How Blacks Invented Rock and Roll

Ebony, July, 2001 by Kevin Chappell

The Rolling Stones were influenced so much by Muddy Waters that they named their band after his song "Rolling Stones."

"George Clinton influenced me so deeply that it is a part of me, like my kidney or my liver," says Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

If all this "doesn't prove Black artists created rock `n' roll, I don't know what does," says Nelson George, author of The Death of Rhythm & Blues and a longtime music critic. "White artists have always admitted it. I mean, how could they not when it is so obvious?"

Little Richard agrees, but adds that it's time for White artists to pay more than respect to the Black creators of rock `n' roll. "Where's my money?" the legend asks. "In the '50s, they would go to a place and headline, singing our songs when they knew we should have been there making the money. Now the Rolling Stones are making $4 million for each concert. It's time to put up or shut up."

So far, no reparations have been offered to legendary Black rock artists like Little Richard. During a 1972 visit to Johnson Publishing Co., Beatle John Lennon told Jet magazine that he wished his three musical idols--Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard--had done better financially. "It hurt my heart that they were not as big as they were in the 1950s," he said. "Berry is the greatest influence on earth. So is Bo Diddley, and so is Little Richard. There is not one White group on earth that hasn't got their music in them. And that's all I ever listened to. The only White person I ever listened to was Presley on his early music, and he was doing Black music."

Not much can be done now, George says, adding rock `n' roll wasn't the first time Whites capitalized by copying Black artists. Jazz and rap music are two recent examples. Even in the late 1930s, "boogie fever" was started by Blacks in juke joints in the North. Kansas City bluesman Joe Turner and pianist Pete Johnson helped to create the music that would sweep the nation until the early 1950s. After the two rocked Carnegie Hall in 1938 and ushered in boogie to mainstream White audiences, White artists followed with such songs as the "Hillbilly Boogie" by the Delmore Brothers and "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

It wasn't until Blacks got out of swing and into this new rock thing that Whites followed. And it wasn't long before Blacks dropped the rock `n' roll of Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino in favor of the soul music of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Motown. "We create music, get tired of it and move on," Moore says. "I think what happened in the 1960s, with the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, Blacks began to look down on blues as being too passive and rock `n' roll as being too happy. So we moved on to a more soulful music, and left Whites with rock music and the ability to define it as they pleased."

Blacks always want to create something new, says Little Richard. "That's fine. I can understand that," he says. "But I blame Blacks for forgetting the music of the past. You can move on, but you can't forget. We have to remember our history. We can never forget that Blacks started it all."