Origins of rock and roll "Rock and Roll" Harris. These songs were generally classed as "race music" or, from the late 1940s, "rhythm and blues", and were barely known by mainstream white audiences. However, in 1951, Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed began broadcasting rhythm, blues, and country music for a multi-racial audience. Freed, familiar with the music of earlier decades, used the phrase rock and roll to describe the music he aired over station WJW (850 AM); its use also is credited to Freed's sponsor, record store owner Leo Mintz, who encouraged Freed to play the music on the radio. Originally Freed used the name
Origins of rock and roll Man!" as "an instrumental screamer.. [which].. displays its rock and roll capacities when tackling the righteous rhythms." In the April 25, 1945 edition, Orodenker described Erskine Hawkins' version of "Caldonia" as "right rhythmic rock and roll music", a phrase precisely repeated in his 1946 review of "Sugar Lump" by Joe Liggins. A double, ironic, meaning came to popular awareness in 1947 in blues artist Roy Brown's song "Good Rocking Tonight", covered in 1948 by Wynonie Harris in a wilder version, in which "rocking" was ostensibly about dancing but was in fact a thinly veiled allusion to sex. Such double-entendres were