The roots of rock lay in the styles of U.S. music known as rhythm and blues (q.v.) and country and western (q.v.). In the early 1950s both styles were outside the mainstream of popular music. They were reported separately in trade journals, and in radio broadcasting they were played only on small stations for their respective minority audiences. In 1953, as an experiment, Alan Freed, a Cleveland disc jockey, began a program of rhythm and blues, then played only to black audiences. It succeeded in drawing a large number of listeners and gave currency to the term he had adopted (though not invented) for the music--rock and roll, or rock 'n' roll. In the resulting form that emerged in 1955-56 with the rise to fame of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Comets, and, particularly, Elvis Presley, a quick-tempo version of traditional rhythm and blues was used to express emotional urgency and enthusiasm, and the lyrical content of popular music was adapted to mirror the concerns of a young audience. This highly rhythmic, sensual music struck a responsive chord in the newly affluent postwar teenage audience. The charismatic Presley achieved an overwhelming popularity with his combination of country-and-western and blues elements with resonant and skillful vocals.
In subsequent years, however, the rough, exciting energy and emotional intensity of rock and roll was gradually lost in the efforts of major recording companies to make the music more acceptable to a wider audience.
In the early and middle 1960s, however, a number of influences combined to lift rock out of what by then had become a bland, sentimental, and basically mechanical format. In England the development of rock had been much slower, largely because of strict programming controls in radio and recording. When, at last, native performers did achieve a wide hearing, they were found to have retained the freshness and naïve excitement of the very early years of rock and roll. Their success at home became even greater in the United States, where a new generation of teenagers had grown up unaware of the music on which that of the new stars was based. Preeminent among the new performers were the Beatles, whose remarkable musical abilities and growth enabled them to transform a merely popular music into an open field for genuine creativity. At the same time, Bob Dylan and other U.S. performers were developing "folk rock," a blending of traditional ballad and verse forms with rock rhythms and instrumentation. Although the Beatles' music had its origins in the rock and roll of the mid-1950s, whereas Dylan's musical roots lay in the tradition of American folk song, they both combined unusual melodic gifts with an ability to write complex and significant lyrics. Rock music gathered momentum in the mid-1960s as young musicians began to explore rock's ability to deal with social and political themes. Such groups as the Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Cream, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, and the Allman Brothers Band combined imaginative lyrics with an unprecedented rock instrumental virtuosity, which was typified by the incorporation of long passages of solo improvisation into the increasingly complex textures and musical structures of rock songs. Powerful vocalists like Janis Joplin and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix achieved large followings with their exotic elaborations on traditional rhythm-and-blues themes. Rock was further enriched by the rediscovery by white audiences of the black blues music from which it was originally derived, and by such groups as Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who evolved a gentler music using acoustic instruments and clear, sonorous vocals. In the shadow of the new experimentation, standard adolescent rock and roll was relegated to the background, although it was still commercially important.
With the premature decline of the great instrumental bands in the early 1970s, rock music was perhaps typified by such authoritative songwriter-vocalists as Elton John, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Seeger. In the 1970s, in addition to the continuance of large rock groups, "soul rock" introduced Jamaican reggae music, and rock assimilated other popular music forms to produce pop rock, jazz-rock (q.v.), and punk rock. In the 1980s, rock music was complemented by the production of short video programs built around popular rock songs and featuring as actors the rock musicians who performed them.