ABSTRACT
The first blasts of the rock 'n' roll era blew away the depression and tedium of the post-Second World War years. Rock 'n' roll was a collision of white country and black rhythm and blues, with many, many other influences leaping in as well within the next three decades. Race, and the continuing fight against discrimination in the USA, Britain or Africa, was, eventually, to be a major concern of some practitioners of the new music. Rock 'n' roll would learn that it was born under a bad sign, born at a time when musicians had been censored for their politics. It would learn that there were traditions, both in the American music that had gone before, and in the popular music in other parts of the world. Britain entered the fifties, and the rock 'n' roll era, in a spirit of dull recovery rather than anti-Communist paranoia.
