by James Harvey

Created on: November 01, 2009   Last Updated: January 03, 2010

In the history of modern-day music, there has been various musical art forms that has generated much talk and controversy: ragtime, jazz, and swing, just to name a few.

But there is no doubt that Rock music has proven to be the most controversial as well as the most influential music in history. No other musical genre has generated so much attention and has caused so many waves in modern-day society than Rock music, a genre that has existed for nearly 60 years, going through various transformations.

The roots of Rock can be traced back to African American culture, mainly derived from the Deep South, which played a major part in the popularity of the genre. It was a combination of jazz and blues, uptempo, or sped up, with a fast, jumping beat, that just made people want to dance, even if they had never danced before or even knew how to dance. It's early influences dates at least to the 1920's.

Even back then it was beginning to cause controversy because of the subject matter of such music, which was often very unabashedly open and direct, with subjects as drinking, gambling and chasing women or fighting over them. Because these musical art forms, jazz, and especially blues was the innovation of Blacks, it was associated with the supposed lifestyles that most Whites assumed of African Americans in general of the time. Hence, it was labeled "Race Music", or so-called "Negro Music", or by other more stronger racist terms of the era.

By 1949, the music industry stopped calling it "Race Music", possibly because of America's changing postwar attitudes toward race and started using its new name "Rhythm and Blues", which was steadily beginning to replace Bebop, which was popularized a little after World War II.

By the early 1950's, Rhythm 'n' Blues was starting to be referred by another term "Rock 'n' Roll", which at the time had a sexual connotation, and which was music mainly well-known and played in the African American community, mainly in nightclubs and bars. Even though most White DJs were aware of the existence of Rock 'n' Roll, they wouldn't touch it because its contents and lyrics were considered shocking and offensive to the social mores of middle-class White America of that time. For instance, the songs sung by such early Rock 'n' Roll groups such as Billy Ward and the Dominoes "Sixty-Minute Man" and the Sultans "Lemon-Squeezing Daddy", was considered too strong for most 1951 ears to hear-mostly austere, pseudo-sophisticated whites-so it was banned from

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