Where did rock and roll come from?

Rock and roll came out of Black American music. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, musicians in the United States blended rhythm and blues with gospel, jazz, boogie-woogie, electric blues, jump blues, swing and folk. The new mix got its name only in 1954, but its ingredients were already on blues records from the 1920s. Modern scholarship increasingly describes it as the electrification and acceleration of African-American musical traditions.

One of the people who plugged those traditions in was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who mixed electric guitar into gospel. By about the age of six she was performing with her mother in a travelling evangelical troupe, billed as a "singing and guitar playing miracle", in shows that were part sermon and part gospel concert. By the 1930s and 1940s she was famous for gospel records that mixed spiritual lyrics with electric guitar. In 1942 a critic reviewing her song "Rock Me" used the words "rock and roll" for her style of spiritual singing. Many churchgoers were shocked to hear gospel words set to music that sounded secular, but the secular audiences loved her. She later influenced Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Then came Chuck Berry. In 1955 he recorded "Maybellene", his version of a country song called "Ida Red". It sold over a million copies and reached number one on the rhythm and blues chart. Berry wrote about teen life, consumerism and music itself, and he added guitar solos and showmanship. When he first saw the record, he discovered that two other people, including the radio DJ Alan Freed, had been listed as writers. He fought it in court and won his full credit back.

The name itself spread through the radio. In 1951 Freed began playing this music on his programme in Cleveland and calling it "rock and roll", and the phrase stuck. So rock and roll was not invented in one moment by one person, and even the title of "first rock and roll record" has several claimants, from Tharpe's 1945 "Strange Things Happening Every Day" to the 1951 "Rocket 88". It was a river fed by gospel, blues and country.