The phenomenon of the mid 1950’s known as rock ‘n’ roll was little more than a mixture of white country music and the old “stompin’” blues out of the rural south and Midwest. It was a percussive, pulsating, shouting, urgent brand of dance music, exaggerated by guitar amplification, heavy off beat drumming, suggestive lyrics and in Elvis Presley’s stage ac, wildly erotic body movements.
For the “War Baby” generation of white, middle class teenage Americans brought up on a diet of Tin Pan Alley’s sentimental ballads, rock ‘n’ roll was a liberating revolutionary escape into a kin fog purely physical music(2139).
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