HISTORY

The origins of rock and roll have been fiercely debated by commentators and historians of music. There is general agreement that it appears in the Southern United States, a region which would produce most of the major early rock and roll acts, through the meeting of various influences that fusion the African musical tradition with European instrumentation. 

The migration of many former their descendants to major urban centers like Memphis and north to New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Buffalo meant that black and white residents were living in close proximity in larger numbers than ever before, and as a result heard each other's music and even began to impulse each other's fashions.Radio stations that made white and black forms of music available to both groups, the development and spread of the gramophone record, and African American musical styles such as jazz and swing which were taken up by white musicians, with the help of "cultural collision".

The immediate roots of rock and roll lay in the rhythm and blues, then called "race music", and country music of the 1940s and 1950s. Particularly significant influences were jazz, blues, gospel, country, and folk. Commentators differ in their views of which of these forms were most important and the degree to which the new music was a rebranding of African American rhythm and blues for a white market, or a new hybrid of black and white forms.