Rock And Roll
...stepped up tempos, and loud guitars, provided American teens of the 1950s the perfect excuse to dance crazy new dances and wear wild new hairstyles. Like all genres of music, rock and roll has as many definitions as it does fans. It was a defying time for music, and a reckoning for teenagers. It was the time of rock and roll. Though rock and roll was a fad to many, rock and roll continued on to become one of the most popular and recognizable music forms.
The explosive events of the mid-1950s first introduced the idea of rock and roll to the world. It was the themes and artistic styles of that very special, brief time, that spawned the movement of rock and roll, and that later artists simply refined and redefined. The 1950s were rather safe and innocent, and rock and roll established a foundation for the ideals that youth could pursue in such an environment. Rock and roll was also forced to respond to the issues of race relations, war, sexuality, and drugs in the mid-fifties. Rock and roll was like a role model to people everywhere. The very first orchestrated rock and roll concert was led by Alan Freed on March 21st, 1952. The
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concert was mostly poor people and was free entry to whomever. It was held in Cleveland, Ohio; where Fred was also born. Freed was a disc jockey that began playing
rock and roll music for his mostly white audiences in the beginning of 1951. Afterwards, rock and roll became a national phenomenon which would eventually envelop the world.
The word rocking was first used by gospel singers in the South as a slang term for spiritual rapture. "So as can be seen, rock and roll was so much more vital and alive than any type of music anyone has ever heard before that it needed a new category: Rock and roll was much more than new music. It was an obsession and a way of life" (Rolling Stone: The Decades of Rock and Roll 13)....
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