What Hath Rock Wrought?: Blues, Country Music, Rock'n'Roll and Istanbul

Year 1995, Issue: 1, 33 - 39, 01.04.1995

Clifford Endres

Abstract

If between 1925 and 1960 the most visible musical exports of the United States were the Broadway show tune and jazz, that distinction in the last quarter of the twentieth century has shifted to rock music. Since the 1960s, when British groups such as the Kinks, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones absorbed and transmuted Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, then winged the new product back across the Atlantic to America in the so-called British Invasion, rock has become the lingua franca of the world's youth. In sheer popularity rock far surpasses its musical cousin jazz.

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