Music-related events during the 1950s
 "For music from a year in the 1950s, go to 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59"
This article includes an overview of the major events and trends in popular music in the 1950s.
In North America and Europe, the 1950s were revolutionary in regards to popular music, as it started a dramatic shift from traditional pop music to modern pop music, largely in part due to the rise of Rock and roll.
Rock &amp; Roll began to dominate popular music starting in the mid-1950s with origins in a variety of genres including blues, rhythm &amp; blues, country, and pop. Major rock artists of the 1950s include Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, and Larry Williams. Rock &amp; Roll helped the electric guitar become the dominating instrument in popular music starting in the 1950s, and the decade saw the release of the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul. In the ensuing decades rock &amp; roll would branch out to a variety of genres and sub-genres all under the umbrella of rock music, with rock becoming the dominant musical genre throughout the 20th century.
Doo-Wop, a genre of rhythm &amp; blues music that originated in the 1940s, rose in prominence along with the rise of rock &amp; roll. Popular doo-wop artists of the 1950s include The Platters, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Lymon, The Five Satins, The Flamingos, and The Del-Vikings. While the popularity of the genre wained after the early 1960s, it would go on to influence many styles of pop and rock music
Traditional pop music experienced a decline in popularity starting in the mid-1950s, however, artists such as Perry Como and Patti Page dominated the pop charts during the first half of the decade, and artists such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin remained popular throughout the 1950s and the ensuing decades.
The 1950s were one of country music's most influential decades, with artists such as Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline being some of the decade's most notable. The honky-tonk style of country music remained heavily popular during the decade, and the late 1950s gave rise to the Nashville sound.
Blues music was highly influential to popular music in the 1950s, having directly influenced rock &amp; roll, and many blues and rhythm &amp; blues artists found commercial success throughout the 1950s, such as Ray Charles.
The birth of soul music occurred during the 1950s, and the genre would come to dominate the US R&amp;B charts by the early 1960s. Soul artists of the 1950s include Sam Cooke and James Brown.
Jazz music was revolutionized during the 1950s with the rise of bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, and cool jazz. Notable jazz artists of the time include Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and Chet Baker.
The lush easy listening genre also enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States during the 1950s. Originating in the late 1940s, this genre now commanded widespread interest on radio, television, films and LPs until the late 1960's, when it was eclipsed by Rock and Roll. Notable soloists, orchestras, composers and arrangers in this genre included: Ray Bloch, Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Xavier Cugat, Doris Day, Percy Faith, Ferrante and Teicher, Jackie Gleason, Andre Kostelanetz, Michel Legrand, Guy Lombardo, Henry Mancini, Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, Freddy Martin Johnny Mathis George Melachrino, Mills Brothers, Stu Phillips, Andre Previn Edmundo Ros, Three Suns, John Serry, Paul Weston and Patrick Williams.
In Europe, the European Broadcasting Union started the Eurovision Song Contest in 1956. In France, the Chanson Française genre dominated the music scene.
Popular Latin styles of the 1950s include the mambo, salsa, and merengue.
The bossa nova genre came to prominence in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil during the 1950s and would grow to become a genre popular worldwide.
Genres.
Various genre in the First World, rock and roll, doo-wop, pop, swing, rhythm and blues, blues, Country music, rockabilly, easy listening, and jazz music dominated and defined the decade's music.
United States.
Rock and roll.
Rock and roll dominated popular music in the mid and late 1950s, and quickly spread to much of the rest of the world. Its immediate origins lay in a mixing together of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western and pop. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music.
The 1950s saw the growth in popularity of the big boom electric guitar (developed and popularized by Les Paul). Paul's hit records like "How High the Moon", and "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise", helped lead to the development of a specifically rock and roll style of playing of such complicated exponents as Chuck Berry, Link Wray, and Scotty Moore. Chuck Berry, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of Rock and roll music, refined and developed the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, focusing on teen life and introducing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music. A decade earlier, Sister Rosetta Tharpe fused gospel and blues, inventing rock 'n roll electric guitar by developing sophisticated phrasing and licks that served as the basis for the iconic rock guitar style of the 1950s and beyond.
Artists such as Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and His Comets, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Big Joe Turner, and Gene Vincent released the initial rhythm and blues–influenced early rock and roll hits. Rock and roll forerunners in the popular music field included Johnnie Ray, The Crew-Cuts, The Fontane Sisters, and Les Paul and Mary Ford. The Rock and Roll Era is generally dated from the 25 March 1955 premiere of the motion picture "The Blackboard Jungle". This film's use of Bill Haley and His Comets' "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" during the opening credits caused a national sensation when teenagers started dancing in the aisles.
Pat Boone became one of the most successful artists of the 50s with his heavily pop-influenced "covers" of R&amp;B hits like "Two Hearts, Two Kisses (Make One Love)", "Ain't That a Shame", and "At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama)". Boone got his fame by covering black R&amp;B hits; his cover versions of the original artists outsold the originals. Boone removed the raw feel of the original versions and replaced it with his own voice, making it safer and appropriate for mainstream pop radio stations at the time. Boone later found success with ballads and less with R&amp;B covers because R&amp;B covers were declining due to the fact that most people at the time were preferring the originals. Boone's traditional pop approach to rock and roll, coupled with his All-American, clean-cut image helped bring the new sound to a much wider audience.
Elvis Presley, who began his career in the mid-1950s, was the most successful artist of the popular sound of the Rock and Roll Era, with a series of network television appearances, motion pictures, and chart-topping records. Elvis also brought rock and roll widely into the mainstream of popular culture. Elvis popularized the four-man group and also brought the guitar to become the lead instrument in rock music. Presley popularized rockabilly, a genre that combined country with rhythm and blues which some claimed it was a new sound. Some claimed that Presley invented the genre by combining country with rhythm and blues. Elvis became the biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. His energized interpretations of songs, many from African American sources, and his uninhibited performance style made him enormously popular—and controversial—during that period. Presley's massive success brought rock and roll widely into the mainstream and made it easier for African-American musicians to achieve mainstream success on the pop charts. Boone and Presley's styles and images represented opposite ends of the burgeoning musical form—Boone was known as being safe while Presley was known as being dangerous, which competed with one another throughout the remainder of the decade.
In 1957, a popular television show featuring rock and roll performers, "American Bandstand", went national. Hosted by Dick Clark, the program helped to popularize the more clean-cut, All-American brand of rock and roll. By the end of the decade, teen idols like Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Bobby Rydell, Connie Francis, and Fabian Forte were topping the charts. Some commentators have perceived this as the decline of rock and roll; citing the deaths of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a tragic plane crash in 1959 and the as causes.
On the other side of the spectrum, R&amp;B-influenced acts like The Crows, The Penguins, The El Dorados, and The Turbans all scored major hits, and groups like The Platters, with songs including "The Great Pretender" (1955), and The Coasters with humorous songs like "Yakety Yak" (1958), ranked among the most successful rock and roll acts of the period.
Rock and roll has also been seen as leading to a number of distinct subgenres, including rockabilly (see below) in the 1950s, combining rock and roll with "hillbilly" country music, which was usually played and recorded in the mid-1950s by white singers such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and with the greatest commercial success, Elvis Presley. Another subgenre, doo-wop, entered the pop charts in the 1950s. Its popularity would spawn the parody "Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)".
Novelty songs, long a music industry staple, continued their popularity in the rock and roll medium with hits such as "Beep Beep".
Classic pop.
Popular music dominated the charts for the first half of the decade. Vocal-driven classic pop replaced big band/swing at the end of World War II, although it often used orchestras to back the vocalists. 1940s style Crooners vied with a new generation of big-voiced singers, many drawing on Italian Canto Bella traditions. Mitch Miller, A&amp;R man at the era's most successful label, Columbia Records, set the tone for the development of popular music well into the middle of the decade. Miller integrated country, Western, rhythm &amp; blues, and folk music into the musical mainstream, by having many of his label's biggest artists record them in a style that corresponded to Pop traditions. Miller often employed novel and ear-catching arrangements featuring classical instruments (whooping french horns, harpsichord), or sound effects (whip cracks). He approached each record as a miniature story, often "casting" the vocalist according to type.
(Mitch) Miller and the producers who followed his model was creating a new sort of pop record. Instead of capturing the sound of live groups, they were making three-minute musicals, matching singers to songs in the same way that movie producers matched stars to film roles. As Miller told "Time" magazine in 1951, "Every singer has certain sounds he makes better than others. Frankie Laine is sweat and hard words—he's a guy beating the pillow, a purveyor of basic emotions. Guy Mitchell is better with happy-go-lucky songs; he's a virile young singer, gives people a vicarious lift. Rosemary Clooney is a barrelhouse dame, a hillbilly at heart." It was a way of thinking perfectly suited to the new market in which vocalists were creating unique identities and hit songs were performed as television skits.
Whereas big band/swing music placed the primary emphasis on the orchestration, post-war/early 1950s era Pop focused on the song’s story and/or the emotion being expressed. By the early 1950s, emotional delivery had reached its apex in the miniature psycho-drama songs of writer-singer Johnnie Ray. Known as "The Cry Guy" and "The Prince of Wails", Ray's on-stage emotion wrought "breakdowns" provided a release for the pent-up angst of his predominantly teenage fans. As Ray described it, "I make them feel, I exhaust them, I destroy them." It was during this period that the fan hysteria, which began with Frank Sinatra during the Second World War, really began to take hold.
Although often ignored by musical historians, Pop music played a significant role in the development of rock 'n' roll as well:
[Mitch] Miller also conceived of the idea of the pop record "sound" per se: not so much an arrangement or a tune, but an