HST 138 ROCK MUSIC IN AMERICAN CULTURE

In August 2019, 45,000 fans flocked to Memphis, Tennessee’s “Elvis Week,” forty-two years after his death in 1977. Why? Because rock and roll has always been about more than the music. Between the mid-1950s, when Elvis Presley, Little Richard and the rest of the first generation of American rockers came onto the scene, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival, rock music framed complex and often disruptive conversations about a wide variety of American social and cultural ideas and institutions including race, gender, youth culture, class, protest, politics, Cold War America, Vietnam, and the music industry. We’ll examine how and why the first generation of rock and roll proved to be such an incredibly influential cultural form from the moment it was born.