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The advent of rock ‘n’ roll as a chart force in the middle years of the 1950s was perhaps one of the single most important, symbolic and cataclysmic developments in popular culture during the 20th century. Rock ‘n’ roll seemed to encapsulate the aspirations and instincts of the baby-boom generation as mass media and the long-awaited emergence from post-war austerity saw rebellious teenagers latched on to the new music, rejecting the established norms of early ‘50s pop to claim a piece of the musical high ground as their own. The USA was the natural birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll, evolving as it did around a complex coming-together of strands of music, of which blues and R&B with its cultural roots in the former enslaved black population was a key element, not to mention the hillbilly country music and urban jazz which were equally distinctive aspects of musical Americana. This 40-track 2-CD set selects some of the biggest hits from the first few years of what could be called the rock ‘n’ roll era, all of them Top 10 US hits of some kind or another. Many come from the breakthrough years of 1955-57, and were by the artists who pioneered the genre in the charts in those times – Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and others. Others come from later years, as Tin Pan Alley, originally sceptical and sniffy about the new music, realised it wasn’t going to go away, and got stuck into developing teen idols to interpret the music for a wider audience. Most of the records were also UK hits, not necessarily major chart-toppers, but nevertheless records which those who lived through those times as baby-boomers remember as iconic landmarks along a remarkable rite of passage into a decade, the ‘60s, which would itself provide yet more magnificent musical mayhem.
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