50sThe big bang

Jerry Lee Lewis

He married his bass player's daughter

He married on 12 December 1957 in Hernando, Mississippi, Myra Gale Brown, aged 13, the daughter of J.W. Brown, his first cousin and bass player; he was 22 and still married to another woman, and the ceremony had to be repeated on 4 June 1958. The scandal did not break then, but on 22 May 1958 at Heathrow. And his two anthems are not his: "Great Balls of Fire" is credited to Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was recorded first by Big Maybelle in 1955.

Édith Piaf

The sparrow of Belleville

Legend has it she was born on the street, wrapped in a policeman's cape. Her birth certificate says otherwise, and she fed the myth herself in her memoirs. She understood before anyone that a life is also a performance.

Ray Charles

The church and the bar

He took two worlds separated by a wall — gospel and the blues — and fused them. Out of that mixture, which many called blasphemy, came soul.

Elvis Presley

Not the fortunate son

He wrote almost none of his songs and still became the sound of an era. Elvis Presley transformed the Black music that raised him, benefited from a colour line he did not invent and, at the height of his fame, refused to hide from the draft.

Little Richard

The man who never collected on the scream

"Tutti Frutti" changed music and left him almost nothing. A white cover outsold it, in 1959 he signed away his royalties, and half the lyric was written by a woman almost nobody names.

Peter Rock

The One Who Opened the Door

Peter Rock, or how a country filed away its own founder as the nice old man on television. On 27 October 1959, aged fourteen, an Austrian immigrant recorded the first rock and roll in Chilean record history. Everything that followed came through that door.

Buddy Holly

The template

Two guitars, a bass and drums, playing their own songs. Today that is the obvious definition of a rock band. In 1957 it wasn't, and he settled it in eighteen months.

Santo & Johnny

The guitar that weeps

At the height of rock and roll, the most played record in America was a slow melody with no words. The last instrumental to top the chart in the fifties.

The Platters

The crack in the wall

In a country with charts segregated by race, they recorded no protest songs: they recorded love ballads so perfect nobody could file them away. And they got there first.

Brenda Lee

Sixty-five years late

She recorded a Christmas song at thirteen and it flopped. In 2023 it hit number one. What waited sixty-five years was the song: she had already topped the chart in 1960.

Tony Bennett

The room slowly fading

He recorded a whole album after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. His memory of life was going and his memory of the songs was not: the standards stayed intact when almost nothing else did.

Nat King Cole

The empty easel

No national advertiser would put its name beside a Black man's in prime time. NBC did not cancel his show: he walked away, and wrote down why.

Frank Sinatra

Breathing like someone talking

He learned to sing by watching a trombonist breathe, and took up underwater swimming to hold longer phrases. And no, "My Way" was neither his epitaph nor played at his funeral.

Chuck Berry

The song that went to space

He put the pieces of rock and roll together and gave it a language. And of the whole genre, humanity chose one song of his to send to the stars.

Ritchie Valens

The first thing he ever won

An eight-month career, seventeen years old, and the first great rock anthem in Spanish, sung by a boy who learned the words phonetically.

The Day the Blues Went Electric

Chicago in the fifties: Muddy Waters plugs in his guitar to be heard over the bar, and everything follows from there. The story of rock's real big bang, and of the debt to Big Mama Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe that was never settled.