Kevin J.

Sievert
25 November 2016
Dr. Stanislava Varshavski
Music of the 20th and 21st Centuries
Essay #2
Rock n Roll Across the Pond: The British Invasion

God save the Queen! As Americans, it is safe to say that our history with our British

friends across the Pond is the farthest thing from simple. Even still, we owe a lot of our success

and development to our sordid love/hate relationship with them. The entire reason we became

a nation ourselves is because we were upset enough about our religious freedom enough to sail

across an ocean to get away from them. Still in the Melting Pot tradition that America has since

adopted, we have not been shy about latching on to major parts of their popular culture. To

this day there is a huge American following of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) show

Doctor Who that gave us the heartthrobs Matt Smith and David Tennant. The Princess culture

with Princess Diana and Princess Kate has created many a standard it seems the men can never

live up to. Even bigger than these examples are in music. Even in todays music industry, there

are many international crossover artists, the sound from our British countries is very distinct,

and sounds different than our American standards. Back in the 1950s and 1960s as America was

still developing and going through yet another change in culture, the international crossover of

British bands into American culture was an integral part in how Americas youth culture and

Rock n Roll developed. The British Invasion opened a door for many talented British artists to

become internationally mainstream and give American parents a reason to worry when their

teens started talking and dressing different. This mainstream movement (and yes, movement is
the appropriate term for it) is the foundation for many developments made in the Rock genre,

and to better understand the importance of the British Invasion and its effects is to consider the

foundations of the Rock n Roll genre, the beginning of the British Invasion itself, and the

qualities that made the British sound so different.

It is hard to credit anything to the Rock N Roll genre without first briefly discussing its

direct predecessor; Rhythm and Blues (R&B). The traveling tradition of Blues that found its

formation in the early 1900s continued to grow and build as a genre as African American

performers migrated to northern cities. The edition of electric instruments, specifically the

electric guitar, was the avenue used by Muddy Waters (1915-1983) to fully develop the electric

blues. The actually name Rhythm and Blues was a term given to this sound by Jerry Wexler in

1949. R&B music in its basic form is comprised of a vocalist(s), piano or organ, electric guitar,

bass and drums. The harmonic structure would often still mirror twelve-bar blues or have a

familiar 32-bar Tin Pan Alley structure. A large contrast though to regular Blues itself was the

heavy emphasis on the back beats (beats two and four) and a more prominent bass line.

Many things in to what made rock successful, but we can credit the crossover in to Rock

and Roll to the white teen culture of the 1950s. R&B was primarily intended for African

American audiences, but the innovations made in technology and audio recordings made it

easier for this sound to spread to anyones ears via either recordings or radio. There was a

huge, magnetic draw white teens made to this music because of the innovative

instrumentation, strong rhythms and even the blatant sexuality of the lyrics. The recording

companies of the time really caught a hold of this, and started to produce covers of R&B songs

by white artists that would crossover better in to mainstream radio. One prime example of this
was the Leiber and Stoller tune Hound Dog, originally written in twelve bar blues for Willie

Mae Big Mama Thornton in 1952, but popularized by Elvis Presley in 1956.

These crossover hits (and others Chuck Berry, a black artist, was known for Rock N

Roll, not R&B or Blues) were credited as Rock N Roll by Alan Freed, a disk jockey in Cleveland,

Ohio. Rock N Roll launched itself nationally with the hit song Rock Around the Clock performed

by Bill Haley and the Comets. In the early part of the genre, performers such as Elvis Presley and

Chuck Berry were launched in to superstardom due to their draw to teen audiences and it was

not long before rock was outselling most other music genres. This crossover genre was really a

fully combined mixture of black and white popular music traditions; the beat of the electric

blues and R&B, milder guitar in the tradition of country music and more. Amplified rhythm and

melodic guitars, electric bass and drums and even the supplementation of other instruments

(such as woodwinds and brass) were the defining instrumentation of Rock N Roll. The actual

musical form drew on Tin Pan Alley (32 bar refrain, ABA form, a draw specifically to the chorus

as the focal point) and blues and vocal timbres varied from lighter, to country twangs to gospel

shouts and everything in between.

Still, a true measure of rocks impact is the culture. More than most modern genres of

music, Rock is truly a cultural genre. Rock became the first genre that could really define an

entire culture, that being the teen culture of the 1950s. The culture of record buying, jukeboxes

and radio led to the emergence of music television shows such as American Bandstand and The

Ed Sullivan Show. A large portion of Hollywood began marketing directly to teens of the time,

with movies that often focused on the hardships and pleasures of being a teenager by focusing

on beach culture, cars, love and sex. As the baby boomer generation were being born and
soldiers and workers were beginning to come home from World War II duty (and coincidentally

the Cold War was beginning), the tensions bubbling under the surface of Americans. It affected

the style of clothes, language and attitude of this large group of people, and the draw became

more about the sense of belonging to the larger network of people.

All of these factors came to a head and flourished during the 1950s, but there was more

on the horizon for American culture. The seeds of the British Invasion were being planted in

Liverpool, England. John Lennon, a guitarist and music enthusiast, formed a band with his High

School buddies known as The Quarrymen. They found minor success locally, and by 1957

another young artist named Paul McCartney joined the ranks and soon after George Harrison.

In 1960, the group of musicians became known as The Silver Beetles, but by a suggestion from

one of Lennons college art friends they dropped Silver and changed the spelling; The Beatles.

A brief tour of Hamburgs red light district and the inclusion of drummer Ringo Starr proved to

be the right set of trials to mold and form The Beatles into a group that ruled at the top of the

British Rock scene. All of these things coming together ushered in the British invasion.

The Beatles were the gateway drug that allowed other bands to invade the American

rock scene; The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Zombies and even pop artists like Tom Jones.

Though one would think that rock is rock no matter where its from, but there are some

audible differences between the two. The British Rock scene and the American Rock scene

actually had very similar foundations. The Brits believed that the way to break in to the

flourishing rock genre was to produce identical tracks to their American counterparts. They

often used session musicians, and younger up-and-coming voices to cut the tracks. It seemed

though, that the artists (and overall quality and feeling of the tracks) were unable to replicate
the spontaneity of the original tracks. Even with artists modeling themselves directly after

artists like Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley there was a limited following in the British Rock scene

in the early 60s. The British Broadcasting Company and Londons Denmark Street music

publishers (think our version of Tin Pan Alley) had a hard grip on the music industry at the time,

but an ache for something more homegrown lead to a replication of trade jazz and acoustic

folk blues. The combination of these elements indirectly lead to The Beatles and the distinct

British sound that come after.

The British Invasion is a part of the American Music industry that cannot be ignored. The

impact of Rock and Roll on American culture, the formation of the Beatles and the distinct

British Sound that came to the U.S. makes up a movement of music appreciation that is still felt

in our culture today. It is part of what makes our history as a nation so spectacular; the melting

of cultures together.
 Works Cited

Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay. Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. "Postwar Crosscurrents." A History of
Western Music. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 911-13. Print.

Puterbaugh, Parke. "The British Invasion: From the Beatles to the Stones, The Sixties Belonged to
Britain." Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone, 14 July 1988. Web. 13 Dec. 2016.

Unterberger, Richie. "The Beatles." All Music. N.p., 2016. Web. 28 Nov. 2016.

U.S, History. "America Rocks and Rolls." Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, 2008. Web. 28
Nov. 2016.