Rock and roll "Rock and Roll Inn" in South Merchantville, New Jersey, was established as a music venue. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing this music style while popularizing the phrase to describe it. The origins of rock and roll have been fiercely debated by commentators and historians of music. There is general agreement that it arose in the Southern United States – a region that would produce most of the major early rock and roll acts – through the meeting of various influences that embodied a merging of the African musical tradition with European instrumentation. The migration of
The History of Rock and Roll Rolling Stone magazine not only released a book with this phrase ("The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll"), but also had an early-1980s weekly radio series with some similarities to the classic 1978 special ("Rolling Stone's Continuous History of Rock & Roll"). The award-winning 1978 version of the show opened with a quick reverse "Time Sweep", featuring clips from selected songs from the 1970s backwards to the 1950s. It covered the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and closed with a "A Top Ten of Rock & Roll" followed by the "Ending Time Sweep": The "time sweep" is a 53-minute