The Birth of Rock & Roll

Don't understand this. Isn't punk a form of rock? (As far as I know they were only punk early on anyway.)

You're right. It's just semantics. Iiiiiiiiiiii know it's only rock n roll but I like it

   Punk,...Metal,....Grunge,....  the're all sub-genres of Rock & Roll.  Another thing that I wanted to mention was The WHO in the early 60's. Don't get me wrong, I like some of their tunes....."Tommy" & "Magic Bus" etc, but what would you call it?  Destroy Rock? ....maybe Performance Rock?  When they performed, they would destroy their instruments. Of course the audience loved it.

no rjc , punk was a rebellion against what rock and roll had become , folk got pigsick of interminably long , guitar / keyboard / drum solos , that had gone through endless polishing to make the sound pristne clean 

they wanted instead a raw punchy , in your face , do it yourself form of music that got its message across in around 3 minutes 

maybe you are right though mate as this essentially what rock and roll was in its infancy , but by the time punk came out in the 70s ,rock had becoming for many boring 

The definition of rock is much more complex than it used to be. Back in the 60s and 70s almost any of the new music put out was simply called rock. Black Sabbath sat comfortably(?) beside The Mamas and the Papas. Some artists varied their styles between albums and even on the same album. I have great respect and admiration for that. Bands that stay pigeonholed become boring to me after a while. For example here's two songs from Meddle, one of Pink Floyd's defining albums, that show some of the breadth rock used to have before it was divided into all the sub-categories we have today. I know these songs are later than the timeframe under discussion here but they are examples I could think of offhand on one cup of coffee.
This first one should be palatable to most folks here.

The second is quite long, one LP side in fact, and is probably an acquired taste. I'm posting a link to a live show to demonstrate that although some extreme effects are used the band could perform this song in concert.
Pink Floyd - Echoes - Live at Pompeii   ( I had to update this link. The first post was only half the song.)

Since this is about the birth of R&R and not the 70s, 80s or 2020s and since no punk, heavy metal or what have you couldn't even be glimpsed in the horizon at this point,  it seems pointless to discuss, on this thread, whether these genres are R&R (or just Rock [or even is Rock even R&R?]) or not when, after asking twice for anyone to define R&R and no one has taken up that gauntlet.  

Most music genres can be defined musically... jazz, blues, swing all had musical traits that more or less define them. We say R&R developed from R&B, blues, C&W, even jazz maybe, but that's really meaningless if what we call R&R is arbitrary.  

Is defining Rock and Roll like loosely defining art: I can't explain it, but I know it when I hear it. 
Maybe it's the core instrumentation... guitars, bass, drums?

I'm starting to think it might have more to do with something else..... (this was the whole purpose of this thread)

R&B had been around a while and Blues even longer. Segregation marginalized this Black-created music and it wasn't too popular among the uptight middle class While crowd. Oddly, in the rural South and mountain regions, at least in the Appalachians,  Black music, Blues and Gospel, seems to have blended in more readily with the rural White music (it's really a shame we have to call music, that universal language, Black or White, but that's how it was).  Radio stations and recording companies, especially the independents, other than those specializing in Black music, were hesitant to play it.  Black music=Devil's music was a prevailing attitude (this attitude was alive and kicking even in 1985 it seems).  Getting White musicians to play a slightly toned-down version (a stroke of genius) made the music more palatable to the far vaster targeted White audience.  The key thing was to walk that tightrope between too-highly-charged and too-bland.   Bill Haley managed this perfectly and people responded. Elvis notched it up to a level that girls loved and authorities hated.. the girls won.... but only for a while because if you stop and think about it, Don McClean was pretty accurate and Feb. 3, 1959 was indeed the day the music died...at least in the US. he 1950s came in with a bang and went out with a plane crash that heralded a period of embarrassing, Big Label controlled blandness... around the start of 1964 what the Beatles and a little later the Rolling Stones and the Animals brought over from England not only revitalized the Rock & Roll scene, it redefined it. 

Yeah, my example was off the mark. I don't think I know rock even when I hear it. There has always been so much variety that it almost defies definition. I guess one way to define it is by who plays it. There are rock stations, country stations, classical stations, etc. Wherever it plays may be what it is.

I think it's OK to talk about its development otherwise we will just be talking about jazz and blues and skiffle up to 1954

My post wasn't in response to yours....

I listened to an interview with Glen Campbell a few weeks ago. He started out to be a jazz guitarist and along the way found himself playing every type of music conceivable. He was very on board with the idea that music is music and classifications were just a tool record companies, radio stations, producers, etc. used to target audiences and get the most money.  His contention was that any musician worth the name could and would play any kind of music with equal facility and enthusiasm.  Campbell showed up in LA around 1959 and became part of an instrumental group called the Champs. They had two groups actually, one played in the studio and the other toured. Campbell was in the touring Champs. The Challenge Studio Champ group which included two icons and much later a duo, Jimmy Seals on sax and Dash Croft on drums, made such songs as "Tequila" and the "Limbo Rock."   This was an important step for Campbell as it lead to his Gold Star Studio gig, which in turn lead to his solo career.  
I guess the Champs biggest competition in this instrument R&R genre was The Ventures who had a major hit with Chet Atkins "Walk Don't Run" in 1960. Groups like the Surfaris ("Wipe-Out") came much later.

cool for the tip of the hat to wipeout , a wicked tune 

heres another one i like , gene chandler's Duke of Earl 

Fifties rock was about songs.

Pink Floyd thrived on albums until A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which I listened to on nearly every trip to Seattle 1989-1991 (twice a month). Moreover, the band was no longer capable of concerts because Waters and Gilmore hated each other.

Springfield! Wonder where that came from? Probably the bourbon.

Back to the main topic:

The Blues gave us rock, rock gave us everything else, even modern Country.

I suppose the technical (although admittedly broadly general) definition of r&r is a I-IV-V chord structure over a 4/4 beat.  That covers a lot of r&r, but also a lot of the blues, some jazz, some country, some gospel, etc.  Since r&r borrowed from many sources, mainly the blues, I don't think you can define or pinpoint what makes it r&r, only the sub-genres.

Interesting thought.... 

Thanks for starting this. It's the best thread I've read on here. V interesting

hi

I'm a glad you're a likin' it.

The above video is about the Club Cosmopolitan which was located in a former grocery store on 1644 Bond Ave. in East St. Louis, a rather upscale place owned by a St. Louis cop named Joe Lewis.   Note that none of what is shown in the video is actually that venue. 
The creator calls this spot the Birthplace of Rock & Roll.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't... but here's the story (some of which he relates in the video).
A band the frequently played the Cosmo, pretty much a boogie woogie jazz band, called the Sir John Trio, or sometimes Sir John and Trio, lost their sax player, Alvin Bennett, who had a stroke. In was New Years Eve (1953) and the leader, Johnnie Johnson, looking frantically for a fill-in, hired Berry, a guitarist, planning on replacing him too as soon as he found another sax player.  As it turned out, Berry proved popular with the crowd and brought a bluesy guitar and a hillbilly voice to the mix. Soon, what was now being called Johnnie Johnson and Trio, was a hot commodity.

a 1954 Argus newspaper ad

Chuck Berry playing the Club Cosmopolitan

While at the Cosmo, Berry had been writing original material (45 years later Johnson would sue Berry claiming he co-wrote and arranged the songs). Now in 1955, they all packed up and moved to Chicago where they caught the eye of Muddy Waters no less. He took them to a small indie studio in Bronzeville Chicago where Waters had recorded just the year before. There he introduced the trio to Phil and Leonard Chess and they recorded a series of songs, one of which would be Chuck Berry's first hit, "Maybellene."  This leads to a curiosity. In the 1960s Berry would sue the Beach Boys for reworking "Sweet Little Sixteen" and turning it into "Surfin' USA."  But Berry did the exact same thing with "Maybellene."  Familiar with the C&W music of the times, Berry knew the song by Bob Willis the the Texas Playboys called "Ida Red." He reworked this song and turned it into "Maybellene."

I don't know that R&R started with Chuck Berry, but he certainly put his indelible mark on it early on. 

I really like Little Richard. It's amazing to me how raucous his sound was.

Little Richard is fascinating. His roots are Gospel.

His vocal influence is said to have been Sister Rosetta Tharpe:

While Ike Turner influenced his piano playing:

That certainly wasn't the kind of piano playing I expected from old Texas. I looked them up and learned they played quite a bit of Swing. It's also the earliest I've ever seen a right handed electric flipped to play left handed.

I've read different opinions from different musicians. Some musicians, mostly from days gone by, claim that the majority of music is rehashed from previous music anyway so there should be no big fuss. Others get upset if you so much as imitate a couple bars of melody.  I feel there shouldn't be a problem as long as the music is changed in some significant ways. Then there are songs that are just blatent rip-offs of another musician's work. I guess it works both ways.

I've heard many, many songs that contain phrases extremely similar to some other song or songs. From the rest of the piece it is usually obvious that it's just coincidence. Our ears just like certain rhythms and melodies more than others so it doesn't surprise me if totally unrelated pieces may have similar sounding phrases.