Why does black people never want to rock?

I feel like Miriam Linna or someone once wrote about some good rockin stuff (albeit you had to look for it) that happened during the fallow period prior to the Beatles.

oh there's definitely good stuff between '60 and '63, it's just that the standard narrative is that rock died when Elvis joined the army/Chuck got arrested/Little Richard retired etc.

well i posted it here more for the race angle, which while not exactly new, idk, was interesting to hear dylan talk about it. his suggestion is something like r&r was black AND white (regardless of the exact roots), but once it was segregated, and once that segregation was enforced, it stopped being r&r as it was originally conceived.

idk how you could look at 60s music and not see that divide (and people periodically attempting to bridge it - Sly, the Stones etc.)

dylan is a pretty smart guy. knows a lot more than he says, i think.

but it's true that most people refuse to acknowledge that "rock and roll", 1963-forward, is a predominantly white musical form. i hate to bring him up, but that was the worst thing about klosterman's nyt garbage- this unquestioned, ingrained belief that rock and roll is a _black_ art form. this, just wall of white delusion and denial.

'59-'63 was a terrible time for the four or five founding behemoths, and a terrible time for the proliferation of Steve Lawrences and Bobby Vees. But, as has often been pointed out, from Motown to Spector to the second wave of doo-wop to girl groups to Pitney/Orbison/Shannon moodiness to lots else, there's no end of great stuff to search out.

I haven't looked at the article, and am certainly not trying to discredit anything Dylan has to say on the matter. He was there, I wasn't (I was, but not really), and he's always interesting on early rock 'n' roll.

"idk how you could look at 60s music and not see that divide (and people periodically attempting to bridge it - Sly, the Stones etc.)"

it is obvious. the divide is there. but i think his point is that it 'died' at that point. sly trying to erode the divide was an attempt, but it was a necessary (and contrived, not necessarily in a bad way) attempt because that initial, organic, conception of it had already died.

"but it's true that most people refuse to acknowledge that "rock and roll", 1963-forward, is a predominantly white musical form. i hate to bring him up, but that was the worst thing about klosterman's nyt garbage- this unquestioned, ingrained belief that rock and roll is a _black_ art form. this, just wall of white delusion and denial."

yep. regardless of racists trying to ignore the black strands, and weird liberals over emphasising the black roots ('IT IS *ALL* BLACK MUSIC!'), regardless of how it happened, the fact is just that most of the innovations have been from white artists. yes i know hendrix is towering, but even as he was bringing his R&B training to what he was doing (and the genre), he was playing in what was already a white rock style. it basically stopped being 'black music' a long time ago.

yeah I'm not disagreeing, I think his point that rock was at least fundamentally different after '59 is correct. Which is why Sly, when he came along, was seen as a welcome exception rather than the rule.

And of course circa 63 Brit acts were all covering material by Black musicians

You'd have to do a detailed check on this to be sure, but my guess is that, starting with the British Invasion bands, white covers of black hits are substantially better by the mid-'60s than in the '55-57 era. I like the original "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" (Exciters) and "Go Now" (Bessie Banks) and "I'm Into Somethin' Good" (Earl-Jean) even better than the more famous covers, but the covers are pretty great too (and probably most people would go with Manfred Mann). The Beatles and Rolling Stones were generally fantastic covering girl group and Motown and Chuck Berry. Compare that with the horrifying Pat Boone-type cover from the '50s. (Exception: the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'.")

That the first three covers I listed were still the bigger hits remained...troublesome? complicated? grossly unfair? Manfred Mann and the Moody Blues and Herman's Hermits all did an excellent job.

You'd have to do a detailed check on this to be sure, but my guess is that, starting with the British Invasion bands, white covers of black hits are substantially better by the mid-'60s than in the '55-57 era. I like the original "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" (Exciters) and "Go Now" (Bessie Banks) and "I'm Into Somethin' Good" (Earl-Jean) even better than the more famous covers, but the covers are pretty great too (and probably most people would go with Manfred Mann). The Beatles and Rolling Stones were generally fantastic covering girl group and Motown and Chuck Berry. Compare that with the horrifying Pat Boone-type cover from the '50s. (Exception: the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'.")

― clemenza

so white people got better at "cultural appropriation"? :)

I brought this point up in this in another thread, but it's probably more relevant to this discussion: It's interesting to look at the R&B chart of 1963 and consider the fact that there was so much overlap with the pop chart at that moment that Billboard stopped publishing an R&B chart for over a year, including all of 1964. In '63 people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Bobby Darin, and the Beach Boys were placing records on the R&B chart. What was going on then? Were "black music" and "white music" converging? In early '65 the R&B chart comes back but it appears that white acts are seldom on it from that point forward - until the disco period when things get shaken up a little.

various guesses online--

http://www.discomusic.com/forums/showthread.php/42201-The-Missing-Billboard-Soul-Charts-1964-answer-and-Cash-Box-charts-here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_R%26B/Hip-Hop_Songs
From November 30, 1963, to January 23, 1965, there were no Billboard R&B singles charts. The chart was discontinued in late 1963 when Billboard determined it unnecessary due to so much crossover of titles between the R&B and pop charts in light of the rise of Motown.[5] The chart was reinstated with the issue dated January 30, 1965, as "Hot Rhythm and Blues Singles" when differences in musical tastes of the two audiences, caused in part by the British Invasion in 1964, were deemed sufficient to revive it.[citation needed]

^^^ I see one guy in the discomusic thread asking the question but no one takes him up on it (unless I'm missing something)

Down to it, it's a good naive question to ask. And the last points I've just skimmed over are very sensible.
Cultural / race divide is its own answer, as music is closely linked to education, heritage, identity. There hasn't been much white presence in some genres that retain a strong black majority even to this day. You just have to ask black artists what they were listening and admiring to as kids. There's already been much talk elsewhere about the woman side of the history of music (how many listeners even approach 'equality' there ?), which is a similar social question.

hell hath no whining like the whining of an entitled dude who believes in “real rock” pic.twitter.com/E583DZ692E

— maura 🎙 johnston (@maura) December 12, 2017