Don't Step on My Blue Suede Shoes: The Revolution of Rock and Roll

This is an analytical and book review paper, written for my Contemporary United States History class. It is based on a book called All Shook Up, How Rock 'N' Roll Changed America by Glen C. Altschuler. The assignment required students to evaluate the author's main argument, critically analyze the book, and determine whether the author's assessment on rock and roll is accurate. This paper was published in my school's literary journal, Write the Ship, in April of 2017. 

        During the 1950s, rock and roll created a cultural phenomenon in American society. To many Americans, the emergence of this thunderous and rollicking music represented sex, drugs, and racial integration. In his book, All Shook Up, How Rock ’N’ Roll Changed America, Glenn Altschuler argued that rock and roll created conflict, at times making it worse and at other times lessening it. Altschuler focuses on several major issues with which the music genre intersected: race relations, sexuality, corruption of youth, and popular culture. Altschuler’s assessment is accurate; rock and roll started a firestorm of controversy, especially for race relations, generational values, and popular culture. Yet most importantly, the social conflicts that rock and roll provoked turned into a positive cultural revolution in American society. Rock and roll united blacks and whites, gave teens their own special identity, and redefined a new teen culture.

           Throughout his book, Altschuler emphasizes and explores how rock and roll altered America, especially when it came to race. Rock and roll was a musical genre that promoted economic opportunities and racial integration for African Americans. Altschuler argues that “rock ’n’ roll remained a highly visible and contested arena for struggles over racial identity and cultural and economic empowerment in the United States.”[1] In this assessment, the author is correct. This new music allowed African Americans to come out from behind the shadows—it also symbolized African American empowerment.

Not only did the music industry allow African Americans to pursue their passions as performers, but rock and roll also reflected changes in race relations; the music began to erode the barriers between whites and blacks. According to Altschuler, “rock ’n’ roll was also breaking down parochial tastes and promoting a national culture, a phenomenon that seemed entirely salutary to most Americans in the 1950s, because it linked universal values to racial tolerance and integration.”[2] Music was changing the narrow outlook on race in the minds of white Americans and it began to undermine racial stereotypes. Even though not all embraced this form of change and racial acceptance, it was a starting point for a new beginning for African Americans. Harry Weinger, the bass player for the Platters, remembered white kids going to black neighborhoods to listen to rock and roll music. The prominent rock and roll radio station Cash Box promoted racial integration and commended the music industry for “promoting understanding between blacks and whites.” With growing acceptance of black entertainers, it was rare for someone to buy a record according to the person’s skin color.[3]  Additionally, the careers of famous black artists like Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, clearly showed that being African American did not hinder their chances of achieving fame and stardom. Yet what was opportunity for African Americans also became a source of conflict for segregationists, particularly in the South.[4]

Some Americans were not prepared for this social change because they were not ready to confront problems that the nation had long ignored. Altschuler states that “rock ’n’ roll became a target of Southern segregationists, who believed that race mixing led inevitably to miscegenation and that exposure to black culture promoted juvenile delinquency and sexual immortality.”[5] White Southerners portrayed rock and roll as a form of music with subliminal messages that encouraged people to defy the social norms of race relations. The music did unite blacks and whites, but white supremacy still existed. Calling rock and roll “jungle music,” white supremacist groups campaigned against it by preaching what they saw as the consequences of rock and roll. They portrayed the music as bringing out vulgarity and animalistic tendencies of whites. Segregationists argued that rock and roll came from Africa and was strategically designed to incite racial hostility in America. The music would turn white Americans into “savages.” Rock and roll created some hostility and tension during the civil rights era because it divided Americans who supported racial integration from those who did not.[6]

Generational values also became a major conflict with the emergence of rock and roll; it symbolized teenage defiance. The music empowered teenagers because the music and lyrics resonated with them, thus creating a subculture. American society looked at teenage subculture as a group of sexualized teens that were, as Altschuler states, “addicted to the pleasures of the body.” Adults feared that rock and roll ruined traditional values, made teens rebel against authority figures, and encouraged promiscuity.[7] To many, the music exhibited lust, passion and eroticism, even though the music did not condone sex outside of marriage.⁸ Altschuler points out that rock and roll often spoke of traditional values when it came to gender roles and relationships between men and women. Some Americans, however, saw rock and roll as a form of sexual expression.⁸

One change from past popular music was that rock and roll lyrics were not made up of clichés and euphemisms, but were descriptive and explicit that left nothing to the imagination of its listeners, whereas conventional popular songs used clichés to insinuate sexual passion.[8] For example, three provocative songs became a hit by musicians Hank Ballard and the Midnighters in 1954, thus notoriously branding all of their songs as being erotic. One song by Ballard called “Work with Me Annie,” delivered explicit and vulgar lyrics: “Annie, please don’t cheat, / Gimme all my meat, / Oo-oo-wee, so good to me; / Work with me Annie.” The song is an example of how some rock and roll musicians were not afraid to disguise the meaning or story of their song.[9] Rock and roll challenged traditional values of Americans, thus leading to a movement that focused on banning rock and roll due to its provocative content.

Some radio stations, jukeboxes, and record stores banned the music genre that resulted in rock and roll censorship. In order to sanitize the music, musicians replaced provocative lyrics with clean words and magazines published articles that focused on teenagers who still valued pre-marital abstinence.[10] The saviors of rock and roll were white performers like Pat Boone. Boone was a rock and roller who simultaneously exemplified the traditional values of morality that many adults feared were being ruined by rock and roll. He was the type of performer who held onto wholesome Christian values, preaching the “taking it slow, very slow” approach among teens when it came to relationships, and presented a clean cut image. What Boone represented was purity, a pure and gentle rock and roller who sang “clean” music; he was a perfect role model for the young generation at the time.[11] If anything, Boone reassured parents in America that goodness in music still existed.

The conflict between parents and their children also created generational division. Altschuler claims that rock and roll produced a generation gap between youth and adults. Youth “tended to reject authoritarian models for the family and choose accommodation rather than open warfare, with adults seeking not to obliterate but to modify teenage culture.” What came with this new teenage subculture were teenagers challenging the social norms of appropriate behavior and embracing rock and roll as an escape from reality while searching for self-identification. Meanwhile, American society saw it as a threat that ruined the good-natured and wholesome reputation of America.[12]

The revolution of rock and roll also challenged popular culture of that time. Rock and roll music led to more record sales, which replaced the need for live performers. It also attracted people back to radio at a time when television was eclipsing radio as the dominant media. This contributed to a culture war in the genre of popular music. It showed that rock and roll music appealed to a mass audience due its diverse songs and performers, whereas traditional popular music was more generic and struggled to reach an audience in America.[13] Unfortunately, not everyone was benefiting from rock and roll. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) disliked the emphasis on playing music over the radio rather than through live performance. Altschuler argues that AFM responded by prohibiting musicians from performing on TV and radio or “allowing disc jockeys to use tapes or transcriptions of them without compensation.”[14]  

Big record companies were also not benefiting from rock and roll because independent record companies emerged, attracting new musicians, and thus causing unwanted competition.  It angered prominent record companies so deeply that they declared war on rock and roll through the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). The record companies fought rock and roll by questioning whether the music genre was trying to manipulate mass media through rock and roll records; the result was a decline in record sales. Also, radio stations began to switch to pop music, polka, novelty songs, and folk music.[15]  This became a battle for culture—it was a battle against rock and roll’s corruption of youth, race relations, and “low-quality” music. Congress eventually stepped in by considering legislation aimed at preventing rock and roll music from tainting American entertainment and mainstream culture.¹⁵ Although this legislation never passed, the battle between ASCAP and rock and roll wounded the music genre’s reputation, but it did not kill it.[16]

Although the industry seemed to be slowly fading, rock and roll was not entirely dead.[17] Altschuler argues that between 1958 and 1963, rock and roll transformed into a less important and creative music genre. There were however, a few rockabilly and rhythm and blues musicians, along with established musicians, that remained high in the music charts. Eventually in the early 1960s, rock and roll made its way to Great Britain and revived the music genre. British rock and roll bands, like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, entered the American market and caused the “British Invasion,” which was a musical sensation in America;[18] British rock and roll groups saved rock and roll by creating a new generation of music. Altschuler argues that “children of the 1950s, when the ‘teen breakout from jailhouse America began’…were also deeply concerned about the order of meaning, and they carried into the new decade some complex, contradictory, and unsettled ideas about themselves and their society.”[19] Rock and roll defined a new generation, but the music also freed people with its words that spoke to its listeners as the song told its story. What the conflict between popular culture and rock and roll really centered on was rock and roll’s ability to connect to people at an emotional level.

Rock and roll caused unforeseen conflicts that resulted in social change in America. The social change influenced different parts of American life and culture, such as race, generational values, and popular culture. Rock and roll helped to integrate American society, allowed teens to find their voices through the music, and redefined a new culture that threatened traditional popular culture. What rock and roll did was create a revolution in social trends that impacted lives and helped to reshape the American way of life.

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[1] Glenn Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’N’ Roll Changed America (NY: Oxford, 2003), 35.

[2] Altschuler, All Shook Up, 48.

[3] Ibid., 47.

[4] Ibid., 57.

[5] Ibid., 37.

[6] Altschuler, All Shook Up, 38.

[7] Ibid., 67.

[8] Ibid., 71.

[9] Ibid., 72.

[10] Altschuler, All Shook Up, 69.

[11] Ibid., 81.

[12] Ibid., 100.

[13] Altschuler, All Shook Up, 131.

[14] Ibid., 132.

[15] Ibid., 133-134.

[16] Ibid., 142.

[17] Ibid., 161.

[18] Altschuler, All Shook Up, 162.

[19] Ibid., 184.