Rock and Roll
The 9 Best Rock and Roll
Tracks of All Time
Rhythm and blues played faster, sold to teenagers, and briefly the most disruptive thing in America. A five-year window in which the record industry discovered a market it did not understand and never fully regained control of.
- Origin
- Memphis and Chicago, 1954
- Tempo
- 130–180 BPM
- Also known as
- rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, fifties rock
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Chuck Berry / Johnny B. Goode
1958 · Chess
The opening lick is the genre's national anthem, and the lyric invents the idea of the guitarist as protagonist. Berry wrote the rules and everyone since has been filling in the form.
Number 2: Little Richard / Tutti Frutti
1955 · Specialty
The most explosive four seconds of introduction anybody has recorded. The original lyric was unprintable, the cleaned-up version is still barely contained, and nothing has ever sounded this free.
Number 3: Elvis Presley / That's All Right
1954 · Sun
An Arthur Crudup blues, cut almost by accident at the end of a session. Whatever you think of what followed, the performance itself is loose, delighted and completely alive.
Number 4: Bo Diddley / Bo Diddley
1955 · Checker
A rhythm rather than a song, and the only one on this list that is still being used as a rhythm sixty years later. Named after himself, which was fair.
Number 5: Jerry Lee Lewis / Great Balls of Fire
1957 · Sun
Piano played as an act of aggression, by someone who genuinely believed he was damning himself by recording it. That tension is audible and it is what makes the record.
Number 6: Eddie Cochran / Summertime Blues
1958 · Liberty
Two acoustic guitars, handclaps and a complaint. The first great record about teenage powerlessness, and structurally the ancestor of every punk single on this site.
Number 7: Gene Vincent / Be-Bop-A-Lula
1956 · Capitol
Slap-back echo, a hiccupping vocal and almost no content. Rockabilly at its most atmospheric — the sound is the song and it has aged better than most of the lyrics here.
Number 8: Buddy Holly / Peggy Sue
1957 · Coral
Jerry Allison's paradiddles on the toms, a guitar tone nobody had bothered with before, and a songwriter who wrote, played and produced. The self-contained band starts here.
Number 9: Bill Haley & His Comets / Rock Around the Clock
1954 · Decca
Not the best record on this list and comfortably the most consequential. A B-side that a film soundtrack turned into a global event and a moral panic.