Fats Domino’s debut single rocks and rolls, and that’s enough to make it another of the building blocks of rock’n’roll. (more…)

Erline Harris, whose career burned brightly and briefly at the end of the 1940s, was a rare female artist in the proto-rock’n’roll era.

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Sticks McGhee launched a career of booze-related songs with a profanity-strewn Army chant called Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee back in 1946.

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The French Dispatch - film review

Wes Anderson’s tenth feature film is “a love letter to journalism” told in a typically whimsical anthology of stories for the titular magazine. The director and his all-star cast of regulars and newcomers are on top form in this tour-de-force. (more…)

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.

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Rewinding back to 1948 on the early rock’n’roll trail, I discover Detroit sax man Wild Bill Moore.

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Chuck Berry must have been listening when a teenage Goree Carter & His Hepcats released Rock Awhile in 1949.

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Here’s a third nomination for First Rock’n’Roll song – it’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it, as some other group would one day observe.

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Here is my second contender for the first rock’n’roll song of them all – That’s All Right by Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup – from 1946.

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Louis Jordan was already the biggest black music star when he staked his claim for the first rock’n’roll song way back in 1945. (more…)