Rock'N'Roll America, BBC Four, 9pm/Rock Around The Clock, BBC Four, 10pm
First of a new three-part series looking at the birth of the 20th century's most important and most life-affirming folk movement - rock and roll - and the social and cultural affect it had on America.
Programme one begins in the early 1950s with acts like Fats Domino and Little Richard blending blues and boogie woogie to make some of the earliest rock and roll recordings, and sets the scene by looking at some of the contradictions which beset the country at the time, as well as the political and social tensions within it: about race, Communism, the threat of nuclear war and (perhaps even more troubling for parents) the threat of their teenage children smoking reefer.
First stop is New Orleans where Allen Toussaint, writer of R&B classics like Working In A Coal Mine and Ride Your Pony revisits the music studio, now a laundrette, where Fats Domino made his first recording in 1949. Called The Fat Man, it's probably the first ever rock'n'roll record and appropriately it was an adaptation of Junker's Blues, an old New Orleans tune about drug addiction. But what Fats did was give it its rhythm by adding a piano triplet that caught the ears - and, importantly, the feet - of black and white audiences across America. "Even in the Deep South, even the segregated South, whites started showing up at his shows," says
critic and Fats Domino biographer Rick Coleman. Programme one also looks at Elvis Presley's earliest forays into recorded music at the famous Sun Studios in Memphis.
Interviewees include Don Everly, Tom Jones and the great Jerry Lee Lewis, and the programme's sobering intro - that these people are among the last "living witnesses" to the birth of rock'n'roll - is underscored by the fact that Everly's younger brother Phil died earlier this year aged 74.
That's followed by a rare chance to see Fred F Sears's 1956 film starring Bill Hailey And His Comets. It isn't the greatest movie ever made, but it's certainly one of the most important and helped give Hollywood a much-needed shot in the arm as more and more people gave up on cinema and tuned to television instead.
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