Word: gillett
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Author Charlie Gillett begins his story back in the '40s, when the rhythm-and-blues musicians who sang about "rock and roll" were talking about loving, not music. It took some shrewd record producers and a Cleveland disk jockey named Alan Freed to make the term-and the music itself-acceptable to a larger, white audience. The sound came off the streets and was segregated as carefully as the people who listened...
...Gillett, who is an Englishman, indulges in some shaky transatlantic sociology while trying to explain how the music transcended the color line and why postwar youth-through its excessive leisure time and readiness to flaunt opposition to the adult world-was eager to accept the rough, driving new sound. Written originally as an M.A. thesis, The Sound of the City sometimes gives off a faint odor of scholarly stuffiness. It is startling to see early greats like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley referred to, in the best tradition of academic criticism, by their surnames. Saying Domino without Fats...