School of Rock

It all began with Frank.  Ol' Blue Eyes.  The Voice.  The Chairman of the Board.  Without Frank, there would be no Rock & Roll.  And he hated rock, calling it music for "cretinous goons".

Sure, most people would argue that rock was directly derived from rhythm & blues - the music that came out of the Mississippi delta, itself a descendant from slavery work songs and spirituals.  Of course, this music was a highly influential ingredient; it was often stolen/copied/gentrified.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Back to the Hoboken crooner.  Sinatra's career took off as a singer for a big band.  Swing music.  The pop of the 1940's.  But he became bigger than the band.  His first step towards launching rock was being responsible for the bobby soxer craze.  Singing directly to teen girls, when pop music had previously been directed toward a more adult audience, a sexual energy or tension was created - a prerequisite for rock.

He took this energy a step further.  As he aged, his popularity with the teen girls waned.  He had to re-invent himself.  He began to sing darker songs which featured a bluesy, heartbreaking longing.  Songs with attitude and sexual overtones.  And as his career was reinvigorated, he developed a hip, swinging persona.  A coolness.  Partying with his Pack:  drinking, smoking, gambling, womanizing - a real rock lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the songs of the south were working their way northward.  A perfect confluence of a promoter, a writer and a gaggle of blues singers converged upon Chicago.  Leonard Chess matched the writing ability of Willie Dixon to such blues legends as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.  Great blues was being made that would later be sampled by Elvis, the Stones, Zeppelin and others.

It was Elvis who became the king.  Despite the often copied and innovative song stylings of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Elvis led the way for rock.  He took the sexual energy of Sinatra many steps further and combined it with the negro musical sounds he had heard growing up to popularize rock with the country's majority white population.  Elvis even appeared on Frank's TV show.

Sure, Frank's was "The Voice" of the 20th century.  But his songs and his lyrical interpretations made them timeless.