Music, Pop Culture

The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll

But here’s a twist: the daddy was from Oklahoma.

Who wrote the very first rock song? Or, to put it another way: Who put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop?

 

 

And—more importantly—who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding dong?

Don’t scoff. These are important, culture-defining questions, after all. Questions worthy of intensive academic study, prolonged scrutiny, and decades of online music nerd debate.

And as it turns out, the long-accepted answer about who really recorded the very first rock song is, quite simply, wrong.

The debate over the true birth of rock and roll has been ongoing for decades. Despite the long-held assumption that rock’s nuclear-powered genesis took place in the 1950s, music historians generally agree that the foundational elements grew directly from the previous decade’s popular music: 1940s boogie-woogie, jump blues, up-tempo jazz, and gospel. Pioneer artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for example, blended spiritual fervor with electric guitar wizardry long before rock’s 1950s mainstream explosion.

As the legend goes, “Rocket 88,” recorded in 1951 by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner, was the rock and roll shot heard round the world.

There’s just one problem with this “fact” though: When you trace “Rocket 88’s” groove, melody, and car-fetishizing lyrics back to the original source, you land four years earlier, in 1947, with a track called “Cadillac Boogie.” The true blueprint for rock and roll was composed and recorded by a talented guitarist born right here in Oklahoma: Jimmy Liggins.

Born in 1918, in Newby, Oklahoma, Jimmy Liggins grew up immersed in the lively, diverse soundtrack of the southern plains. Oklahoma during this period was already a buzzing crossroads of creativity, where swinging big band music, country blues, sophisticated jazz, hillbilly songs and the hugely popular phenomenon of western swing were all colliding in new and fascinating ways.

When Liggins—a professional boxer—decided to hang up his gloves permanently, he channeled all his energy into music. The dance band he fronted, Jimmy Liggins and his Drops of Joy, were well-known for their frenzied stage antics and for playing the most exciting show on the tour circuit.

Luckily, his band also brought all that electrifying energy into the recording studio.

 

 

In 1947, Jimmy Liggins and his Drops of Joy cut “Cadillac Boogie” for Los Angeles-based Specialty Records. Listening to it today, the track is an unexpected chronological headscratcher, showcasing all the musical and thematic elements that would provide the blueprint for rock and roll in the mid-1950s, including an “eight-to-the-bar” bassline that moved away from the traditional jazz walking bass, and a hard-hitting horn line blasting out raucous-yet-joyful riffs, featuring Maxwell Davis’s tenor saxophone solos delving into the aggressive, honking style that became a foundational element of early rock instrumentals.

Yet this was a song recorded squarely in the middle of the postwar era, when country crossover hits, western swing and highly produced traditional pop crooners like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore still ruled the radio airwaves.

“Cadillac Boogie,” on the other hand, was anything but smooth and polished. It crackled with youthful energy, blowing past the stuffy limitations of 1940s pop-jazz. Liggins’s jubilant, wink-and-a-nod baritone vocals barked out lyrics centered entirely around the worship of speed, pretty girls, good times and a showy car—pure early rock rebellion. This was definitely not your parents’ pop music. It was a sweeping stylistic leap into the future.

Jimmy Liggins invented the engine with “Cadillac Boogie.” Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner hitched a ride with “Rocket 88.” They didn’t just borrow from “Cadillac Boogie”—they cloned it. “Rocket 88” uses the exact same key, tempo, chord progression, and melodic phrasing for its vocal delivery. If “Rocket 88” is rock and roll, then its identical blueprint from four years prior must be as well.

So the burning question is this: Why does “Rocket 88” get all the credit for being rock song number one?

A large part of the track’s claim to fame stems from a bumpy car ride. Guitarist Willie Kizart’s guitar amplifier was accidentally knocked around in the trunk on the way to the recording studio for the “Rocket 88” recording session, damaging the speaker. In an attempt to fix the rattling sound coming from the ailing amp, producer Sam Phillips stuffed it with newspaper, resulting in a fuzzy, overdriven guitar tone. This unintended “dirty” sound caught everyone’s attention in the studio, so they decided to use it for the recording, creating, in one fell swoop, the sonic signature of rock music.

But here’s the thing: Granting “Rocket 88” the title of “first” penalizes Liggins simply because his studio amplifier worked correctly, rewarding a technical accident (albeit a really cool one) while completely ignoring the deliberate musical composition that occurred four years earlier. While “Rocket 88” was a massive commercial milestone, and a fantastic record, it was actually just the evolution of a sound that was wholly created by Liggins and his band, not the genesis of a new genre.

Despite what some historians claim, rock and roll wasn’t born in Memphis or Chicago. Its blueprint was created by a scrappy kid from Oklahoma who looked at a Cadillac and heard the future of music. It’s time to give Jimmy Liggins the crown he rightfully earned.