The 1939 song Ian Anderson called the beginnings of rock: “It planted a seed of things to come”
Rock music’s genesis has a long and contested history, but Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson pulled such arguments back right to the final days of the 1930s.
We all know it took Bill Hailey & His Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ to first shoot rock and roll to the top of the charts in 1954, but the spit-curled frontman’s enshrining in post-war youth culture was cemented by the momentum behind him. A brief examination of the era’s plugged-in upheaval reveals buried sediments of plentiful blues, solid clumps of old-school R&B, and kernels of country and gospel spirituals, all largely pulled from the US Black tradition.
Before long, Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s ‘Strange Things Happening Every Day’ and Arthur Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right’ would plant essential signposts in the 1940s, but 1951 was the year that the old crooners must have first sniffed some new competition in their Billboard domination.
A double lightning strike landed on the music world: one being DJ Alan Freed first labelling his R&B ‘race music’ spins as rock and roll, the other being ‘Rocket 88’ from Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, but, in fact, Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm as the backing band, boasting a piano stomp so influential that Little Richard was taking notes.
But 1939? While naturally we could follow the blues’ threads right back to the late 19th century, Anderson once confessed his feelings that rock’s roots could be traced back to the heyday of the jazz big band, struck by how one key 78 in his father’s record collection arrested his senses as a tender seven year old with its brash three-chord jaunt and its world’s apart from the church music and Scottish folk he was otherwise accustomed to.
“I particularly liked ‘In the Mood’ by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra, which is a bright, syncopated swing piece,” Anderson revealed to Classic Rock in 2021, later adding, “In some ways, this was a precursor to rock and roll. My dad wasn’t really a music fan. He didn’t sit around listening to this sort of thing, but I guess before I was born, he did. I enjoyed this one – it was a fun piece of music. Perhaps it planted a seed of things to come.”
There’s a sprightly energy that bursts from ‘In the Mood’, pulling kids to the dancefloor with its tight arrangements and offering a joyous escape as the threat of war slowly loomed over the nation for fans across the Atlantic. Yet, also like the white end of rock, Miller offered a reassuringly tamer form of jazz to conservative stiffs paranoid about the harder bebop’s nebulous forms, deemed to be the Devil’s score to ghastly racial mingling for a youth drifting away from God’s good and wholly segregationist word.
So, three-chord roll and urgent energy can certainly wade into the rock’s genesis conversation with some clout, but Miller’s ‘In the Mood’s place in the rock canon is unwittingly bolstered by a curious detail from Anderson’s recollections.
The fact that the Jethro Tull founder can’t remember his father ever listening to that old Miller 78 in his youth precisely attests to rock’s eternal fuelling of adolescent fire, a soundtrack to his old man’s youth before work, family, and life’s responsibilities snuffed out such a spirited pre-life. Long buried in his singles collection and gathering dust when Anderson was a boy, ‘In the Mood’ reveals that rock music is perhaps just another incarnation of that eternal charge of youthful rebellion, a feature that has existed in the human condition since time immemorial in some fashion or another.
