One thing that struck me in your book is that you pointed out that black artists did sell records to whites before World War II. How was the rock and roll explosion in the fifties different?

Rock and roll seemed to have, ah, crystalized sometime in the fifties although the rudiments were present maybe for a decade or two before, as far back, let's say, as western swing, which the Periclean Age, the great year or years was 1935 and 1936. And, ah, as Waylon Jennings said, western swing ain't nothing but some country boys playing jazz. Well, there was a very strong black element there because of the diversity of western swing in that they emulated, they picked up so-called race records off the juke boxes. And they were doing songs like "Yes Sir", "Take It Easy Greasy You Got A Long Way To Slide", songs of Fats Waller, songs of a group like the Harlem Hamfats which an ad hoc recording group, they had no reality in performance. And so western swing I think is one of the real precursors of what we've come to know as rock and roll which eventually was an amalgam of certainly of black and white influences.

What particular musicians do you see as being the rock and roll forefathers. Somebody like Louis Jordan comes to mind.

Louis Jordan is preeminent because the whole thing was present, all, the germination was present in Louis Jordan in everything he did: he had the rhythm, he had the shuffle rhythms, he had the humor, he had, ah, the, ah, the back beat and plus he had little miniature vignettes you know, a record had to be under three minutes to fit on a 78 rpm record. And Louis Jordan would have songs like "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens" which certainly has certain rural resident, resonance, a country and western kind of thing. "Saw Pork, West Virginia" now that's country of course "Caledonia" and things like that. And Louis Jordan was a dynamite in person performer and he had tremendous mixed audience, white as well as black, in theaters and so on. Other seminal black performers would be people, let's say like Rubber Legs Williams who used to sing with Count Basie, Wyononie Harris, Roy Brown. Wyononie in particular was a charismatic, magical presence because he, his, his MO was hubris, in other words, he was so infatuated with himself that he would appear at the Apollo Theater on a darkened state and the orchestra would hit a, you know, a couple of cords or a drum roll and Wyononie on a darkened stage would announce to the audience, his dear constituency, - fools, Wyononie is here. Now that kind of pre-rock arrogance I think was echoed many years later in, ah, fortunate white, ah, versions, how should I say - pseudo clones of these great black artists in what we came to see as rock and roll arrogance, maybe no names on that right now.

You rolling? Okay, I, I mentioned Roy Brown who's, you know, best known record was probably "Good Rockin’ Tonight" which is a song which Wynonie Harris also covered. The notion that the rubric term - rock and roll - was presented to us by Alan Freed of course is totally wrong because it appears in many songs. For example there's a song by Red Allen called "Get Rhythm In Your Feet" and the word rock and roll appears there. There's a Ella Fitzgerald song - "Rock It For Me" where the line appears - "You want to satisfy your soul with the rock and the roll". And it goes back to the twenties with a one arm performer named Wingy Manone who made a record called "Tar Paper Stomp" in which the phrase, I believe 1928. So rocking and rolling which of course were lingua franca. These were expressions that came, you know, from the black world and black musicians having to do with sexual congress. And so the whole notion of good time happenings on a Saturday night including getting carried by the rhythm, the music, maybe a little bitty gin and then the culmination in the bed. After all rock and roll finally embraced those ingredients. There's not much more to it.

It seems difficult for a lot of kids today to conceive of how separate white and black music were. Can you talk about pre rock and roll, the forties, the fifties, how the charts were divided and what the lines were there?

Yeah, ah, the very notion that the trade charts, the music charts worked by categories, ah, it bothered some people but it's not true necessity because what determines a particular market or a particular demographic is not who plays the music, it's not who sells the music, it's who buys the music. Now so-called rhythm and blues or race music as it was called before it became rhythm and blues was bought by black people. It's an unfortunate truth of merchandising in a free enterprise society that you need to target your audiences. So if you're selling in the country and you are buying records which are made, say, originally by the Jeanette Recording Company in Richmond, Indiana for a sub label which was merchant by, merchandised by Sears Roebuck. Sears Roebuck had clients in the country that were black and they were white. Well Sears Roebuck knew how to target the so-called race records which they had specially made for them and also the so-called country records for their groups. The other categories of course included jazz and the what you might call sophisticated supper club music, urbane music. So the categories were necessary then and I believe they're necessary today. They're subject to accusations of political incorrectness but the, ah, the sikhims, the gurus who would prescribe these things, I'd like to see them, how they would me merchandising a catalog, let's say as diverse as Epic Records without these categories.