According to Marion Keisker, who worked for Sun Records during the 1950s, the label owner Sam Phillips constantly said words to the effect of "if I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." Additionally, according to Keisker, Phillips wasn't saying this cynically in the way you might think; he started the Memphis Recording Service, essentially, to put out all the R&B music he was hearing and loving around Memphis, and recorded early music by the likes of Ike Turner and Howlin' Wolf, which was licensed to Northern record labels before he started Sun Records in earnest. Phillips, here, was as much frustrated at the racism of the music industry and of the listeners who ignored the fantastic music he was putting out, as much as he had dollar signs in his eyes looking out for the white man he mentioned.

And then, of course, Elvis Presley came to Sun Studios to record some singles to show his mum (or so he said; Peter Guralnick argues he was primarily trying to get noticed by Sam Phillips...which eventually worked), and Phillips found Elvis's ability to make a sort of upbeat countrified R&B. And, well, the rest is history...oh wait, that's what I'm meant to be writing about here!

Elvis's Sun Records recordings in 1954 and 1955 did well regionally, and Elvis became a regional star. In the wake of the enormous success of Bill Haley and the Comets' 'Rock Around The Clock' - the biggest hit of 1955 - a major record label, RCA Records, bought Elvis's contract from Sam Phillips and Sun Records. In 1956, with major label backing, and a sound which still captured a little of the eerieness of the Sun Records sound (with its slapback echo), but smoothed off the edges, Elvis became the biggest name in pop music, having a succession of #1 singles, and conquering the rapidly rising TV variety shows (I discuss this elsewhere) - the music that in 1955 had been a sort of novelty single sung by a balding older man (Haley), was now the dominant music of a generation (though, as I discuss elsewhere, we should be careful assuming all of a generation likes the same music). By the end of 1956, rock'n'roll was a different beast to R&B in important ways - not least of which was that almost all the prominent rock'n'roll stars on major record labels - and thus with significant national resources behind them - were white - ultimately, the likes of Chuck Berry on Chess Records and Little Richard on Specialty Records had an uphill battle attempting to compete with white rock'n'roll stars on major labels, and radio stations and television variety shows that would prefer to play the white, sanitized Pat Boone cover of 'Tutti Frutti' than the wilder real thing (i.e., Little Richard).

Part of why RCA Records took a chance (of sorts) on signing Elvis was that for the first time, more or less, retailers, advertisers and, of course, record companies, were aware of a youth demographic - the children born in the Post World War II baby boom (the baby boomers, in other words) - who you might expect to have different tastes and interests to their elders, having grown up in a fundamentally prosperous age with the rise of affordable consumer electrical goods - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc - and cars (if you were middle class and white), and an age where people increasingly lived in suburbs rather than the inner city or rural areas (I discuss youth music in the context of the 1910s here which should give some context to what came afterwards). Rock'n'roll - R&B made for white teenagers, in other words - was marketed towards this new demographic, very successfully. The term 'rock & roll', in the era before Elvis's success, was mostly commonly associated with Alan Freed's radio show in Cleveland, which - before Bill Haley's 'Rock Around The Clock' and then Elvis - traded upon playing a particular selection of R&B (and some upbeat country music of the era) to the white teenagers of Cleveland to much success (though the term is much older as a description of music than Alan Freed); Alan Freed's use of the term 'rock'n'roll' was essentially a rebranding of R&B, in the belief it would appeal more to the white teenagers who made up his audience.

In March 1952, Freed put on a concert in Cleveland for his audience, the Moondog Coronation Ball, which promptly sold over 20,000 tickets to a 12,000 person venue (due to printing errors); the police shut down the concert after one song. By 1954 Freed was broadcasting in the New York market, popularising the term 'rock'n'roll' there for R&B music marketed to white teenagers, and providing some of the groundwork that led to the success of Bill Haley & The Comets and then Elvis.

It's also fair enough to say that 'rock & roll' is different to the R&B of the era. R&B in the decade before 1955-56 was a diverse set of music, with quite a variety, from more uptown recordings more obviously descended from jazz and swing (e.g., the jive of a Louis Jordan) to some fairly adult-centered recordings with more country origins (the Chicago blues), to urban street corner harmony groups (what we might now call 'doo wop', though it wasn't called that at the time - groups like The Penguins). Rock & roll took a particular corner of R&B - somewhere in between the uptown stuff and the Chicago blues - and then refined it to the tastes of white teenagers - the music became straighter (with less of a shuffle or swing feel, and less of a 'behind the beat' feel), faster and more energetic in both tempo and vocal performance, and with more focus on the electric guitar than there typically was in R&B of the period (outside of the Chicago blues, which rarely had the high tempo energy of rock'n'roll - but when it did, it sounds very rock & roll to modern ears). The drum beat of rock'n'roll was heavier, more prominent in the recordings, taking more from the drum styles of jazz drummers like Gene Krupa than R&B drummers typically did.

There is also a large influence of (largely white) country music in rock'n'roll; Bill Haley had started his career as an exponent of Western Swing, a country-jazz meld that is best known these days for being the 'western' in the term Country & Western, which generally played music in the style of swing, but with a certain countryfied-ness - a focus on fiddles rather than horns, for examples. Elvis himself, of course, covered country songs like 'Blue Moon Of Kentucky' (here's Elvis's version and here's Bill Monroe's 1946 country original) alongside R&B songs like Big Mama Thornton's 'Hound Dog'. And as much as the country establishment of the 1950s protested against rock'n'roll (and they were not really that established in the 1950s - it's really only in the mid-1940s that you see a distinctive move from the tradition-focused 'hillbilly' music to a more professional Nashville-based country music establishment with a focus on songwriting and a cleaner, more 'poppy' sound), they were relatively happy to let in (white) refugees from 1950s rock'n'roll in their later careers (e.g., Waylon Jennings who'd almost died in Buddy Holly's plane crash, or Jerry Lee Lewis, who turned to country in the mid-1960s after giving up on rock'n'roll), who in the 1950s often made fairly similar music to the country of the period, except with louder drums. Typically, rock'n'roll of the 1950s made by Southern acts, which has something more of a country-ish feel, with a bit more twang in the guitars, and perhaps less focus on the drums - Elvis, or Carl Perkins, or the Johnny Burnette Trio, or Wanda Jackson - gets called 'rockabilly' (a portmanteau of 'rock'n'roll' and 'hillbilly').