The first, and arguably most important, was another product of 1948, when the California instrument maker Leo Fender released the first mass-produced electric guitar. When white pop music entered the idiom in the immediate postwar era, rhythm and blues became rock and roll. A mixture of white and black musical forms from the Mississippi Delta, country music with the grinding of machinery and automobiles implicit in its grinding beat, rhythm and blues spread across the nation from its birthplace, Detroit. Among the nation’s favorite tunes that year were Frank Loesser’s “On a Slow Boat to China” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” Kim Gannon’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Jay Livingston and Ray Evans’s “Buttons and Bows,” George Morgan’s “Candy Kisses,” and assorted hits by the Andrews Sisters and Frank Sinatra.īut in 1948, thanks to the mixing of Americans of different ethnic backgrounds and from different parts of the country during World War II, a new kind of music was finding its way onto the airwaves and in roadside truck stops and juke joints. That year saw the debut of Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King’s lovely crooner “Tennessee Waltz,” with which Eddy Cochran would score a pop hit and Patsy Cline a country-chart smash a little more than decade later. To judge by the charts, 1948 belongs to the big band and swing eras. Some would say 1928, when Henry Thomas recorded “Bull Doze Blues,” which Canned Heat would record forty years later as “Goin’ Up the Country.” Still others would push the date up to 1952, when Clyde McPhatter recorded the first of several jumped-up versions of Stick McGhee’s “Wine Spo-De-O-Dee.”īut if one year is to be declared rock’s birthdate, it might well be 1948, when technology and popular culture coincided to produce the makings of a new kind of music. When was rock and roll born? Some scholars of popular music would say in 1935, the year Elvis Aron Presley entered the world, the year hillbilly fiddle tunes began to meet African American country blues in the music of popular entertainers such as Jimmie Rodgers.

Principios del rock and roll Hillbilly