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"Rhythm 'n' blues," Amiri Baraka wrote, "not only reflected that stream of music that had been city blues and was a further development of the growing urban tradition, it also reflected a great deal about the America it came out of and the Negroes who sang or listened to it. Certainly the war years had brought about profound changes in the cultural consciousness of Negroes, as they had done to the superstructure of American culture as a whole. There was a kind of frenzy and extra-local vulgarity to rhythm 'n' blues that had never been present in older blues forms. Suddenly, it was as if a great deal of the Euro-American humanist facade Afro-American music had taken on had been washed away by the war. Rhythm 'n' blues singers literally had to shout to be heard above the clanging and strumming of the various electrified instruments and the churning rhythm sections. And somehow the louder the instrumental accompaniment and the more harshly screamed the singing, the more expressive the music was.¹⁵

To understand the music's appeal to young whites we must understand who they were and what the music meant to them.

They were "teenagers", a term in general usage only since 1945, and then only in the United States. Before circa 1935, American teenagers considered themselves, and were considered, to be young adults, and not a specific group.¹⁶

Post war affluence made them the first American generation of young people with money to spend without having to work and the freedom to reject parental values and discover cultural forms