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So whadaya think, the first rock and roll song?


caveman

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Ummmmm, errrrrr they both have piano? Other than that you are stretching farther than a 6 year old with severe A.D.D. that got his hands on a stretch Armstrong that has been baking in the sun for 4 hours.

 

stretch-armstrong-560x359.jpg

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Rock & Roll was a term Alan Freed made up to make Rhythm & Blues palatable to white audiences but you can follow that R&B thread pretty far back. There's boogie woogie pianists back to the 30's, blues shouters fronting Kansas City swing bands, electric blues guitarists, New Orleans pianists, west coast piano trios, vocal groups both gospel and secular, Sister Rosetta Tharpe doing her electrified country blues gospel thing with the Lucky Millinder Orchestra, honking saxophone small-combo swing, Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Tiny Grimes, the Delmore Brothers' hillbilly boogie, Roscoe Gordon's bizarre proto-ska, and on and on.

 

But IMO if Rock & Roll can be said to be a distinct style it started when Earl Palmer straightened out the beat backing up Little Richard on Tutti Frutti. Not that there aren't plenty of genuine Rock & Roll songs with a shuffle beat but to me that seems like the dividing line.

 

Rocket 88 does have something but there's so much rocking R&B from the pre-Rock & Roll period that I don't think that question can ever be settled.

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Okay. I'd like everyone to take a listen to this track by Kokomo Arnold from 1935.

 

I'd like to get peoples' opinions.

 

To me, it has everything a rock and roll song needs, but it came out at least a decade before any song I've seriously heard bandied about as "The First Rock and Roll Song."

 

What say you?

 

[YOUTUBE]mT4DuBjXIvY[/YOUTUBE]

 

To me, it's rock and roll.

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RIP, Danny Cedrone :cry:

 

Cedrone was paid only $21 for his work on the session, as at that time Haley chose not to hire a full-time guitarist for his group. Cedrone would also play on the June 7, 1954 recording session for Haley's version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll" although he was not allotted the chance for another notable guitar solo.


On June 17, ten days after this session, Cedrone died of a broken neck after falling down a staircase (some sources say he died of a heart attack).

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You can keep going further and further back and pulling out examples of stuff that pretty much qualify. Listen to some Pinetop Smith boogie stuff from the late 20's and it sounds just like the stuff Jerry Lee Lewis put down about 25 years later.

 

A lot of what became recognized as the "rock and roll sound" has its origins in stuff from at least the 1920's in blues, gospel and hillbilly (country). Some of those influences could go as far back as the beginning of the 20th century. But we'll never know since music by black people and hillbillies was not considered worthy of recording back then.

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I say Roy Brown or Wynonie Haris' Good Rockin Tonight. I don't think that Ella cut sounds enough like rock. The Kokomo Arnold song might qualify if it had a bigger sound, but being just guitar and voice I don't think it qualifies.

 

This is a good website on very early rock.

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