The Birth of Rock’n Roll

A record producer who had been searching for a “white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel” began recording the Memphis-based country singer Elvis Presley. In 1956 the 21-year-old Presley created a sensation with his rock ‘n’ roll- styled “Heartbreak Hotel”, the first of his 14 records in a row that sold more than a million copies each. Presley’s success inspired other country performers to begin singing rock and roll music in the late 1950s. The popularity of Presley also helped to encourage the practice of “cover” recordings. That is, when new records by black performers began to appear on the hit charts, white singers would record simplified versions of the same songs. The recordings by the white performers received wider distribution and were played on more radio stations than the original recordings. As rock and roll rapidly became the most popular music of the late 1950s, record industry executives became aware that young listeners made up the largest portion of this music’s audience. Therefore they employed young, often adolescent, singers to record rock and roll music, and produced such teenage romance songs as “Young Love”, “16 Candles”, and “Teen-Age Crush”.