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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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…)

Ernest Tubb once remarked that whenever one of his songs came on a jukebox, men in bars would turn to their girlfriends and say: “Heck, I can sing better than that.” And, agreed Ernest, “They’d be right.”

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Hank Williams once said that when it came to pulling power for the famously devout music fans of the Deep South: “It was Roy Acuff – then God.”

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Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys brought Western Swing to the fore in the 1940s and helped define the ‘other’ half of Country & Western music. (more…)