timeline : The Prelude 1927-1950

The Persistence of Listen (Prologue to Dan's Rock 'n Roll Timeline)

As a prologue of sorts, ("Prologue to what?" I hear you ask.) (We'll get there.) I thought I might do a quickie list of important dates for American Pop Music. There are certain moments where the technology changes radically, or something happens where the performers change the way we listen to and appreciate the music. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good place to dip your toes in.

1931 The Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” 

Created by George Beauchamp and made by Rickenbacker Electro, this is widely considered to be the first electric guitar. It was generally played as a lap steel but it wasn't a giant leap from this configuration to what came next.

1941 Les Paul’s “Log” 

Master guitarist Les Paul persuaded Epiphone to let him tinker around in their workshop on Sundays while production was shut down. The result was the first solid body electric guitar.

1948 The Fender Broadcaster (Telecaster) 

Leo Fender created a streamlined solid body electric guitar that proved popular enough to become the industry standard. The Telecaster helped to blur the lines between Blues, Jazz, R&B, Gospel and Country, and it's still popular today.

1948 Columbia Records introduces the first long-playing microgroove record. 

Spinning at 33 1/3 rpm, this bad boy allowed for a whopping 23 minutes of recorded sound per side. The first disc featuring the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, sounded the death-knell for its 78 rpm predecessors which only allowed for around 5 recorded minutes per side.

1949 RCA Victor introduces the 7” Vinyl disc with a big hole in the middle of it. 

45 rpm records were RCA Victor’s attempt to compete with Columbia Record’s new 33 1/3 technology. Even though the 45 rpm “singles” stuck around for a long while by pandering to the teenage market that craved, “just the single”, and they were the perfect size for the new jukeboxes, RCA Victor had to start producing 33 1/3 LPs by 1958 just to stay competitive.

1950 Here comes the Sun

Sam Phillips opens the Memphis Recording Service which would later become Sun Records. Sun Records would go on to record... well pretty much everybody.

1951 The Jukebox for the masses.

The JP Seeburg Company releases the first jukeboxes to use the new 45 rpm vinyl “singles”. The jukebox would eventually migrate everywhere people gathered, from dive-bars to Diners it would become an essential part of American culture for decades.

1951 Alan Freed’s Moondog Show. 

Cleveland radio D.J. Alan Freed popularizes the term rock ‘n roll to describe the mix of up-tempo Jazz, Jump Blues, R&B and Western Swing featured on his show.

1952 The Moondog Coronation Ball 

The first Moondog Coronation Ball, organized by Alan Freed, is held at the Cleveland Arena. It’s generally considered to be the first large scale rock concert.

1954 That's All Right

Elvis Presley records a cover of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” while screwing around between recording takes at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records recording studio. The combination of a pretty white boy singing African American Jump Blues and R&B resulted in a fiery apocalypse that changed music forever.

1959 The founding of Motown Records 

Detroit Michigan entrepreneur Barry Gordy Jr. signs an unknown doo-wop group called The Matadors to his new Tamla Records label. Later that year Gordy would change the label’s name to Motown and the band in question fronted by the legendary Smokey Robinson would change its name to The Miracles and the rest is history carved deeply into the foundational underpinnings of the American Pop Music scene.

1962 The Infinite Mixtape is born.

Phillips releases the Compact Cassette Tape to European audiences at The Berlin Radio Show. The new invention was released in The United States the following year. Cassette tapes allowed the listener to record their own songs in whatever order they liked and were extremely portable, allowing you to take your music anywhere

1964 The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. 

The Beatles made their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing a three-song set (All My Loving, Till There Was You and She Loves You) followed by a two song encore later in the show (I Saw Her Standing There and I Want To Hold Your Hand.) This program was viewed by a record-breaking 73 million viewers, and it simultaneously launched Beatlemania in the United States and kicked in the doors for the “British Invasion” of American pop music.

1965 Dylan Plugs In

At The Newport Folk Festival, folk music’s poet laureate plugged in an electric guitar and launched into a blistering rendition of "Maggie’s Farm", dragging the insular folk music scene kicking and screaming into the broader realms of American pop music.

1979 Sony introduces the Walkman. 

Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka set a challenge to his engineering team to design a headphone friendly audio player so he could listen to music on long flights. The result was the Sony Walkman which was small, lightweight and extremely portable. The Walkman branding and structural paradigm lasted through the shift to Compact Disc and well into the digital age.

 

1981 MTV 

Debuting with the prophetically titled “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, MTV followed a top 40 radio format that would lead to a shift in how the world listened to music and a radical change in how bands were promoted.

1984 The Compact Disc ruins everything.

Bruce Springsteen’s "Born In the USA" is the first album released in the United States on Sony and Phillips’ Compact Disc technology. While there were earlier releases in Japan, the release of this album signaled a paradigm shift in the way we listen to music in the United States. And, we got to catch up with the rest of the world.

 

1999 The Birth of Napster (while we're on the subject of the paradigm shift)

Created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, Napster allowed users to share electronic copies of music stored on their personal computers over the internet. Even though their company was shut down by a tsunami of copyright infringement lawsuits, it heralded a major change in technology and the way we listen to music, sounding the death-knell of the American Recording Industry’s corporate system.

2001 The Apple iPod 

Replacing the Sony Walkman as the portable music player of choice, the iPod capitalized on the MP3 sound file format and dominated the market for the next 20 years until Apple’s iPhone became ubiquitous enough to discontinue the line. Today most people listen to music on their portable device of choice.

 

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