In this free-for-all Friday, Trent explores the varied roots and offshoots of rock and roll music.
Transcript:
Welcome to the The Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
“Everybody’s talking about the new sound. Funny, but it’s still rock and roll to me.” That was Billy Joel. Today, we are talking about musical genres, the history of rock and roll, and it’s many, many, many permutations into various genres in modern music.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I am your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Today I want to talk about a webpage that I found that was really interesting that has cataloged all of the different genres that have branched off from rock and roll music, as well as its precursors. It’s a really cool webpage. It’s called 100 Years of Rock in Less Than a Minute.
What makes it really interactive is that it shows a chart showing all of these different genres, how they lead up to rock and roll in the 50s and 60s, and then the genres that play out from that. But you can click on every genre and you hear a little musical sample of the genre, and it has an arrow showing what it came from and the genres that came from it to show the evolution of music. It’s just a really cool thing to see human creativity, how we build off of the accomplishments and work of others, tweak it and modify it, add our own cultural elements, to present that really unique sound.
Rock and roll has an interesting element to it when it comes to the history of music. There is a video on YouTube called Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. There’s a lot of songs like that that talk about 100 best songs, 100 most popular songs, so they differ a bit, but they get a general sense of the change in music.
When you listen to it, what’s really fascinating is that when you listen to popular music in the United States, and this is just the United States. Obviously, in England and other places, the music is different. In fact, a lot of our music here in the US came about because of things like the British Invasion. The Beatles come here, the Rolling Stones, British new wave pop, things like that coming to the United States and changing things up. And then we export a lot of our elements of country and other elements of music going around to other places and the creativity continues.
But if you listen to the previous music … I’ll play a little bit of this. I’m really hoping I don’t get any copyright issues today. I’m just going to go for it. Let’s just see what happens. When you listen from 1924 until the early 1950s, the music is just really similar. It’s all a bunch of crooning, slower jazz ensembles. It has almost a static feel for it for about 30 years. I’m going to play a few of them. Here’s Gershwin, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue. Sorry, in the year 1924.
And this is Ben Bernie, 1925. A lot of piano, a lot of rag time. (singing)
That’s a Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Let’s see if we have a few other elements here. We’ve got Duke Wellington, It Don’t Mean a Thing. (singing)
Ethel Waters, Stormy Weather. It continues on. We’ve got Bing Crosby. (singing) Then also we get a lot of swing music during this time.
But as you go through the 20s, 30s, and 40s, a lot of jazz, a lot of swing and big band. You go to the early 50s, you still have crooners, like Dean Martin. (singing) 1954, Mr. Sandman. When you think of 1950s music, a lot of times you think of that, like in Back to the Future when he goes back in time to 1955, you hear The Chordettes, Mr. Sandman, which it came out a year earlier.
But then I feel like you have the big change ushering in rock and roll in 1957 with the King, Elvis Presley. That is what changes everything in the US, I would say. (singing) The recent biopic of Elvis, I’ve seen clips of it, I’ve heard mixed reviews on it, but it’s got really good reenactments at least of his early concerts. What made Elvis really successful is that he brought music that had been popular among African-Americans to largely white audiences. There’s this white southern boy that knows how to shake his hips like nobody’s business and brings in this new sound for people to hear. You have girls that just start screaming when they see him, how he shakes his hips. But that was a real thing because when you think about rock and roll and the history of it, the precursor to rock and roll tends to be jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie woogie, gospel, as well as some elements of country music.
That was kind of the precursor for that. And Elvis was the one who put a lot of that together and brought these elements in for more of a largely white audience to be able to hear. It was controversial. The phrase rock and roll itself can refer to the fervor in black church and gospel performances, but it was also a slang term to refer to sexual activity. And Elvis, with his hip swinging, really brought a lot of that out.
Going back then to a hundred years of rock visualized, it’s so interesting. I’ll play a few of these clips and you see where they all start to come together. To give you an idea of this development of the sound here on the website, and I’ll play some of it. To see how it grows, you start in the 19th century, early 20th century, which is blues … just playing the blues guitar. Then that develops more into something like jump blues (singing) and then eventually into rhythm and blues by 1950. That itself is the offspring to rock and roll or doo wop (singing), which itself then turns into more of what you would call beat music of the 60s (singing), and then that develops more into the pop rock of the 70s.
I love this. It’s a cool website, concerthotels.com, 100 Years of Rock. It’s all different kinds of genres to see where this comes off and veers off into different directions. Blues, country turns into things like rockabilly and rock in the middle of the 20th century. Rock fragments into all different kinds of rock and sound, which also turns into … so you have things like blues rock, for example. Which then it is one of the precursors to heavy metal (singing). You get that heavier sound (singing), which then turns into more developed forms of metal music (singing).
I’ll give you another example. I just think it’s so neat to see how when you look at a chart like this and you see the genres of music, how there’s slow incremental changes in the sound. It’s not these dramatic jumps. It’s how evolution works, basically. It’s these small changes over time. We have found the missing links in the evolution of music.
Another one, country and rock really have a lot of kindred elements here, and a lot of that goes back to things like Appalachian folk music (singing). Okay, (singing) so then Appalachian folk would become later in the 1960s folk rock (singing), which then turns more into soft rock (singing) or country rock (singing), in which today in the 90s then turns into more like alternative country (singing). There’s a lot that you can play with here to see the development of these different genres over time.
That was it. I just wanted to give you a little bit of that. I thought it was really interesting. The other video I’d recommend is Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. As I said, once you get past 1957 with Elvis, it’s so interesting to see the development of rock into things like the British Invasion, which then turns into more like the 80s bands, hair bands, metal, and then grunge in the early 90s, and then the resurgence of pop in the 2000s. As you get more into the 2015s, later 2010s, early 2020s, we almost have a return. The circle starts to come full turn away from the louder sound of the 80s, for example, or 90s grunge. Remember I said earlier in the 20th century is more individual vocals and solos, crooning, if you will, that kind of makes a return in the 2010s (singing). With things like Adele, for example, in 2015 and other similar genres.
Fascinating stuff. I hope that you enjoyed this. As I said, 100 Years of Rock, visualize, go and check it out, or Most Recognizable Song Each Year of the Past 100 Years. Thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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