Rock and roll: the 1950s form that every guitar band since has been arguing with

Rock and roll is the music of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, and the youth culture that arrived with it. The name is a contraction of rocking and rolling, a phrase that had been in blues records for decades with a meaning nobody needed explained. The form itself is simple enough to write down, which is exactly why it spread.

Where it came from

Two American traditions met: rhythm and blues, which supplied the beat, the twelve-bar structure and the vocal style, and country music, which supplied the melodic shapes and much of the first white audience. Jump blues sat between them, already using a small horn-driven band and a heavy shuffle. Nothing was invented from nothing. What changed between about 1951 and 1955 was the amplifier, the seven-inch single and a teenage audience with money.

There is no agreed first record. Rocket 88, cut in Memphis in 1951 with a guitar amplifier that had been damaged in transit, is the usual candidate because of the distortion. Rock Around the Clock in 1955 is the usual candidate for the moment the audience arrived. Both answers are right in different senses, and arguing about it is part of the tradition.

The parts: backbeat, twelve bars, and a guitar loud enough

A rock and roll band is typically a singer, a guitarist or pianist, a double bass or electric bass, and a drummer, often with a saxophone. The rhythm is 4/4 with a hard accent on the second and fourth beats, the backbeat, which is the single element that separates it from almost everything that came before. Under it runs a rolling bass line inherited from boogie-woogie, moving in eighths and outlining the chord rather than sitting on its root.

Over that sits the twelve-bar blues: four bars on the first chord, two on the fourth, two back on the first, one on the fifth, one on the fourth, two to finish. It is a shape a band can play without rehearsal, in any key, which is why it survived the transition to pubs, garages and student unions intact.

The Northern band style and the horns

From about 1952, big bands in the northern United States began applying that offbeat to swing arrangements, keeping the horn section and shrinking everything else. It is occasionally mistaken for rockabilly because of the slapped upright bass, but the drums are louder and more prominent, the horns take solos, and the whole thing carries the visual habits of big-band culture — matching suits, shouted interjections, a bandleader working the room. The repertoire mixed rhythm and blues covers with original material.

Rockabilly

The Southern answer arrived in 1953 and 1954: a mix of rhythm and blues with country, first played with nothing but a slapped double bass, an electric guitar and a voice, with drums and piano added afterwards. Sun Records in Memphis was the centre of it, and because Sun's artists toured relentlessly the style spread across the South faster than the records did. Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins each carved out something distinct inside a very narrow form. By 1957 rockabilly had largely dissolved back into mainstream rock and roll, and several of its players went home to country music.

Hand jive and the Bo Diddley beat

Hand jive, also called the Chicago sound or the Bo Diddley sound, is a historically Black strand of rock and roll built on a trance-like maracas ostinato that alternates with the vocal in a question-and-answer scheme. The dance that goes with it is body percussion: clapping hands against each other or against the body in set patterns.

The tradition behind it is older and much darker. Hambone, or pattin' juba, was body percussion developed by enslaved Africans in the American South after drums were banned precisely because they carried messages. A rhythm that survives a prohibition by moving into the body is a serious piece of cultural engineering, and it ends up, a century and a half later, in a pop record.

The opening bar as an argument

Rock and roll made a virtue of the first four seconds. The opening of a single had to do the work that an overture does elsewhere: state the case, set the tempo and dare you to turn it off. That instinct is not unique to the form — a discussion of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, published under the heading piece of music has magnificent opening, makes the same argument about a work written in 1875, whose famous opening chords are in the wrong key and have almost nothing to do with the rest of the movement.

What it left behind

The instrumentation never went away. Guitar, bass, drums and voices on a small stage is a 1954 arrangement, and punk, post-punk and everything on the list of the sub genres of rock is a variation on it rather than a replacement. So is the economics: a short single, a cheap recording, a circuit of small rooms and an audience that is mostly young.

So is the wardrobe, which has outlived the music by some distance. Seventy years on you can buy a denim rock and roll shacket without owning a single record made before 1980. The look detached from the sound somewhere around 1975 and has been sold separately ever since.

What a band like The Victorian English Gentlemens Club inherited from all this is not a style (nothing they recorded sounds like 1956) but a set of assumptions. Three people can make a complete noise. A song can be two minutes. The single matters more than the album. Those are rock and roll's terms, and almost nobody has renegotiated them.