Rock and Roll, Alan Freed, and the Renaming of Black Music

Rock and roll was not born in Cleveland, but Cleveland is where it got its name, and the name mattered in ways that lasted for decades.

In nineteen fifty-one, a disc jockey named Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues records on WJW radio in Cleveland for a white audience. Rhythm and blues was the commercial name the music industry had given to music made by Black artists for Black audiences, a category invented largely to segregate the charts. Freed played the same records but called the music rock and roll, a phrase already in wide use in African American slang, and marketed it to white listeners.

In March of nineteen fifty-two, Freed organized the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena. It is often cited as the first major rock and roll concert. The event sold so many tickets, through counterfeiting and double-printing, that the crowd far exceeded the arena's capacity. The show was shut down after one song. The city blocked the exits. Freed's career and the new name for the music survived the riot that nearly wasn't.

The music Alan Freed renamed and promoted belonged to Black artists whose record labels were segregated from the mainstream market he was opening. Those artists received limited royalties and minimal credit as the genre grew. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, housed in a building designed by I.M. Pei and opened on September second, nineteen ninety-five, stands on the Lake Erie shore in Cleveland in part because of Freed's claim that the city was rock and roll's home. The building is magnificent. The erasure it commemorates is real.