Author Talk: with Dave Luhrssen, 'Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll: 1944-1964'

360°Sound sat down with Dave Luhrssen, co-author (with Mike Larson) of the new book, Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll: 1944 – 1964. The 360-page encyclopedia is out now on Bloomsbury, and contains informative biographical profiles, coverage of important recordings and performances, and entries on record labels, concert venues, and related musical genres, including blues, doo wop, and Western swing.

Dave Luhrssen is the managing editor of The Shepherd Express, an alternative monthly magazine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has written numerous books on film and music, including an encyclopedia on classic rock and another on punk and new wave. In this exclusive interview, Luhrssen discusses the core characteristics of rock and roll, why the book starts in 1944, the innovations of surf music pioneer Dick Dale, and more.

Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview on our YouTube channel @360degreesound.

360°Sound: Please start by telling us how the Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll came to be.

Dave Luhrrsen: My friend Mike Larson and I spent most of our time talking about music back in our middle school and high school days when punk rock happened. We gravitated toward that, and Mike moved away, then returned to Milwaukee. At that point, I had a contract with Bloomsbury to do the Encyclopedia of Classic Rock. I asked Mike if he wanted to collaborate with me on it, and he came on board. We followed that up with Encyclopedia of Punk Rock and New Wave, which was the music of our coming-of-age years. Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll: 1944-1964 is our first time covering music before our lifetimes. We did not grow up with any of this music.

If you notice the dates this book covers, it’s yanking the timeline of rock and roll music back by at least a decade. There are several things I wanted to do with this book, and one was to challenge the myth that Elvis Presley went into a recording studio with producer Sam Phillips one evening in 1954 and, through spontaneous combustion, rock and roll was invented. Now, serious historians of the music know that’s not quite true, but they often say that rockabilly was invented in that way, and even that’s not true. There was a lot of music by the early 1950s, coming out of the South particularly, that sounded very much like rockabilly, but they didn’t call it that yet.

Rock and roll evolved from a variety of genres and styles, including swing, jump blues, country, and rhythm and blues. What makes rock and roll, rock and roll?

It’s a very good question, because the boundaries are jagged at times and hard to define. I contend in this book that what we call rock and roll began somewhere around 1944. That’s not an entirely arbitrary start date because a bunch of things were happening at that point. There was a strike by the labor union American Federation of Musicians that came to an end in 1944. It had banned instrumentalists from recording for a few years. The big bands were starting to break up, and they were spinning off into these smaller combos, playing a stripped-down, smaller version of the big band-era swing music. There was the birth of bebop, in which you had jazz musicians who saw their music not as entertainment anymore, but as art music, as something for concert halls.

The musicians who were dubbed rhythm and blues are the subject of our book, and they wanted to entertain. They wanted to fill the dance floors, and they wanted people to get up and move. The rock and roll records of the 1950s really sound very much like rhythm and blues records of the 1930s, and sometimes earlier. Even really distinctive things, like the Chuck Berry guitar lick – the guitarist in Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five played the identical riff on the 1946 record, “Ain’t that Just Like a Woman,” 10 years before Berry did. So, all the elements that we think of as rock and roll had already been recorded at that point.

There were several big differences. Calling this music rock and roll was coined by Alan Freed, the most powerful disc jockey in America in the late ‘50s. He loved Black music and wanted to play it as much as possible on his programs. He had the idea that there would be a bigger audience for this music if you could find a way to market it to white teenagers, and he thought that the term rhythm and blues sounded, frankly, too Black. The words “rock and roll” had already been used in a lot of song titles and lyrics going way back to the ‘20s. It was Black slang [for sexual intercourse], but white people didn’t know what it meant for the most part. Freed had the idea to call this music rock and roll, and his term stuck.

Rock and roll really began primarily as Black, or heavily Black-influenced music, but it became, in no insult to anybody, whiter as time went on. More and more country influences came into it. The Everly Brothers are deep in country music, and Buddy Holly had a country music background, and so the music began to change and evolve very rapidly.

Our readers are certainly familiar with the big names of early rock and roll, such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. But there are a number of lesser-known stars from the era that you write about in the book, including Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. Who were some of the unsung heroes of early rock and roll?

I think Eddie Cochran is very important because he foresaw the development of heavier forms of rock music. I think if the technology had existed for him, he could have been the first heavy metal act in 1958. Dick Dale was very important. Dick Dale is known as a surf instrumental guitar player. He played a very important role in pushing the technology further with Fender guitars, new kinds of reverb and Echoplexes, and increasing the size and power of amplifiers.

Dale wanted to do something not unlike what symphony orchestras do with their instruments. He wanted the electric guitar to have the power to dramatize and represent a certain setting and a certain set of emotions. He wanted people hearing his guitar to feel what it was like to be riding a wave, the sensation of being on a surfboard with the waves are cresting and falling. He was able to achieve remarkable things by pushing the development of guitar technology. I give a great deal of credit to Dick Dale. Jimi Hendrix was a big fan of his.

What do you hope readers take away from the encyclopedia?

If you care about the music and culture of your lifetime, you should be aware of where it came from, and everything has roots, and the roots go way back, and they’re very complicated. They tell us all sorts of stories that do not simplify the record, and they sometimes tell us really bad things.

The music industry of America was highly segregated, as was everything else, until recent decades, and the music industry was born under these conditions. Black artists often had to seek out small independent labels to be heard, and they were sometimes ripped off by the people who ran the labels. There’s a lot of difficulty in our history here, but out of it all came some absolutely brilliant, exciting music that is still worth hearing today. Without that music, the music that we are more familiar with in our lifetimes, whether rock or hip hop, wouldn’t exist.

Here’s the full video interview with Dave Luhrssen from our YouTube channel, @360degreesound: