Word: songed
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...Turner walked into Sam Phillips' studio in Memphis, Tenn. and, along with his band, helped create a sound that still echoes through history like thunder across the sky. The original song they recorded, Rocket 88, may well have been the first rock 'n' roll record, and in the years that followed, innumerable music reference sources, from The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll ("frequently cited as the first rock & roll record") to the website of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum ("widely considered the first rock and roll record"), have backed up that title...
...think in Memphis. This month the city is celebrating what officials bill as the "50th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll," pegging it not to Rocket 88 but to one made three years later: Elvis Presley's July 5th, 1954 recording of That's All Right, a cover of a song previously released by its composer, bluesman Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, in 1946. This is certainly not all right...
...news that some white blues, jazz, rock and hip-hop musicians have been more readily embraced by mainstream audiences and the popular press than their black counterparts. Eminem once rapped about his record sales on his song White America, "let's do the math, if I was black, I would've sold half." (Eminem's arithmetic doesn't work for everybody: Outkast has sold a ton of records and won Grammys to boot. Hey Ya!) It's also not news that some of the black musicians that helped lay the foundation for rock were poorly compensated for their breakthrough work...
...known for his collaborations (most famously with wife Tina) and his clashes (again, with Tina, as portrayed in the 1993 movie that was made about their stormy marriage and breakup, What's Love Got to Do With It). Rocket 88 was a product of Turner's collaborative side. The song explored the major sonic themes that Presley would revisit years later on That's All Right and then some - Rocket 88 was brash and it was sexy; it took elements of the blues, hammered them with rhythm and attitude and electric guitar, and reimagined black music into something...
...Irish village of Baltimore was carried off in 1631. Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe both mention the frightening trade in their writings; at that time, pamphlets and speeches by survivors and escaped slaves had a huge influence on the popular imagination. James Thomson's famously rousing 1740 song Rule Britannia, with its chorus about how Britons "never shall be slaves," was a direct allusion to the Barbary terrorism...