When you rock, do you roll?

Origins of the phrase In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience. Freed is credited with first using the phrase “rock and roll” to describe the music. However, the term had already been introduced to US audiences, particularly in the lyrics of many rhythm and blues records. Three different songs with the title “Rock And Roll” were recorded in the late 1940s; one by Paul Bascomb in 1947, another by Wild Bill Moore in 1948, and yet another by Doles Dickens in 1949, and the phrase was in constant use in the lyrics of R&B songs of the time. One such record where the phrase was repeated throughout the song was “Rock And Roll Blues,” recorded in 1949 by Erline “Rock And Roll” Harris. The phrase was also included in advertisements for the film, Wabash Avenue, starring Betty Grable and Victor Mature. An ad for the movie that ran April 12, 1950 billed Ms. Grable as “…the first lady of rock and roll” and Wabash Avenue as “…the roaring street she rocked to fame”.

Before then, the term “rocking and rolling”, as secular black slang for dancing or sex, appeared on record for the first time in 1922 on Trixie Smith’s “My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll”. Even earlier, in 1916, the term “rocking and rolling” was used with a religious connotation, on the phonograph record “The Camp Meeting Jubilee” by an unnamed male “quartette”.[1] The word “rock” had a long history in the English language as a metaphor for “to shake up, to disturb or to incite”. Rocking was a term used by black gospel singers in the American South to mean something akin to spiritual rapture. By the 1940s, however, the term was used as a double entendre, ostensibly referring to dancing, but with the subtextual meaning of sex, as in Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight.” The verb “roll” was a medieval metaphor which meant “having sex”. Writers for hundreds of years have used the phrases “They had a roll in the hay” or “I rolled her in the clover”[2]. The terms were often used together (“rocking and rolling”) to describe the motion of a ship at sea, for example as used in 1934 by the Boswell Sisters in their song “Rock and Roll”[3] and in Buddy Jones’ “Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama” (1939). Country singer Tommy Scott was referring to the motion of a railroad train in the 1951 “Rockin and Rollin’”. [4]. Sue