Search - Birth Rock N Roll :: Birth Rock N Roll

Mark S. from AMISSVILLE, VA
Reviewed on 5/20/2019...

Ask ten people to name the first rock & roll song and you're likely to receive ten different answers. Entire books have been written on the subject, and no consensus has ever been reached. Nor can one: first, you'd have to settle on a definition of rock & roll, and that in itself would spark a whole new set of disagreements. Nonetheless, it's a given that the increasing encroachment of primarily black Southern blues and white country music upon each other between the 1920s and the early '50s ultimately resulted in the music that came to be called rock & roll. This three-CD box set from Britain, The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll, comes no closer than any other collection in providing a definitive answer -- and its lack of liner notes may be an indication that the compilers didn't even want to try. Instead, the music is left to speak for itself -- each of these 60 primal American recordings deserves its own wing in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The first disc, "Blues 'n' Boogie," reaches into the pre-R&B era of boogie-woogie piano players (Albert Ammons), jump blues (Louis Jordan), and the first stirrings of real R&B (Joe Liggins, Roy Brown, Big Joe Turner) to set the scene. Some of the earliest tracks recognizable as rock & roll (Fats Domino's "The Fat Man," Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," Bo Diddley's anthem to himself) close out the disc and the thread is picked up at the top of disc two, "Southern Roots." Again, the R&B side of the equation is weighted heavily here, with Ike Turner's earth-moving "Rocket 88" leading things off, followed directly by Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right Mama," one of the two songs Elvis Presley covered for his first Sun Records single (the other, Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky," follows soon). With the exception of the Monroe bluegrass classic, only a brief midsection of the disc is given over to the country music that contributed so much to the basis of rock & roll: tracks from Hank Williams and Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb and Lefty Frizzell. Those aren't nearly enough to make the case that country music was half of the rock & roll soup, but it's hard to quibble when the remainder of the second disc is loaded with such monumental recordings as LaVern Baker's "Tweedle-Dee," Hank Ballard & the Midnighters "Work with Me, Annie," its answer song "Roll with Me, Henry," by Etta James, as well as cornerstone hits by Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, and Little Richard. The third disc in the set is assigned entirely to doo wop. That's a questionable decision on some levels, as vocal group recordings, although undoubtedly vital to the picture, surely don't require a complete disc when it's at the expense of excluding such pioneers as Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, James Brown, and Elvis himself (to be fair, all were presumably omitted due to licensing restrictions). Still, it's hard to argue with a 20-song CD that manages to pack in such durable gems as Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?," the Chords' "Sh-Boom," the El Dorados' "At My Front Door," the Dominoes' "Sixty Minute Man," and the Cadillacs' "Speedoo." All collected on the disc titled "On the Corner," they represent the D.I.Y. spirit of early rock & roll and serve as a reminder that five guys harmonizing in a hallway could make music that would still thrill a half-century later -- and that one of the great artistic forces of the past century truly did have a humble beginning. ~ Jeff Tamarkin, Rovi