Relation By Design

Rock and roll edition

They put a parking lot on a piece of land
Where the supermarket used to stand
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local palais

Who knew that this 1983 classic from the British rock band the Kinks doubled as an entry in my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” series! It’s kind of a funny diversion for rock song lyrics, isn’t it? But I suppose that sort of thing was part of the charm of the Kinks, who are described as being the “most English” of the British bands of the era.

Apparently some people thought “Come Dancing” wouldn’t do well in America because dance halls were too British of a theme. But if you’re old enough, you can remember a similar craze in America. In fact, one of the first buildings I ever featured in this newsletter had a stint as a dance hall, probably in the 1950s.

I knew this song, but I didn’t know the words, as with most songs. I came across it because I’ve been reading a bit about the history of rock music lately. It’s quite interesting how it basically all descended from American blues. If you drew a phylogenetic tree for rock, it would all start with a single genre from the American South in the 1920s or 1930s. But curiously, the main branch of that descent went through England and not America.

I guess the high-level way of capturing what interests me about “firsts” and “lasts” is the idea of taxonomy and descent. It’s an interesting exercise to try to pin down precisely where a thing begins or ends, and to trace its evolution, just as we do for plants and animals.

Where did rock and roll actually begin? Like my question, which town in America is the last one we ever built?, the question of identifying the first rock and roll song is possibly not answerable. But that’s what’s so interesting about categorization: while categories obviously exist, they break down at the edges. Out of uncertainty emerges certainty. We don’t absolutely know what the first bird was, but we know that there were dinosaurs and there were birds. We know that blues exists and rock exists, but somehow the line between them is fuzzy. The same phenomenon of “true” versus “transitional” “fossils” exists.

One fellow on Reddit suggests that “When the Levee Breaks”—the same song as the Led Zeppelin classic (again it’s curious how many old American blues songs were covered by 1960s British rock bands)—first written and recorded in 1929, could possibly be the earliest “true” rock and roll song:

To me, this song is just plainly, obviously an early kind of Rock n Roll: the riffs, the rhythm, the instrumental sections, the strumming patterns. It’s acoustic rock n roll music with a simple 12 bar format, recorded in 1929.

As we know, Rock music developed out of a synthesis of existing musical forms, with Blues being a heavy contributor along with Rhythm and Blues and Gospel, and especially the music of black Pentecostal churches was a crucial component of its development. (e.g. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others in the late 30s and early 40s).

Wikipedia lists rock n roll as an musical genre that Rock and Roll “emerged as a defined musical style in the United States in the early to mid-1950s”. Given that, “When the Levee Breaks” seems like a SUPER early incarnation of what would become Rock music. I’m not aware of an older one, and wondering if anyone else might be.

Unfortunately, he didn’t get many comments, and mostly critical ones: that early rock was just blues/rhythm and blues/gospel repackaged for white audiences and stolen from black musicians. This is kind of true, but what we now consider rock music obviously is a distinct genre from the blues of the early 20th century. One commenter says the question of the “first” is “pointless.” But he also offered a 1927 song, Barbecue Blues, as an earlier and even more rock-and-roll-ish entry. The point, I guess, is that genre/category is a kind of arbitrary thing we impose looking back, not an inherent thing we can discern. But this fuzziness is precisely why it’s interesting to me.