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Reviews in American History 32.1 (2004) 105-113



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Deliver Me from the Days of Old

Charles L. Ponce de Leon


Glenn C. Altschuler. All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiv + 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $26.00.

As anyone who has glanced at a recently published textbook would agree, the rise of social and cultural history has altered accounts of the American past we provide our students and the general public. What began as a modest effort to broaden the range of issues and subjects covered in surveys has blossomed into an ambitious project to create a new synthesis in which social and cultural history are at the very center.

In many respects, this has been a welcome development that has enriched our understanding of the past. But it is still very much a work-in-progress. Vast areas remain largely undisturbed, including much twentieth-century historiography, where the "old history" continues to influence textbook narratives and, no doubt, many survey lectures. In textbook chapters on the twentieth century, social and cultural history often appear in isolated pockets, sandwiched between more traditional fare. This is especially true when the subject is mass-produced popular culture—Hollywood movies, tabloid journalism, radio and television, and the products created by the record industry. While journalists place these mass media at the forefront of their attempts to make sense of the past and often exaggerate the significance of superficial trends, most historians keep them at arm's length and integrate them into their work mostly as color.

In the last few years, however, a number of historians have produced works that may require us to do more to incorporate popular culture into our standard narratives. Glenn C. Altschuler's book on the emergence of rock and roll is a good example of this new trend. Fusing the contributions of music critics with insights and an analytical framework derived from recently published books on postwar America, Altschuler has given us a concise and mostly persuasive account of the rise of rock and roll and its impact on American society. He is especially good at detailing the many conflicts and controversies the music inspired, and reminding us that, however trivial or [End Page 105] tame 1950s rock and roll might seem today, it was a phenomenon many Americans at the time took quite seriously.

He begins with an overview of postwar America and the mainstream music industry, a field dominated by a handful of record labels—the "majors"—that exerted considerable influence over the range of music available in the nation's record stores, on jukeboxes, and on music programs broadcast by network radio stations. These labels—Capitol, RCA, Decca, Columbia, Mercury, and MGM—were key institutions of an emergent national culture that first appeared in the early twentieth century and steadily increased its reach during the 1920s and 1930s. Often linked to other media through cross-ownership and guided by similar marketing strategies that placed a premium on creating products for a relatively broad mainstream audience, the major labels were conservative and hewed close to the middle of the road, content to peddle music that already had a large audience—or seemed certain to attract one because of its familiarity to material that had a proven track record. This conservatism, Altschuler notes, affected not merely the sound but also the lyrics of most of the records the majors released. The result was a proliferation of bland, soothing pop, sung by crooners and played by the mellower big bands of the era, and a regular supply of catchy yet wholesome "novelty songs" designed to appeal to children and teenagers.

While presuming to provide something for everybody, this was not a very effective strategy to adopt in the field of popular music, particularly in the 1940s, when new social, economic, and demographic trends were beginning to reverberate throughout America. Unlike the Hollywood studios that enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the production of motion pictures, there were thousands of musicians performing throughout the...

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