Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll or rock 'n' roll) is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, jump blues, country, jazz, and gospel music. Though elements of rock and roll can be heard in country records of the 1930s, and in blues records from the 1920s, rock and roll did not acquire its name until the 1950s.
The term "rock and roll" now has at least two different meanings, both in common usage: as synonymous with rock music and as music that originated in the mid-1950s and later developed "into the more encompassing international style known as rock music". For the purpose of differentiation, this article uses the second definition.
In the earliest rock and roll styles of the late 1940s and early 1950s, either the piano or saxophone was often the lead instrument, but these were generally replaced or supplemented by guitar in the middle to late 1950s. The beat is essentially a blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, the latter almost always provided by a snare drum. Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), a string bass or (after the mid-1950s) an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit. Beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language. It went on to spawn various sub-genres, often without the initially characteristic backbeat, that are now more commonly called simply "rock music" or "rock".
Read more about Rock And Roll: Terminology, Origins, Decline, British Rock and Roll, Cultural Impact
Famous quotes containing the words Rock And Roll, rock and roll, rock and/or roll:
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I neednt argue with that; Im right and I will be proved right. Were more popular than Jesus now; I dont know which will go firstrock and roll or Christianity.”
—John Lennon (19401980)
“When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyangumumi, kiduo, or lele mama?”
—Julius K. Nyerere (b. 1922)
“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He cant even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“I know its only rock n roll but I like it.”
—Mick Jagger (b. 1943)