rock and roll

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The origins of rock and roll are rooted in a blending of African-American musical genres, mainly rhythm and blues, with stylistic influences from gospel, jazz, boogie-woogie, electric blues, jump blues, swing, and folk music. While rock and roll's early elements can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until 1954. By the mid-1960s, rock and roll had developed into "the more encompassing international style known as rock music, though the latter also continued to be known in many circles as rock and roll". For the purposes of differentiation, this article deals with the first definition. In the earliest rock and roll styles, either the piano or saxophone was typically the lead instrument. These instruments were generally replaced or supplemented by the electric guitar in the mid-to-late 1950s. The beat is essentially a dance rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, almost always provided by a snare drum. Minimal blues chord progressions such as the twelve-bar blues are commonly used. Classic rock and roll is usually played with one or more electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm) and a double bass (string bass).¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Rock and roll”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

rock and roll is genre of popular music, early subgenre of rock music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 38 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶