Black rhythm and blues crossed segregated radio into the white mainstream in the early 1950s and became rock and roll. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe built the sound from blues and gospel, driven by electric guitar and a hard backbeat. White teenagers embraced it before the law integrated their schools. A segregated industry channeled the greatest fame and profit to white performers — above all Elvis Presley — while the Black creators who invented the sound were underpaid and uncredited. Rock seeded fifty years of popular music; who got paid for it remains unsettled.
In 1955 a song called "Maybellene" raced up the American charts, sung by a Black man from St. Louis named Chuck Berry, and white teenagers who had rarely heard Black rhythm and blues on mainstream white radio danced to it in their living rooms. That was the trick rock and roll pulled. It took Black rhythm and blues, the music of a people kept off mainstream white airwaves by custom, market segregation, and industry practice, plugged it into an electric guitar, sped it up, and carried it into the white mainstream. The wall came down at a party. But the money mostly did not follow the music home. The biggest star the new sound produced was a white Southerner, Elvis Presley, who loved the Black artists he learned from and said so, while Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino watched lesser white singers grow richer on the sound they had invented. Rock and roll is the Black music that crossed the color line in youth culture before much of American public life did, and the story of who got paid for it.