We tend to think of the 1950s as the decade when rock’n’roll was born. But there’s a whole legion of post-war musicians who lit the spark.

By 1949 the evolution from jump blues and R&B was already in full swing – even if white folks hadn’t caught on quite yet. This is another example.

Coming along a year after Wynonie Harris’s Good Rockin’ Tonight, the rolling rhythm, boogie bass and scorching sax breaks (by Danny Turner) make Rock The Joint another crucial entry in the pantheon of proto-rock’n’roll.

It gave Jimmy Preston & His Prestonians their second hit single on the R&B chart (after Hucklebuck Daddy) and spawned a cover by Chris Powell & The Five Blue Flames in the same year that’s equally great.

Inevitably it became best known when it was covered in 1952 by Bill Haley, who was a country-and-western singer on the same Gotham label in Philadelphia when this came out, credited to Bill Haley & The Saddlemen.

Some say that was the first rockabilly record but I think that label was applied retrospectively, and I’m not sure it’s any more accurate than the idea – floated by Alan Freed – that Haley invented rock’n’roll.

I think it’s fair to say Preston and Powell both did more justice to the song, composed by Gotham’s in-house songwriters Harry Crafton, Wendell “Don” Keane, and Harry “Doc” Bagby in New York, before Ivin Ballen moved his label to Philadelphia in 1948.