Lisnaholic

Thanks for telling us something about Johnny Ace, Lord Larehip. He certainly had the right name and the right death to join the rock and roll pantheon, but I have to say that this struck me as a bit simplistic:-

I´m no expert, but a quick look at wikipedia suggests that the claim to earliest rock star is pretty muddied:-



Wikipedia is focusing on the material rather than the artist, but I presume that if you´re recording rock and roll songs, then you´re a rock and roll star. Anyway, here´s a song that Wikipedia mentions which seems to pre-date Johnny Ace´s material by a couple of years:-

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Lord Larehip

I'm not saying that Johnny Ace did the first rocknroll songs. I'm saying he was the first whose music founded rocknroll as a cultural phenomenon. By that, I mean he had a sizable young white audience. Without those white kids, it isn't rocknroll but rather R&B or jump blues. When Alan Freed was trying to sell these black R&B artists to a white audience right about the time the Ace was releasing his stuff, he called it "rock and roll" because white parents knew what R&B was--it was jigaboo music and they forbade their kids to bring such records into the house. So Freed came up with a code name for it--rock and roll (a phrase that he did not invent, he just used it).

Ace was there from the beginning of this new craze and it was he that most white kids could relate to because he didn't always sound so black. He did those slow love songs that you could slow dance to and hold the girl or boy close to you and you could go out to lovers' lane in your ride and make out to Johnny Ace crooning out "Never let me goooo!" Kids began calling up stations and requesting an Ace and dedicating to someone they were dating or wanted to date. It was the start of rocknroll as a culture not just a genre of music.

As a genre, rocknroll goes back to at least 1938 when Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson released "Roll 'Em, Pete". Charlie "Bird" Parker's musc was borrowed and reworked by a lot of jump blues bands into rocknroll songs as "The Hucklebuck" (from Bird's "Now's the Time"). There was another guy name Wild Bill Moore from Detroit who had a HUGE jump blues hit with "We're Gonna Rock, We're Gonna Roll" around 1947 but his main audience was black. And Frank Sinatra deserves some credit because his female fans were the bobbysox girls and that carried over into the 50s rocknroll scene. But when Freed's craze hit, the real star to emerge first among both the white and black kids was Johnny Ace. Other blacks were popular too--B.B. King, Al Hibbler, Fats Domino, of course. And Fats really ran off with the crown after Johnny died. He had more hits than Elvis and recorded earlier than Johnny but it was still jump blues until Freed turned it into rocknroll and got the white kids to buy into it.