![]() ![]() It seems we’ve lost some of the breadth that used to be there.” I love being able to illustrate how broad the music used to be, because now it’s so narrow and pigeonholed. “Which is why we don’t know who they are now. “I was especially happy to be able to include so many women performers, because they never got their due,” he continues. I was able to show the melting pot in America, which came together to create this phenomenon. ![]() Without any trouble at all, I was able to include people of all races in this book. It’s such a conglomeration, and that diversity is the real back story of rock ’n’ roll. It came from the church, from vaudeville, from the music played in after-hours clubs, from juke joints. The roots of rock go back a lot further than we realize. “Bob Wills was playing in the ’30s and ’40s in Oklahoma, and Chuck Berry modeled ‘Maybellene’ on a Bob Wills song. “We have this notion that rock ’n’ roll started in Memphis in 1955, and it really didn’t,” Linderman says. It’s a little slice of entertainment found in America’s rural landscape of the early 20th century. The most famous group in the book, the Carter Family, wears ruffled dresses at a county fair, the sort of event you’d expected to find homemade ice cream and a pie-eating contest. That’s the story I wanted to tell with images, not words.”įor a book about rock, many of the images are undeniably “country”: Women in homemade gingham dresses and shawls, men with slicked down hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, a little girl with springy curls playing a banjo labeled “Jesus Saves,” square dancers, marching bands at tabernacle revivals, hardscrabble Dust Bowl farmers with stern expressions holding guitars, and Western bands in full-on Hollywood cowboy regalia. I realized that rock ’n’ roll didn’t come down from above, from performers in arenas, it came up from little people. I was collecting photographs of guys with banjos when I realized that I could tell a bigger story if I included more recent photos, and yet still use roots music as my influence. I’ve literally been here for the whole thing. As I say in the book, I was born the year Hank Williams died, and the next year, Elvis made his first recording. “What a remarkable, lucky thing that was, to be here at that time. “A couple of years ago, I came to the realization that I had lived through virtually the entire history of rock ’n’ roll,” Linderman says. All the musical genres that influenced what we know of as “rock” are represented: Everything from jump blues and gospel to boogie woogie and Western swing. ![]() Instead, the images capture the gangly musicians, the giddy dancers, and the drunken antics found in small-town America from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond. In fact, most of the people in the photos wouldn’t have heard of rock ’n’ roll, much less thought of themselves as rock-’n’-roll progenitors. The images are largely unexplained, left to speak for themselves-and they don’t include a single photo of Bill Hayley, Elvis Presley, or any of the usual suspects. IGGY POP YOUNG SERIESHis latest book, The Birth of Rock and Roll, published by Dust-to-Digital and available for pre-order on Amazon, is a series of found images sandwiched between his musings on rock music and a conversation with rock critic Joe Bonomo. That’s the real history of rock ’n’ roll.” “The whole point was pretty much to get together, get drunk, and get laid. Then he organizes and presents them on one of his blogs, like Dull Tool Dim Bulb, Old Time Religion, or Vintage Sleaze, or even as books, such as Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography, 1890-1950 and the self-published Secret History of the Black Pin-Up: Women of Color From Pin Up to Porn. Linderman, an author and former librarian for CBS News, has made something of a second career for himself collecting vintage, everyday photographs that fit into particular themes. But when Jim Linderman, a collector of vernacular photography and folk art, finds a photograph like that, he sees the seeds of the rebellious music known as rock. If you had to choose an image to define “rock ’n’ roll,” what would it be? Elvis’ pompadour? A psychedelic rock poster? A Flying V guitar? The last thing you might picture is a young woman in the Great Depression, wearing her Sunday best, smiling modestly as she poses with her saxophone. ![]()
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