By Franklin Crawford
Rock 'n' roll: Alan Freed named it, Elvis was its icon and Bill Haley wrote the anthem, according to Glenn Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell.
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There's just one person left out of Altschuler's thesis: Altschuler. The Cornell professor has added a scholarly twist to what one 1950s critic derided as "musical riots to a switchblade beat." In his latest book, All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America (Oxford University Press), Altschuler uses rock 'n' roll as a vehicle to explore 1950s cultural angst and shows how the music transformed post-World War II America and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the 1960s.
All Shook Up is the fourth book in an Oxford University Press series titled Pivotal Moments in American History, narratives that examine a large event or process that changed the course of America. Altschuler has authored several books on American history and popular culture, including Changing Channels: America in TV Guide, co-authored with David Grossvogel, professor emeritus of Romance studies.
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The use of popular culture as a means to scholarly ends is not new. And many of the biographical details in All Shook Up about early rock stars, like Fats Domino, Little Richard and Elvis, are standard fare for the initiated. However, Altschuler, who teaches a course on American popular culture in the 20th century, makes historical and cultural connections in an entirely engaging and original way. The book's core chapters examine the decade's racial, sexual and intergenerational issues, and he goes on to detail the popular culture wars using a variety of sources from pop magazines and trade pubs to congressional records.
"The book's purpose is to understand the 1950s as a period of anxiety and conflict and as having more in common with the 1960s then perhaps the average person would think," said Altschuler. "At its best, popular culture allows us to take some things that don't look all that serious or significant and see in them important tendencies in American culture. The rise of rock 'n' roll can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s."
In All Shook Up, Altschuler writes that rock 'n' roll helped shape and define "to a significant extent, a distinct teenage culture, with its own mores. ... With the development of a separate market for teenagers, differentiation based on age became more pervasive and permanent in American culture and society. The values of young men and women were by no means fully formed, nor were they necessarily all that different from those of their parents. But in increasing numbers, these young people were unwilling to be policed or patronized. As the '50s ended, the vast majority of baby boomers had not yet become teenagers: rock 'n' roll and the youth of America had history (and demography) on their side."
Altschuler also notes that "part and parcel of rock 'n' roll's attraction for young people in the 1950s was that you could have your cake and eat it too."
"You could listen to the music and have your moments of rebellion and yet at the same time live a very conventional life. My guess is that's precisely what tens of thousands of young Americans did. For some people in the 1950s, rock 'n' roll prepared the way for a more thoroughgoing rebelliousness in the 1960s, and for some it didn't."
Writing the book was in many ways an act of discovery. The author immersed himself in the music of his formative years -- borrowing many recordings from friends. Meanwhile, with assistance from some former Cornell undergraduate advisees, Altschuler conducted the type of research most congenial to an academic. That included perusing congressional records, The New York Times archives, mass circulation magazines like Seventeen, old trade publications like Cash Box, and sifting through ephemera as well as poring over old photographs.
"When you're looking at a decade through the lens of culture, you need to read around the pop culture and so you need to read about juvenile delinquency to understand generational conflict, you need to read about the way in which baby boomers were transforming patterns of consumption in the 1950s. So while it's a book about American pop culture, it's a book that really draws on those other sources in order to gain a reasonably sophisticated understanding of pop culture."
Altschuler intersperses his narrative with biographical sketches of household names as well as informative nods to rock's rhythm-and-blues precursors. He said that anyone reading the book "should be able to see how much rock 'n' roll rose out of rhythm and blues and rose out of African-American idioms and other African-American music."
Altschuler currently is working with Cornell colleague Vice Provost Isaac Kramnick, the R.J. Schwartz professor of government, on a book about the history of Cornell from World War II to the present.
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