ABSTRACT
I’d always enjoyed r’n’b - it was just something we grew up with in Tennessee.
Scotty Moore, Elvis’s guitarist
In Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948, radio station WDIA opened up, billing itself as ‘America’s only 50,000 watt Negro radio station’, broadcasting twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Elvis wasn’t the only one listening in. Their parents would have been horrified if they had known but lots of other white American teenagers were listening too. Like their contempor aries in Britain, they were fed up with the unexciting pop their parents and elder brothers and sisters were buying. But, unlike the London Teddy boys, American teenagers could flip the dial on their wireless sets and find music that had much more roughness and fire to it.
