Precisely how rock ‘n’ roll got its name probably never will be definitively answered, but there can be no doubt that it entered popular usage thanks to a disc jockey named Alan Freed, a “wild, greedy and dangerous man” who was, in the mid 1950s, “the dominant nighttime personality on radio in New York City.” Almost exactly half a century ago he changed the name of his show to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Dance Party” and began to plug the music of black rhythm-and-blues performers as well as the young whites who began to copy and reinterpret their work.
The rest is history, not a blip on the pop-cultural radar screen but a development of major importance in 20th-century American, and eventually world, history. Thus we now have, in Oxford University Press’ ongoing series called “Pivotal Moments in American History,” Glenn C. Altschuler’s account of rock ‘n’ roll’s formative years, the decade immediately following the Second World War. Its three predecessors in the series cover the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education, the stock market crash of 1929 and the battle of Antietam, which is to say the editors, the distinguished historians David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson, put rock ‘n’ roll in rarefied company.
