What is your favorite memory of the 1950's? Since our site deals primarily with music and radio from the decade, we will kick start a few thoughts for you from that perspective.
The advent of Rock N' Roll was brought about by the emerging popularity of Rhythm and Blues in the Black Community and the diversification of Country in the Deep South.
Many feel that rock and roll started in the big cities. Actually it began in the southern USA. When hundreds of thousands of southerners migrated north to find better jobs after World War 2, they brought the music with them.
Mainstream radio was slow to pick up on the emerging force. So were the major record companies. If you scanned the radio dial in any major US city in the early to mid 50's, you didn't hear early pioneers like the Orioles, Dominoes, Lloyd Price and Fats Domino unless you found a low powered AM station that usually was a daytime signal and programmed what was then called 'Race Music'.
Whenever a black act was blessed to have a record cross over to appeal to the white mainstream audience, a white act would immediately 'cover', or re-record the song. As a result, the white act had the distribution and thus would garner the bulk of the sales on the song compared to the original version by the black performer.
All that would change circa 1953 when enterprising disk jockeys like Dewey Phillips in Memphis, Alan Freed in Cleveland and Buddy Deane in Baltimore became sensitive to a demand for the music in their cities and began playing it on their mainstream radio shows.
Bill Haley & The Comets 'Rock Around The Clock' (recorded in 1954 and played by Deane on WITH in Baltimore a full year before the nation heard it in the movie soundtrack of 'Blackboard Jungle') is generally given credit as the first big rock and roll record. However, it wasn't until the Fall of 1956 that the new genre began to dominate the charts.
That year, Elvis broke upon the scene. He appeared in his first movie 'Love Me Tender' in the Fall of '56. Immediately, independent promoters filmed a slew of low-budget yet highly entertaining movies and by 1957, rock and roll was here to stay.
Elvis went into the U.S. Army in 1958. By 1959, the first phase of rock and roll settled into a more balanced mix of radio airplay. By this time, even the parents were lovin' Elvis, Paul Anka, Bobby Rydell and the Platters.
Against the backdrop of this halcyon period, Ultimate Oldies Radio invites you to remember fondly family, places, timeless towns and lost roads.
After all, they've made you (if you were around then) who you are today.
Bob Mathers
Ultimate Oldies Radio
Ultimate Oldies Radio - Rock 'n' Roll Hits of the 50's 60's 70's
