CHAPTER 17 | ROCK AND ROLL 423
indie labels had its own distinctive style, whether the gospel-tinged sound of
Atlantic, the electric blues sound of Chess, or the countrifi ed sound of Sun and
King. Celebrating bodily joys, rooted in black traditions, yet stylized for distri-
bution in the modern marketplace, postwar rhythm and blues was targeted for
black listeners, though most company owners and producers were white.
Rhythm and blues owed much to broadcasting. During the 1930s there had
been no such thing as a radio station aimed at black listeners. As black radio began
to take shape, however, the new record labels began to serve them. And after the
war, across the southern United States black radio matured, with the founding
of stations centered on rhythm and blues and also, depending on their location,
offering gospel, traditional blues, or jazz. The R&B artists active in recording and
broadcasting were also experienced live performers who learned their trade in
the theaters, dance halls, clubs, tent shows, and other black venues that made up
the “chitlin circuit.” Broadcasting increased the diversity of their audience: whites
could listen to black radio, and they could buy records by black artists. As one indus-
try fi gure put it, “you could segregate schoolrooms and buses, but not the airwaves.”ROCK AND ROLL
No social fact about music in the years after World War II is more noteworthy
than the growing infl uence of teenagers in the marketplace. W hile the rise of
the youthful popular music fan has often been linked to the advent of rock and
roll in the 1950s, the careers of Benny Goodman in the 1930s and Frank Sinatra
in the 1940s indicate that teenagers had been a growing economic force for two
decades before rock and roll. What was new in the postwar era was a growing
“generation gap” that did much to transform the popular sphere, especially as a
business enterprise. Unlike their parents, who had experienced both the hard-
ships of the Great Depression and the heightened idealism of the World War II
years, postwar teenagers came of age in a consumerist society that offered little
in the way of unambiguous moral guideposts. Perhaps more openly than ever
before, young Americans in those years were searching for social identity.
J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), written from an adoles-
cent’s perspective, seemed to speak for the whole postwar generation. Its hero,
sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfi eld, experiences growing up as a process ofCD 3.14 Listening Guide 17.3 “Good Rocking Tonight” WYNONIE HARRISListen & Refl ect
- Although each chorus follows the traditional 12-bar blues chord progression, the lyrics do
not conform to the archetypal AAB format (as in “St. Louis Blues”; see LG 11.1). Instead,
certain points in each chorus allow for new lyrics, and others are always the same and thus
constitute a refrain. Examine the lyrics and consider their pattern; how might each chorus
be described as a verse-and-chorus structure?
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