Where did the term “rock and roll” come from?
As Alex Turner once famously (and intoxicatedly) said: “That rock’n’roll, it seems like it’s fading away sometimes, but it will never die. And there’s nothing you can do about it”. Indeed, as the Arctic Monkeys frontman claimed back at the Brit Awards in 2014, it can sometimes feel like the once eternal-seeming genre of rock and roll is slipping from our grasp, but it persistently rears its head throughout the ages in one form or another.
While rock and roll has been about in a musical form since the 1950s, we ought to question where the term came from. An early use of “rock and roll” was used back in the 17th century by sailors to describe the “rocking and rolling” side-to-side motion of a ship on the ocean.
In terms of music, the phrase was used in the song ‘The Camp Meeting Jubilee’, with versions recorded by the Edison Male Quartet and the Columbia Quartet. The song featured the lyrics, “Keep on rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms/Rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms / Rockin’ an’ rolling in your arms/ In the arms of Moses”.
In the 20th century, the term had been adopted by Black communities to refer to dancing and partying with a double entendre of having sexual intercourse. This double meaning started to be used in a number of popular songs of the 1920s up to the 1940s. One instance is ‘Rock It for Me’ by Chick Webb, in which Ella Fitzgerald sang, “Won’t you satisfy my soul, with the rock and roll?”
The sexual (and sometimes religious) connotation was evident in the songs of the early part of the 20th century. By the time the 1950s came around, those meanings had begun to be lessened in severity, especially as white musicians began to appropriate the black genres of R&B, gospel and blues.
Legendary DJ Alan Freed first began referring to “rock and roll music” on mainstream radio in 1951, which set a precedent for how we conceive of the term today. Apparently, Freed had found the term on the Billy Ward and his Dominoes’ single ‘Sixty Minute Man’, which features the lyrics, “I rock ’em, roll ’em all night long”. However, he never actually admitted to being influenced by the song in terms of his lexical choices. Freed later said: “Rock ‘n’ roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm”.
Rock and roll as we know it today, looking back, is heavily influenced by those early blues and rhythm records, with a harsher, more biting edge, as popularised by ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ himself, Elvis Presley. Elvis had indeed been influenced by early 20th-century Black music but perhaps given the genre’s history, his nickname ought to be considered slightly disrespectful to those who went before him.
Still, the term “rock and roll” finds its origins in the words of the mariners of yore, transposed later to the Black communities of the early 1900s, who used it to describe their penchant for partying, dancing, drinking, and generally getting down. Then it was adopted by DJs of the 1950s to describe the burgeoning new guitar music scene that had been influenced by early gospel, blues and rhythm music. And there you have it.
