374 ChaPter^7
“Rockin’ and Rollin”
While folk kept its association with political and protest music throughout the
1950s, a new type of music was emerging that would become the most pop-
ular entertainment form in 20th century American: Rock & Roll. Rock com-
bined African American sounds from the blues and jazz and added new,
faster, louder beats and rhythms, creating a boisterous new sound that woke
up people across the country, especially the young, and left them, in the words
of one of the more famous early rock songs, “all shook up.” Rock, with its
rhythms, its noise, and the new dances associated with it featuring faster,
gyrating body motions, like “The Twist,” was easily associated with sex, and
that frightened Americans who were concerned that “traditional” values were
in decay. In 1948, a scientist, Alfred Kinsey, published the results of a long-term
study into the sexual habits of Americans, titled Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male [the sequel about sex and women would come in 1953]. Kinsey found
that people enjoyed sex and had it frequently, often with multiple partners
throughout their life–a challenge to the idea of being a virgin at marriage and
monogamous thereafter–and that men had sex with men and women with
women. It was, to people of “decent values” a shocking report and it made
them fear that sex, like Communism, was undermining our conformist values,
was bringing subversion into the bedrooms of an otherwise “moral” country.
In fact, may conservatives attacked Kinsey as a Communist who was trying to
destroy American society.
So, with the country already anxious about sex, Rock added to their fears.
Indeed, the very term, “Rock & Roll,” coined by a disc jockey from Cleveland
named Alan Freed, had a double meaning, making people, especially youth,
think of music but also of the “rocking and rolling” of sex. Perhaps the first
Rock & Roll song to gain national attention was “Rock Around the Clock,”
by Bill Haley and the Comets. It took its rhythm from African American music
and added “fun” lyrics that teenagers could understand and enjoy and were a
bit naughty [“we’re gonna rock around the clock tonight/we’re gonna rock,
rock, rock til’ broad daylight”]. Not surprisingly, “Rock Around the Clock”
was featured in a film about Juvenile Delinquents [another pressing issue, as
we will see] called The Blackboard Jungle in 1955, was prominent in a famous
film about that era made in the 1970s, American Graffiti, and was the theme
song for Happy Days. While really innocent, this new music truly frightened