Review Of All Shook Up: How Rock And Roll Changed America

American youth of the 1950s weren't crazy about the easy-listening pop music their parents enjoyed. Crooners like Johnny Ray, who sang, “Gee but it’s great after staying out late/walking my baby back home/Arm and arm over meadow and farm/walking my baby back home” and balladeers like Perry Como singing, "Don’t let the stars get in your eyes /Don’t let the moon break your heart / Love blooms at night / in daylight it dies," did not excite the younger population. Fifties popular music was for adults and not quite what the teens wanted to hear at their school dances, in soda shop or in their cars after school.

Yet change was in the air. The end of World War II had brought changes to America including a new era of radio broadcasting. As television

Altschuler discusses media commentator Jeff Greenfield’s opinion about the influences of Rock and Roll on American youth. Greenfield states, “Nothing we see in the counterculture [of the 1960’s], not the clothes, the hair, the sexuality, the drugs, the rejection of the reason, the resort to symbols and magic – none of it is separable from the coming to power in the 1950s of rock and roll music.” He continues with “Brewed in the hidden corners of black American cities, its [Rock-n-Roll] rhythms infected white Americans, seducing them out of the kind of temperate bobby-sox passions out of which Andy Hardy films are spun. Rock and Roll was elemental, savage, dripping with sex; it was just as our parents feared.” (Altschuler, 8) Rock and Roll stood as a powerful alternative to the conformist ideals Americans had valued. What was originally slang for ‘having sex’ became a new aggressive music genre. Innovations in musical instruments and technology, young fresh talent and savvy record producers created a young population of new consumers who helped change ‘race music’ into rock and

In the post war prosperity, teenagers became a powerful market of their own. Wexler writes, ”Their buying power was real, their emotional needs immediate, their libidinous drive no longer reflected by the dead-and-gone fox-trots of their parents. Suddenly there was another force at work – old but new, primal yet complex, a music informed by the black genius for expressing pent-up frustration, joy, rage or ecstasy in a poetic context marked by hip humor and irresistible rhythm.” (Brackett, pg. 91)

Fats Domino found fame in rhythm and blues as well as early rock and roll. He was known to shove his piano across the stage at the end of his music show and by the 1950’s he had three (3) one million-selling records to his credit. He and Dave Bartholomew co-wrote ‘Ain’t that a Shame’ in 1955 and this song shot to the top of the R&B charts and hit number 10 on Billboard’s pop charts.

Fats Domino: