Why Aren't Early Rock Songs Included in the Great American Songbook?

Everyone knows what The Great American Songbook is, a musical composition filled with the great composers of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. The primary focus being show tunes and jazz standards. Yet after World War II, many of these songs went out of fashion, and were anything but gone from the mainstream American culture by 1960. Instead, a new form of popular music had risen in the last several years. One that brewed in the American South for decades.

Prior to being a genre of music, Rock N Roll had three distinct meanings. One had a religious connotation in reference to being in the arms of God, or any other type of savior. Another was a term for sexual relations in the segregated black community of the time. While the third and least known definition involves waves, boats, and ships rocking and rolling against the ocean. The first recorded reference to Rock N Roll goes back over fifty years before the genre itself went mainstream in 1955.

Rock began in the Gospel hymns of black churches in the early 1900's, then spread to secular Blues artists by the 1920's where this early form of Rock music took on a more sexual meaning. It soon it went mainstream in the Jazz and Big Band genre in Chicago and New York. Now involving both black and white artists, who used the term Rock N Roll in songs and music decades before it was well known. A small number of white country and western artists also picked up on this.

In the 1940's, a new musical style swept throughout Jazz, Country, and Blues called Boogie Woogie. A style that had been in the American South almost as long as Rock N Roll, but did not catch on until this period. It was a piano driven style of dance music that further bound the above genres of music together. Despite the mainstream not yet catching to this was this new form of music was. It would be another decade or so of evolution before we would know what Rock N Roll was.

Three more sub-genres of the Blues would emerge in the same decade to help further Rock music onto its path. Chicago Blues, Jump Blues, and R&B. Taking the piano from gospel and Boogie Woogie, bass and drums from Jazz, the electric guitar from Blues, and the acoustic guitar from Country and Western. These early forerunners developed the basic setup for what would become a rock band, with each musical style having its own variation.

The came 1950-1955, the period where Rock became more commercial and was exposed to a mainstream white audience. A Cleveland based disc jockey named Alan Freed played both black rhythm and blues records and white country and western albums. He labeled this new music Rock N Roll. Musicians of both races began to emerge in this new style. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino. The rest they say is history.

The Great American Songbook features all these Broadway and Hollywood show tunes from before World War II. Yet what about after? Rock has a long and twisting history, just as intriguing as the songs featured in The Great American Songbook. Why are they not even featured? They all belong there. Anything from Gospel, Blues, Country and Western, Jazz to its later variations Boogie Woogie, Chicago Blues, Jump, and Rhythm and Blues.

Of course, the musicians who performed this music should be forgotten. Nor should the artists who brought it to the mainstream in the 1950's. They should all be remember and their songs commemorated. Yet they are not for some reason. Are there a bunch of elitists or scholars who keeping them out? If so, then why? Does Rock and its associated variations or genres not sound classical and clean enough for this group?

If they are not to be included in The Great American Songbook, they why not develop a songbook just for them? Call it The Modern American Songbook or The Contemporary American Songbook, this way it would appeal to a wide range of people. Naming it The Great Rock N Roll Songbook or The Great Rock Music Songbook would just confine it to the limits of a genre. It needs to be thought of as more than that.

It is sad there are those who wish not to acknowledge, the existence of Rock music. Over fifty years after it surfaced in the mainstream, there are those who still think Rock is distasteful or inappropriate. It is also sad to deny people their musical heritage, whether they performed it or grew up listening to it. One wishes there was an answer as to why The Great American Songbook chooses ignore this form of race music from The South. Or music after World War II.