‘Good Rocking Tonight’: The song from the 1940s that undoubtedly blazed the trail for rock ‘n’ roll
“Before Elvis”, John Lennon supposedly once said, “there was nothing.”
And he was right, culturally. But in real life, well outside of the accepted narrative of popular folklore and storytelling, outside of the white lens of music history, there were whole worlds of music before Elvis ever sang ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ or ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
Elvis himself was the first to acknowledge that he owed a debt of gratitude to black artists like Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Fats Domino or Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard, to name just a few.
What was so unique about Elvis, and so underrated in the retelling of his story, is how he weaved together all those influences along with disparate elements from gospel (Mahalia Jackson, The Golden Gate Quartet), country and western (Hank Williams, Hank Snow), bluegrass (Bill Monroe), big band crooners (Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra), pop groups (The Ink Spots, The Platters) and even, on occasion, opera (Franz Liszt, Eduardo di Capua and Alfredo Mazzucchi) and pulled it all together to create a new style, and in doing so, forever changed the course of popular music history.
Though it’s well understood that he put rock and roll on the map in 1954 with his sensational debut ‘That’s All Right’, the folks down south had been rocking and rolling long before Elvis ever began to shake his hips to the gospel sounds of the Assembly of God church in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Some people instead name the 1951 Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats song ‘Rocket 88’ as the true first rock and roll record, while others still would point to any number of jump blues recordings, an uptempo blurring and blending of rhythm, blues, jazz and boogie woogie, from the decade prior, not least of all Louis Jordan’s 1945 hit ‘Caledonia’. Any number of songs could and have been cited as “the first rock and roll song of all time”, but every time you tug at one musical thread, plenty of others pull through, and there were so many other songs as well that could have clued you in to where those rhythm and blues were heading.
Way back in 1938, Sister Rosetta Tharpe recorded ‘Rock Me’, a rollicking gospel blues that set a steady rhythm and kept on ticking, but then by 1948 she’d taken a bounding leap towards the rock and roll future with her electrified ‘Didn’t It Rain?’. In that same year, Muddy Waters plugged in in Chicago and unleashed the electric blues of ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’, which gave more than a little hint of things to come.
Another song that was in the air that year was ‘Good Rocking Tonight’, in a version from the charismatic blues shouter Wynonie Harris, but he wasn’t the first to sing it. The year before, Roy Brown had already let the world know what was coming down the pike. “I’ve heard the news and there’s good rocking tonight” he belts, over a steady beat, a boogie woogie piano and screaming saxophone. A jump blues like ‘Caledonia’, the song rocks and it rolls, it shakes and balls.
When he was setting the world on fire seven years later as the foremost star of the fledgling rock and roll scene, and singing his own version of ‘Good Rocking Tonight’, even Elvis’ version with its kit drum, bass and electric guitar doesn’t rock nearly half as hard as Roy Harris did back in 1947.
