We are probably at least two generations away from being able to tell a history of early rock n' roll that accounts for racism/appropriation and still acknowledges that white artists still made seminal contributions.

White folks have been exhausting for years, trying to pinpoint when rock n' roll was "invented" as though it wasn't an outgrowth of a perpetually evolving American folk music scene that every step of the way drew its energy, inspiration, and dynamism from Black Americans.

The counterargument that whites stole rock n' roll starts with truth: rock n' roll comes directly from American Black R&B. Not only would it not exist without its parentage, but Black Americans did the work to make this genre, to the point that large swaths of R&B from the era...

...are instantly identifiable as "rock n' roll" whether racist American practices of the time ghettoized them into the Race Records section of stores or not.

The really thorny part that will take years to unpack is when white folks joined in. All of these things can be and often are true at once: white musicians who began picking up the sounds and styles they heard from Black artists *were* appropriating, whether they meant to or not;

they were also simply playing the music they knew and loved from the radio and the people around them in good faith; they were entering into this music as part of a larger tradition of cross-pollination that is a defining characteristic of American folk music.

Rock n' Roll, like R&B, and even Country-Western, came out of a folk music tradition that had, at its very core, the idea that each artist was part of a continuity, that they might oright not write songs but they would they *most certainly do* is to play the songs--

the people they were performing for knew and loved and add their bit, their style. They played old favorites, hits from the radio, their rival's songs, etc.

This was not only not theft, it was an expected and normal aspect of American folk music of the time. (For reference, I am using "folk" not in its record store shelving sense but to refer to the broad spectrum of American made popular music of the first half of the 20th cen.)

Someone qualified could (and likely has) written entire books on how this idea of folk music as a living, evolving entity, when combined with institutional racism and capitalism made a hot mess out of our notion of music and authorship.

(Look into AP Carter from The Carter Family and how he built the Carter Family's classic songbook largely by getting countryfolk, white and black, to play him the old favorites they knew, which he then promptly copyrighted in his name.)

Or Willie Dixon and his latter life crusade to make sure Black artists got their copyright and royalties. Theft was real. White record companies and producers ripped people off, particularly and especially Black people.

But where the idea of who owns a song here is relevant is that playing other people's compositions was not the exception in this era. It was expected. Whether it meant covers or outside songwriters, you were expected to expend a significant amount of your artistry interpreting.

This complicates any narrative of early rock n' roll. Take "Hound Dog" for example.

Most people know this song from Elvis's version. His isn't bad. It's a little weird, because it's a song about a woman who has no patience for a no-good man. Elvis seems to be singing it either as literally about a dog or in the abstract and about nothing in particular.

To whatever extent it works, Elvis's version works because of the strength of his vocals. It hardly mattered what he sang about at that point. Big Mama Thornton's version is pretty clearly better.

And so, the comparison between the two is a favored jumping off point in indictments of white theft of Black music. You've got the great song by a Black artist and the inferior "theft" by a white artist. It feels cut and dry.

Alice Walker certainly thought so. Her short story "1955" is essentially a dramatization of analogues of Elvis and Colonel Parker visiting an analogues of Big Mama Thornton and ripping her off. It's the cynicism of American youth's voracious appetite to consume and imitate

Black culture and capitalism's urge to profit from this rendered. Clear as day.