A Historical Book Review of Glenn C. Altschuler’s All Shook Up: How Rock ‘N’ Roll Changed America

By Stacey Peterik

Music has been a huge part of history since it began back in prehistoric times. As the decades have passed, music has gradually changed to include a variety of different styles; each being influenced in some way by the early blues and rhythm and blues of the 1940’s and 1950’s. As it does currently, in that time period, music created many conflicts between generations. Also in those decades though, music created conflict between racial and gender classes. In his book, All Shook Up: How Rock ‘N’ Roll Changed America, Glenn C. Altschuler discusses all of these conflicts and what rock ‘n’ roll did to aid or discourage them. Using analysis of primary sources and a narrative format, Altschuler makes a strong explanation and argument for how this music really affected and changed America.

Glenn C. Altschuler received his Ph.D. in American History from Cornell in 1976 and has been an administrator and teacher at Cornell since 1981. He is currently the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and the Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. According to the Cornell University website, his year-long course in American Popular Culture is among the most popular in the university. He is the author of several books on American history and popular culture, including Changing Channels: America in TV Guide.

All Shook Up is a social history that uses primary sources such as newspapers and magazines of the time period, as well as other books on the subject matter to argue its main points. Altschuler chose to organize his book by topic, which worked really well in his narrative style because there are so many different aspects to how rock ‘n’ roll changed that time period from 1945 to 1965. He starts with a section on how pop music was affecting American Culture from 1945 to 1955, and then in the next three sections really focuses on the decade following that time and how rock ‘n’ roll and race, sexuality, and generational conflict were all changing the youth and their attitudes. The three sections that end the book discuss rock ‘n’ roll and the pop culture wars, the lull and revival it went through, and then an epilogue on the continual power of rock ‘n’ roll.

Altschuler’s first section starts off with a headline from an article in a 1957 New York Times that really gives the reader a first impression of rock ‘n’ roll at the time. Some newspapers even called rock ‘n’ roll a “communicable disease” that was sweeping the nation. Parents and community members could not begin to understand why the youth of America were so drawn to this music. They even started to ban rock shows from coming to their towns in order to prevent the chaos that usually accompanied before, during, and after the shows.

The next two sections of the book discuss rock ‘n’ roll and race and rock ‘n’ roll and sexuality. At the time when rock ‘n’ roll was emerging on the scene, African Americans were also trying to gain civil rights. This music was heavily criticized for promoting integration. At this time, there were many important events that were going on, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Martin Luther King’s speech and the “integration” of nine black students into Little Rock Central High School. Altschuler does a great job helping the reader realize where in the Civil Rights Movement that rock ‘n’ roll came in by giving many historical events that took place. He also discusses how there were many artists at this time that were criticized for not supporting their own race, including Nat King Cole and Antoine “Fats” Domino, who decided that they would not perform at segregated venues. Other artists were criticized for the lyrics in their songs that were often suggestive towards sexuality. At this time kids were taught through religion not to have sex until after they were married and were told by their parents and through popular magazines the rules for dating. Lyrics such as “There’ll be fifteen minutes of kissin’ / Then you’ll holler, please don’t stop / There will be fifteen minutes of teasin’, / And fifteen minutes of squeezin’ / And fifteen minutes of blowin’ my top” by the Dominoes (pg. 72) really threw parents into a panic. A campaign was started to clean up the filthy lyrics. Parents and community members went to record distributors, record stores, and radio stations and asked for a ban on producing, selling, and playing these filthy records. These records threatened to damage the reputation and possibly livelihood of the original rhythm and blues.

The next section in Altschuler’s book discusses the generational conflict influenced by rock ‘n’ roll. Altschuler tells in this section about parents and elders not understanding the teenagers of the time and why they wanted to listen to this music. Parents were convinced that rock ‘n’ roll was solely responsible for the conflict that was happening between them and their children. They believed that “rock ‘n’ roll reinforced the most worrisome aspects of youth culture: antagonism to adult authority and expectations; conformity to peer-group norms; and an ephemeral, erratic emotional intensity” (pg. 99). Rock ‘n’ roll was meant for teenagers- it was about them and performed by a lot of them. Altschuler shares in this section, both sides of the argument about rock ‘n’ roll. The first being that the music encouraged teenagers to defy their parents; the second being that teenagers were the same the decade before, just without the music and that it was just a phase to go through on the way to adulthood.

The next two sections in All Shook Up, discuss the pop culture wars with rock ‘n’ roll that created a lull in the industry. Rock ‘n’ roll records had replaced the need for live musicians, comedians, and actors on soap operas because teenagers were taking their radios everywhere to listen to their music. Teenagers were buying tons of records; from 1954 to 1959, records sales tripled from $214 million to $613 million. Altschuler discusses how this angered members of the American Federation of Musicians because they were not allowed to appear on radio or television or allow disc jockeys to use tapes or transcriptions of them without compensation. Even some of the major record companies had their market shares start to drop because everyone was going to the smaller, more independent companies. They were so angry that they decided to wage war on rock ‘n’ roll through the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and fought them by questioning what rock ‘n’ roll was doing- were they manipulating the mass media through their records? This argument caused a lack of confidence in these records and slowly, they started to falter. Many radio stations switched to other styles of music, including pop, polka, calypso, folk music, ballads, novelty songs, and mellower melody music.

Just as rock ‘n’ roll was starting to fade out in the United States, it started to become popular over in England. Just after Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, an album was released called “The Buddy Holly Story”. It sold tons of copies and became very popular in England. The Beatles, who were young and just starting out at the time learned a lot from Buddy Holly’s record and titled their first record “That’ll Be the Day”. John Lennon and Paul McCartney said that their first forty songs were inspired by Buddy Holly and that the name for their band that they finally landed on, the Beatles, was because they wanted something similar to Buddy Holly’s Crickets. While on tour in the United States, the Beatles paid homage to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and all of the other rock ‘n’ roll legends from the 1950’s in their shows, interviews, and in the studios. The Beatles’ songs rose to the tops of the charts and as more British rock ‘n’ roll performers followed them over to the United States, rock ‘n’ roll was on the rise again.

In the epilogue, Altschuler discusses how rock ‘n’ roll came to define that generation and how it all culminated into one ultimate experience in August of 1969. More than three hundred thousand people went to Bethel, New York to experience the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair”. Altschuler discusses how many people were angered that Woodstock was happening, but the youth at the concert said that it was just an experience that you were either part of or you weren’t. After Woodstock, rock ‘n’ roll still flourished until the end of the twentieth century, but not to the extent that it had initially. Altschuler discusses how it wasn’t until Bruce Springsteen took the stage that rock ‘n’ roll looked like it even had a future. Now, he says, this music has taken on so many forms, including R&B, romantic rock, heavy metal, punk rock, grunge rock, Christian rock, and postmodern feminist rock. Altschuler sums up the role of rock ‘n’ roll currently quite powerfully in the last page of his book: “The music that changed America in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, rock ‘n’ roll continues to solidify youth consciousness and bring meaning and order to the lives of millions of people” (pg. 192).

This book reveals that there is currently a lot of research about rock ‘n’ roll and how it affected America during its emergence. Altschuler’s book does a great job of dividing the era into topics that were really important during those two decades. This book was extremely readable and understandable with a lot of examples of musicians that were big names at the time. The pictures in the book were helpful in illustrating some of the main points of the book. All Shook Up would be a great choice for a reader that is interested in how rock ‘n’ roll got started, the turmoil that its emergence created and how it continued to influence the music that we have today. This would also be a great book for a cross-curricular unit between the history classes and the music classes. Students would really enjoy reading about these artists and the conflicts of the time, as well as hearing the music that was represented in Glenn C. Altschuler’s book.