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). .
Rock "n" roll revolutionized the music industry. Because it was music in the oral tradition, one or two hearings were enough to learn it, sheet music sales plummeted as record sales soared. Tin Pan Alley was in trouble. .
To survive Tin Pan Alley kept the new music's surface elements, the beat, instrumentation, and repertory, but signed up new teen idols, which were good looking, white young, middle class singer, to record anything that even mildly resembled rock "n" roll. Thus arrived Pat Boone, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, and the Everly Brothers(2140). .
By 1961, rock "n" roll was just another item in a wildly diverse song market. Rock "n" roll gradually gave way to new "age rock", an era of subtler, more profound, and more socially conscious "youth music." Among the influences on this new music were the Beatles, an English group strongly influenced by American rock "n" roll and revival of folk music, headed by groups such as The Weavers and Peter, Paul and Merry, and singers Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. But most important was the goring political-social awareness of there performers as that rallied American youth, by action and original songs, in the protest movements of the 1960's(2140).
At the Same time the so called Hippie movement swept the campuses.
