How Rock And Roll Has Been Affected And Evolved Through The Ages

How Rock and Roll Has Been Affected and Evolved Through the Ages Larry Williams, the blues and rock and roll singer, once said, “Rock and Roll has no beginning and no end for it is the very pulse of life itself.” With this quote, he shows that rock and roll truly is an ever-changing enigma. Its lifespan is similar to that of a human’s life because it has consisted of many phases like rockabilly, doowop, and many others. It has had its ups and its downs with the appearance of young new talent that inspired people around the world, and the death of superstars has ripped fans apart as long as this historical music genre has existed. Legends of rock and roll such as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presleyhave taken the industry by storm altering it significantly.

In a blog post titled “The Antecedents of 1950s Rock and Roll,” the author characterizes western swing as “the sub-genre of jazz” and that it is “dance music performed by a band” ("The Antecedents of 1950s Rock and Roll" 2013). He even goes as far as saying that western swing is the reason that rock and roll was born. The author explains that western string was one of the first genres to make music easier to access to the public. It helped create the idea of bands thus adding a new aspect to the music industry. Not only did western swing just shape rock and roll industrially, but also stylistically. During this period in the late 1930s and early 1940s, blues and jazz musicians under the western swing category “began to experiment with rhythmic music and amplification.” They also started to shout vocals and utilize solos with saxophones ("The Antecedents of 1950s Rock and Roll" 2013).All of those things are incredibly familiar and prevalent in rock and rollof the past and the present. As mentioned previously, country music also came in to impact rock and roll music slightly later in the 1940s and 1950s. Country, specifically rockabilly, introduced new instruments like the drums and electric guitar to rock music allowing it to have a wider variety of rhthyms and sound. It also served as one of the first ways for female singers to get into the music business by performing this southern style of music ("The Antecedents of 1950s Rock and Roll"