page_title: Music history of the United States
section_title: The dawn of rock & roll
hierarchical_section_title: Music history of the United States / 1940s and 1950s / The dawn of rock & roll
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Bill Haley and his Comets. Decca Records issued the ad without any copyright marks or notations. The photo is a larger version of that in the Decca ad. US Copyright Office page 3-magazines are collective works (PDF) "A notice for the collective work will not serve as the notice for advertisements inserted on behalf of persons other than the copyright owner of the collective work. These advertisements should each bear a separate notice in the name of the copyright owner of the advertisement." Copyright for Billboard magazine would not affect this non-marked Decca Records ad. Decca didn't label their ad as under copyright.
context_page_description: The music history of the United States includes many styles of folk, popular and classical music. Some of the best-known genres of American music are blues, rock and roll, and country. The history began with the Native Americans, the first people to populate North America. The music of these people was highly varied in form, and was mostly religious in purpose.
  With the colonization of America from European countries like France, Spain, Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales came Christian choirs, musical notation, broadsides, as well as West African slaves. West African slaves played a variety of instruments, especially drums and string instruments similar to the banjo. The Spanish also played a similar instrument called the Bandora. Both of these cultures introduced polyrhythms and call-and-response style vocals.
  As the United States incorporated more land, spreading west towards the Ocean, more immigrants began to arrive in the country, bringing with them their own instruments and styles. During this time, the United States grew to incorporate the Cajun and Creole music of Louisiana, the Polynesian music of Hawaii and Tex-Mex and Tejano music.
context_section_description: Starting in the 1920s, Boogie Woogie began to evolve into what would become rock and roll, with decided blues influences, from 1929's "Crazy About My Baby" with fundamental rock elements to 1938's "Roll 'Em Pete" by Big Joe Turner, which contained almost the complete formula. Teenagers from across the country began to identify with each other and launched numerous trends. Perhaps most importantly, the 1940s saw the rise of the youth culture. The first teen stars arose, beginning with the bobby soxer idol Frank Sinatra; this opened up new audiences for popular music, which had been primarily an adult phenomenon prior to the 1940s. In the 1940s, boogie woogie was using terms like "rocking" and "rolling" borrowed from gospel and blues music, as in "Good Rockin' Tonight" by Roy Brown. In the 1950s, rock and roll musicians began producing direct covers of boogie woogie and R&B stars, for example "Shake Rattle and Roll" by Big Joe Turner (covered by Bill Haley and his Comets in 1954) and "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton (covered by Elvis Presley in 1956), and their own original works like Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" in 1955.
caption: Bill Haley and His Comets had the biggest selling rock and roll single in the history of the genre.
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