The Best 1950s Pre-Beatles Rock-n-Roll Albums You Should Buy
Little Richard: The Architect of Rock and Roll’s Early Sound
Rock-n-roll has lots of mothers and fathers, but it’s hard to name one that holds more influence than the great Little Richard. Not only did he help create the early rock-n-roll sound, you could argue that the minimalism of “Ready Teddy” and “Rip It Up” are the foundation of punk rock. He was also a magnificent and flamboyant performer, and you can see his fingerprints are all over popular music as a whole. He was a precursor to James Brown, gave Jimi Hendrix his professional start, and Bob Dylan called him “my shining star.” If all you know about him is “Tutti Frutti” — a fantastic if admittedly watered-down song after 60 years of being licensed to death — then you’re missing out. His music went through many phases and his whole oeuvre is worth exploring but since we’re sticking with pre-Beatles, you should start with Here’s Little Richard.
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Chuck Berry: The Pioneer Who Defined Rock-n-Roll Guitar
Like Little Richard, Chuck Berry’s fingerprints are all over rock-n-roll and popular culture. You know “Johnny B. Goode” as the song Marty McFly performs in Back to the Future, and you probably know “You Never Can Tell” from the scene in Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman and John Travolta are dancing at the 50s restaurant. Heavily influenced by the blues riffs of T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters, Berry scored his first hit with “Maybellene” in 1955, and it’s been rock-n-roll history ever since. There are many well-done collections of Chuck Berry’s music and there’s so much great music that it usually requires two CDs, if not a whole box set. For a single-disc collection, one would like to recommend The Great Twenty-Eight but since it goes in and out of print and tends to be a bit harder to find, let’s go with The Definitive Collection on CD, which manages to pack 30 songs on one disc for a great price.
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Buddy Holly: The Rock-n-Roll Legend Behind the Glasses
It would be difficult to overstate Buddy Holly’s influence to the sound of rock-n-roll, as he’s often credited with creating the guitar/drum/bass formula that almost every rock band follows today. As precocious as they come, Holly was already opening for Elvis Presley when he was just 18 years old, and he spent the next few years churning out hit after iconic hit, including “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Rave On,” “Maybe Baby,” “Everyday,” and “Oh, Boy!” — all of them killer tracks. He was only 22 when he was killed in a plane crash with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in 1959, but Holly is so influential that even today’s nerd fashion aesthetic can be traced back to his black-framed glasses, and even inspired a hit song by Weezer. He’s got a surprisingly robust discography for such a short career, and you really can’t go wrong with the 3-CD value that The Very Best of Buddy Holly and The Crickets provides for the price of one.
Pro-tip: The version of “That’ll Be the Day” that he recorded with The Crickets is much better than the one without the band.
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Elvis Presley: The King of Rock-n-Roll’s Iconic Career
What is there to say about the King of Rock-n-Roll? It’s more than fair to criticize Elvis Presley for his role in the cultural appropriation of Black music but there’s no denying his impact or the greatness of the songs he performed. He helped create the rockabilly sound that combined country music with rhythm and blues, with a look and style that still finds itself fashionable today. The biggest-selling solo artist in music history, Presley was almost always in the public eye, with personal lows that were just as publicized as his career highs, and he remains one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century. When he showed up to Sun Records that fateful day in 1953 to cut “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” the world quite literally became a different place. As fantastic and seminal the Sun recordings are, it’s hard to pick an entry point that isn’t out-of-print, recently available on vinyl, or doesn’t span multiple discs, so let’s go with his 1956 debut album on RCA Victor.
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Ray Charles: Blending Soul and Rock for a New Sound
They didn’t call him “The Genius” for nothing. By combining blues, jazz, R&B, and gospel, Ray Charles practically invented soul music as we know it today, and contributed significantly to the integration of pop and country music. With a career that spanned almost 60 years, his legacy includes 37 Grammy nominations with countless accolades and awards, as well with collaborations with pretty much any big name you can think of. His last album was his biggest-selling one — Genius Loves Company, released posthumously in 2004 — and 1962’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was a smash, groundbreaking success, but let’s go with Greatest Hits as an entry point, which collects his hit singles from the 1960-61 ABC years and has a lot of the classics you’re familiar with.
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Sam Cooke: The Soul Pioneer’s Impact on Rock-n-Roll
Could anyone sing better than Sam Cooke? Ray Charles may have practically invented soul, but Cooke was the King of Soul. Without him paving the way, it’s possible that performers like Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, James Brown, and countless other artists like them wouldn’t have achieved the success they had. “A Change Is Gonna Come” is perhaps his most well-known because of its relationship to the Civil Rights movement, but the man was a hit-making machine, with 30 top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, including “Wonderful World,” “Another Saturday Night,” “Cupid,” “You Send Me,” and two dozen others. One of the earliest Black artists to have control over the business side of his music, Cooke was astute enough to branch out from his beginnings in gospel into the more lucrative pop music genre — with phenomenal success. Unfortunately, his career ended abruptly in 1964 when he was shot and killed by a hotel manager when he was just 33. As far as his discography goes, The Best of Sam Cooke is fine and all, but we’re going to cheat on our pre-Beatles rule and go with the much more definitive Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964, which includes tracks released the same year The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
Bonus pick: One Night Stand! Live At The Harlem Square — recorded in 1963 — just may be the best live rock-n-roll album ever.
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Otis Redding: The Soulful Voice That Transformed Music
When Sam Cooke passed in 1964, Otis Redding was just getting started on his run of great studio albums. Born in 1941, Redding dropped out of school when he was 15 to join Little Richard’s backing band, The Upsetters, eventually fronting them when Richard quit rock-n-roll to record gospel music. Redding continued to perform and tour with relatively modest success, but didn’t really break out until 1962, when he drove the unlicensed-to-drive Johnny Jenkins to a studio session at Stax in Memphis, Tennessee intended to showcase Jenkins. Unscheduled, Redding ended up performing “These Arms of Mine” when everyone was ready to go home for the day, and he was signed almost immediately. Selling more than 800,000 copies, it was his first hit and one of his most successful ones. From there, he put together a string of incredible hits that are now classics — including “Respect,” which was made famous by Aretha Franklin, and his posthumous “Dock of the Bay” — until his death at 26 years old in 1967, but for the purposes of this exercise, go with his debut Pain in My Heart, released mere weeks after The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1964. It includes covers of “Lucille,” “Stand By Me,” and “Louie, Louie,” as well as the gut-wrenching “These Arms of Mine.”
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Bill Haley & the Comets: The Band That Brought Rock-n-Roll Mainstream
You’re probably well-aware of “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets, and its contribution — both the song and the band — to the rock-n-roll genre is significant. The Comets were early purveyors of the rockabilly sound and laid a lot of the groundwork to what eventually became rock-n-roll. The song is not the first rock-n-roll song or even its first successful one in terms of the Billboard charts, but after its inclusion in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, “Rock Around the Clock” is what brought rock-n-roll officially into the mainstream. Though it’ll probably always be the tune Bill Haley & His Comets are best known for, they also scored big hits with “Crazy Man, Crazy,” “See You Later, Alligator,” and their version of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll.” It’s hard to pin down a single release that will satisfy fans as a complete retrospective (since many completists may favor the original 1952 Essex Records version of “Rock the Joint” as opposed to the new Decca version in 1957), but the 2-CD, 50-track Rock Around the Clock: The Very Best of Bill Haley & His Comets will give you a lot of rock-n-roll history to chew on.
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Eddie Cochran: Defining Youth in Rock’s Early Days
You can give Eddie Cochran credit for a lot of rock-n-roll. Not only is he credited with being among the first guitar players to use an unwound third string to push notes up a whole tone and using distortion techniques, he also experimented with overdubbing and multitrack recording. Cochran may have been also the first songwriter in rock-n-roll to capture the concept of teenage angst so well, particularly in “Summertime Blues.” A true legend of rock-n-roll, he was so unnerved by the deaths of his friends Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper that he was convinced he would also die young. In true rock-n-roll fashion, his premonition came true when he was killed in a car crash in England in 1960. He was only 21 years old. The Liberty Years has a generous 71-track retrospective, but it’s only available digitally. It’s highly recommended but if you want something physical, get The Complete Releases 1955-62.
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Lloyd Price: The Early Rock-n-Roll Star Who Changed Music
Jeez, has anyone in rock-n-roll history had as many careers as Lloyd Price? F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American lives, but he obviously never met Price. In addition to recording a few hit singles that brought the New Orleans sound to rock-n-roll, Price started at least three different record labels, owned a nightclub in the heart of midtown Manhattan, helped famed promotor Don King push some of the biggest boxing matches of the century, built middle-income housing in The Bronx, and created and managed a line of food products that were inspired by the restaurant his mother owned. Someone could write a very compelling book about his life but let’s talk about the music. There are a number of collections of varying sound quality and track curation, and while Greatest Hits: The Original ABC-Paramount Recordings gets high marks for both those things, it only seems to be available on the secondhand market. The Exciting Lloyd Price has been recently re-released on vinyl, but it’s missing “Personality,” one of his biggest hits. Try to track down Complete Singles As & Bs 1952-62, which is 78 tracks spread over 3 CDs and won’t cost you box set prices.
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Ritchie Valens: Rock Pioneer Who Bridged Cultures
Anyone who wasn’t around The Day the Music Died probably knows Ritchie Valens from Luis Valdez’s 1987 film La Bamba, starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Esai Morales, Rosanna DeSoto, and Joe Pantoliano. It’s perhaps the best rock-n-roll biopic ever put to celluloid, and it was so successful that the Los Lobos cover of “La Bamba” reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. As good as the movie is, Ritchie Valens’s music is even more impactful and influential. Lester Bangs — perhaps the most important rock-n-roll critic to ever opine — called “La Bamba” a prototypical punk song that predates “Louie, Louie” by The Kingsmen, “You Really Got Me” by The Kinks, and “Blitzkrieg Bop” by The Ramones. It’s amazing what Valens accomplished before he passed away at age 17(!), mostly on the strength of three songs: the aforementioned “La Bamba,” “Donna,” and “Come On, Let’s Go.” As such, there is only so much material available, so buy The Complete Releases 1958-60, which includes In Concert At Pacoima Jr. High, a live album that Bangs gives high marks for.
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Jackie Wilson: The Dynamic Voice of Early Rock-n-Roll
They called him Mr. Excitement and none other than Berry Gordy — the dude that started Motown — said that Jackie Wilson was the greatest singer he ever heard. After being in and out of detention centers and boxing in the Golden Gloves as a teenager, he began his singing career in a group that included cousin and future Four Top Levi Stubbs called The Falcons. That led to a stint as a member of Billy Ward and His Dominos but once he went solo, he became one of the most successful and influential artists in the history of soul music. More than 50 of his singles charted, including “Lonely Teardrops,” “You Better Know It,” “Doggin’ Around,” and “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” An exhilarating showman, he supposedly took salt tablets and drank copious amounts of water before his live shows so his body could create extra amounts of sweat during his performance. The Very Best of Jackie Wilson has an astonishing 75 songs spread across three CDs for a great low price — but it’s inexplicably missing “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” It’s arguably his best and most popular song, so you may want to go with The Ultimate Jackie Wilson, which still has a generous 44 tracks.
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George Jones: A Bridge Between Country and Rock
If Hank Williams has any competition for being the best and most influential country music artist in history, it’s probably George Jones. With his baritone enunciation, he owned pretty much every song he sang and scored more than 150(!) hits, including his duets with collaborator/wife Tammy Wynette. More honky-tonk than rock-and-roll, he’s a tremendous influence on contemporary country pop, sticking strictly within the boundaries of his genre, unlike, say, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. He lived hard, too, with drinking exploits so legendary that he once drove to the liquor store on a lawn mower because his wife hid the keys to his cars. As for his releases? He’s got a wealth of hits before The Beatles came along (like “Why Baby Why,” “White Lightning,” and the fantastic career-making “She Thinks I Still Care”), but it’s very difficult to narrow that down to one convenient piece of vinyl or CD with material strictly from those years. Though that makes this exercise trickier, that’s not a bad thing at all for someone looking to get into George Jones. As prolific as anyone in the history of popular music, Jones dominated the Billboard US Country charts for 35(!!) years — and that’s not even counting two handfuls of minor hits that barely charted in the 90s. Licensing issues and the embarrassment of riches that is the George Jones discography force us to break our rule once again and recommend the two-disc, 40-song The Essential George Jones. It contains his most famous songs and is actually better than the three-disc 50 Years of Hits, which is a bit gimmicky and limited by picking just one song per year of his bounteous career — for better or for worse.
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