This is the first installment in writer Ralph Horner’s newest column about discovering Rock & Roll music as a teenager in the 1950s.

A very good thing happened to me on Whittier Avenue while visiting friends in my old neighborhood. I was in my teen years and a seminal moment occurred in my life. It was nothing earth shaking or life changing but it was something that would be a part of my life to this day. 

It was the birth of Rock & Roll. It was 1953 and I heard Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Shake, Rattle & Roll.” 

I was playing touch football in the street in my black tassel loafers that I had just shined. The leather soles were causing me to slip and slide all over the place. The slipping and sliding stopped when a car came around the corner. 

The car’s windows were down, and “Shake Rattle & Roll” was blasting out of the open windows— my first taste of rock roll. It stopped me in my tracks. Slipping and sliding turned into rocking and rolling for me.   

Bill Haley and the Comets - Shake, Rattle and Roll“Shake Rattle & Roll” was a song first recorded by blues singer Big Joe Turner. It was later covered by Bill Haley and His Comets and was, in my opinion, likely the first Black hit song to break into the white music world. 

In 1954 Bill Haley and His Comets released “Rock Around the Clock,” which is widely considered to be the song that, more than any other, brought Rock & Roll into mainstream culture around the world. It was also featured in the movie “Blackboard Jungle.”

This was not my first time enjoying music outside of the mainstream. Yes, Hail, Hail Rock ‘n Roll, but as threatening as Rock & Roll sounded to our parents, it was a gradual transformation from something more essential, visceral, and even more dangerous.

Rock & Roll emerged out Rhythm & Blues, or as disapproving adult Caucasians called it, “Race music" or used other racist phrases.

My parents would never speak like that. They were not prejudiced and would never use racist language because they were fairly recent immigrants from the brutal coal mining towns of Western Pennsylvania. Their experiences of hard times and their move to Cleveland installed in them some humility. Still, they were not too far up on the economic scale, but better off in Cleveland than they were in Western Pennsylvania.

At this time in my life I was a student at Willson Junior High on East 55th Street. Willson was a melting pot of different ethnic groups and white and Black students. We all had a commonality and understanding that brought us together. We were all lower income and working-class people and there was no shame in that.

Leo Mintz (white shirt) outside his record storeThe music caught on in a big way among my friends and a lot of other white kids in Cleveland in the 1950s. How did we young teen-aged white kids gain awareness of this exotic music? For us it was through hearing it from records that Black kids brought to school for dances. 

Standard listening fare for young people in most white communities was by such artists as The Four Lads, The Crewcuts, Perry Como and Patti Page.

That music was like a slice of white bread compared to the amazing sounds on the Black kids’ records.

The origin of Rock & Roll in Cleveland can be attributed to two men: Alan Freed and record store owner Leo Mintz. They had noticed the great interest and growing popularity in rhythm-and-blues records by Black musicians among young customers of all races.

Mintz decided to sponsor three hours of late-night programming on WJW Radio to showcase rhythm-and-blues music. Alan Freed was installed as host. Freed’s hip persona and vocabulary that included liberal use of the phrase “Rock & Roll” to describe the music he was now promoting caused the program to grow in popularity.

Mintz and Freed decided to do something that had never been done before. He would host the first rock & roll concert. The idea was a great success. It was to be presented in the Cleveland Arena, a sports venue on East 36th Street and Euclid Avenue and called the Moon Dog Coronation Ball—the world’s first Rock concert. 

Moondog Coronation Ball posterUnfortunately, 25,000 people showed up at the arena, which seated only 10,000 people. The crowd exploded into the arena and the police stopped the show. The Moondog Coronation Ball turned Freed into a star. It also revealed the rising power of Rock & Roll and cemented Cleveland's role as the breakout city for the musical genre.

Yes, I know that the phrase Rock & Roll can be attributed to a number of Black artists from an earlier age, but Alan Freed made it stick. No, I wasn’t at the Moon Dog Coronation Ball, but I would have been, if I had known about it. 

Alan Freed played records that, if my parents heard them, they would have wanted to call the police to have Mr. Freed arrested. They also, probably, would have called Father Peterson from our church, to make a house call to see if my soul could still be salvaged after listening to music that was surely produced by Satan himself. 

Alan Freed put on concerts featuring Black performers in theaters on East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue and the WHK Auditorium on East 55th Street and Euclid Avenue.

I did get to one of his “Cavalcade of Stars” shows on 55th and Euclid with my friend Keith Green.  It was my first rock concert, if you could call it that.  It featured Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers singing “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” 

That song had special meaning to me because I was going steady for the first time in my life with Terry Lavano and that was our song.  That sentiment was expressed many times in the furtive notes that we passed back and forth in junior high.

The term Rock & Roll. Yes, I know that the phrase can be attributed to any number of Black artists from an earlier age, but Alan Freed made it stick. His frequent usage of the term while on the air from WJW studios brought it into common usage. 

I listened to Alan Freed late into the night in my little bedroom on East 49th Street because it was too hot to sleep in the summer and too cold in the winter.

My most vivid memory of that experience is the sound of a plaintive train whistle Alan Freed frequently played on the air during his broadcasts. Our house was not far from the Pennsylvania Railroad crossing bridge on East 40th and Payne Avenue, and I could hear that mournful sound as I laid in my bed. Alan Freed did not coin the phrase Rock & Roll, but he introduced it to the white listeners of his show and made it an anthem.