The 9 best Rock and Roll tracks of all time
Rock and Roll
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.
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Chuck Berry / Johnny B. Goode
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.
Little Richard / Tutti Frutti
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.
Elvis Presley / That's All Right
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.
Bo Diddley / Bo Diddley
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.
Jerry Lee Lewis / Great Balls of Fire
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.
Eddie Cochran / Summertime Blues
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.
Gene Vincent / Be-Bop-A-Lula
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.
Buddy Holly / Peggy Sue
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.
Bill Haley & His Comets / Rock Around the Clock
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.