and it is still around.

CLEVELAND REPRESENTS!!!
(I was born there 3-and-a-half years later and was moved to L.A. at the age of 5... still, I have so few opportunities to show off civic pride...

This article was interesting and well written. Over the last few years, though, I've heard some musicologists who really take issue with this "birth of" rock-n-roll idea, which basically dates that "birth" to the time white people got involved. The music itself, as the article kind of makes clear, was around before that, and so were wild concerts in clubs with dancing and sexual energy. Just not so much with white people, and it didn't threaten white communities.

Well, there were plenty of other names for the music, but "Rock and Roll" became the crossover to 'white' music.

Right, the problem isn't with the name but with considering the "crossover to white" point the "birth of" point.


Actually the Wikipedia entry on the history of the music as well as the term is pretty fantastic.

Kind of like the "discovery" of America.

Yeah, just like that. The more history I read the more it crops up. Dominant culture finally starts catching onto something, therefore dominant culture dates the existence of that thing from the point of its introduction to them.

See also vaccination.