The Very First Rock And Roll Record Was Released In 1934

Prevously: Huh? And The Mysterions

Okay, I admit it: I was a bit disingenuous with the title of this piece.  Strictly speaking, this is not the first rock & roll song. It isn't even about rock & roll dancing and it doesn't have a rock & roll beat -far from it. This is actually a song from the swing era. 

But it is the first known rock & roll record, in the sense that the title of the song is "Rock And Roll" and the phrase "rock and roll" is sung over and over.  And over.

And this isn't even the Boswell Sisters' best work. In fact it was the B side of their recording "You Oughta Be In Pictures" which later became the unofficial anthem of the American film industry after Rudy Vallee covered it and turned it into a bona fide hit.  But the song does have a place in rock & roll history, if only as a footnote. 

Here is the scene from the movie Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round where the Boswell Sisters are part of the entertainment on a cruise ship, singing about how they'll somehow be dancing and romancing "in the rolling and the rocking of the sea":

The film itself belongs to that genre of musical-comedy-whodunnits that were popular at the time. The story revolves around the murder of a gangster on a cruise ship, and features Jack Benny as the director of a company of entertainers on said cruise.  Is the movie worth watching?  It is, if only for the chance to see Jack Benny before he was funny:

Huh? And The Mysterions

Previously: 100,000 Candy Bars You Never Got A Chance To Taste

I was about 15 years old before I started taking an interest in songs on the radio.  I found I really liked this song I was hearing that had just hit number one on KHJ radio's top forty, "96 Tears."  I recall the disc jockey saying the name of the group was unpronounceable and that made me all the more curious, so I went down to the Anaheim mall and bought the 45.  But the record label just listed the artists as  "? and the Mysterions." 

I didn't know how I was supposed to pronounce that question mark part so in my head I silently pronounced the band's name to myself as  "huh?" and the Mysterions. This was the sixties, and that pronunciation made as much sense to me as anything else those days.

It was many years later -decades, actually- when I finally learned the group's name was pronounced "Question Mark and the Mysterions."

Duh. 

Glad I never pronounced my version of the name out loud among my peers. I was in 9th grade and wouldn't have been able to bear the shame. 

Anyway, by listening to the record over and over I found I could learn to play that riff by ear on my little sister's toy organ, as the song simply slipped from a C chord to a C minor and back again repeatedly.  The church janitor happened to be my neighbor, and one weekday I went to work with him so  I could sneak into the chapel and practice that song on the massive church organ while no one else was in the building.  Teenage heaven, my friend. Teenage heaven.

Here's that record, which I probably shouldn't have been playing in church, as rock historians have since dubbed it one of the early precursors to the Punk Rock movement:

By the way, you may have guessed that the lead singer's name wasn't really Question Mark. It was Rudy Martinez.  And Rudy wants people to know they are a Mexican band. “We lose our national identity when we say Hispanic,” he said. “People don’t connect the good things we do with being Mexican, and that hurts our image as a people.” -Fifty Years Later Question Mark and the Mysterions are as Mysterious as Ever.

Next Up: The Very First Rock & Roll Record: 1934