The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock & Roll

But the songs for Presley’s films Loving You and Jailhouse Rock were worse. Written by Leiber and Stoller, they allowed Presley to indulge his tendency to exaggerate the importance of his feelings and began his decline towards melodramatic popular songs, a decline that became “official” when he recorded “It’s Now or Never” in a pseudo-operatic styl

Fats Domino was the singer, whose apparently eternal and universal appeal defies musical analysis. His records were simple, convincing, memorable, and danceable. While a steady rhythm pounded from his full-chorded piano playing, a band led and arranged by his producer Dave Bartholomew played easy riffs that emphasized the dance beat, and Domino san

Little Richard, and virtually every other rock ’n’ roll singer, abandoned himself in his efforts to express his devotion, but in Lewis’s voice there was almost always an edge of cynical detachment or even derision, as if he was suggesting how ridiculous the idea of total love was by exaggerating the styles of expressing it.

Country rock was comparable to the vocal group style of rock ’n’ roll – and unlike the band styles – in that it seemed to be a spontaneous, informal sound, created by a few friends who had no evident musical training but a determined spirit “that had to come out”.

Where rock ’n’ roll had seemed to be about self-assertion, Anka brought in the self-pity that was to become a feature of teen music from then on.

“Alley Oop” sounded like a Coasters record, made while Leiber and Stoller were taking a lunch-break; it had some of the same ingredients, including an alley piano style borrowed from “Searchin’ ”, and a lyric about a figure from current American pop culture; but there was a sloppiness that Leiber and Stoller would have tidied up. And no wonder, as

unlike the lyrical, warm instrumentalists in the dance blues, the instrumentalists in rockabilly responded more violently to unpredictable inflections in the singer’s voice, shifting into double-time for a few bars to blend with a sudden acceleration in the singer’s tempo.

Vincent had a definitive white rock ’n’ roll voice – reedy, urgent, vulnerable

while other companies all over the country made use of the “Bo Diddley” rhythm, nobody else could effectively use Chuck Berry’s style.