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young audience had appeared singing and playing songs that young people could dance to with lyrics that spoke to them.

The disc jockeys and their young audiences were firmly in charge. New York's franchise on the pop stream, typified by Tin Pan Alley's Brill Building, did not place one song on the Top Ten Pop Chart in 1955. Three R&B songs - including Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" - crossed over to the C&W and Pop charts, and Berry's version of his song was a Pop and R&B hit.

In 1956, the Encyclopedia Brittanica's Book of the Year gave the new music's name official sanction - they included an entry on rock 'n' roll and called it popular music "at its lowest ebb in the so-called 'rock 'n roll" style' of rhymetric chant (which) concentrated on a minimum of melody line and a maximum of rhythmic noise, deliberately competing with the artistic ideals of the jungle itself."

For many, that was what the music was them; for many, that is what it is now, but the study of this music and its history has much to tell us.

As I said at the beginning, it is American history, and like all American history, it is suffused with race. Like all American history, it has its share of tragedy and triumph, heroes and villians. But it is ultimately the history of survival, of cultures clashing and mingling; as Vincent Harding put it, the history of "the creation of a more just and democratic society."⁵³

Here is the theme song of the 20th Century effort to create