[78-L] Evolution of 'rock 'n roll'

[eugene hayhoe]

See below for my comments re:
 
In my opinion, the first rock 'n' roll record had to be
> > a white cover of a black record in the jump/R&B style that was prevalent
> > then. I know that there are as many opinions on this as there are
> > records, but for my money, it was Bill Haley's 1951 cover (Holiday) of
> > Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" (Chess). Brenston's record is given credit
> > as the first rock 'n' roll record by many pseudo-historians, but this
> > was an R&B boogie record. It took a white hillbilly artist covering it
> > that gave black music the credibility it needed to cross over.
 
CGinnell
 
So the imitator gets the credit? I really don't get the point unless you're saying that if it's not whites imitating Black music, it's not rock 'n roll? 
 
Sounds like what Bo Diddley called 'the R&B ghetto" to me. Black music had plenty of credibility w/o whites, hillbillies or otherwise, in fact it seems pretty clear to me most (not all) 20th century American popular music is based on Black music or 'white' imitations of such going back to the very early days of recorded music, from 'coon songs' onward (and this was going on before records too, obviously, Jim Rice & Jump Jum Crow & so on). Undoubtedly there were white influences on Black music as well, but when looked at as a whole, especially when it comes to the development of the 'pop music vocabulary' the contributions of Black Americans are represented way out of proportion to their percentage of the population.  
 
The underlined statement above seems to me to be saying that since most whites wouldn't buy records by blacks there needed to be a 'white' version to cross over. While there's not much debate to this question, why does it then become reason to dispossess people from what they have created? Haley and Presley were hardly the first whites to borrow from Black blues; musical comparisons between blues/r&b and 'r 'n r' show that  the majority of the differences have to do with performer nuance, not radically differing musical content. Where do pre-Presley "Black rockabilly"  artists (like Sun era Jr. Parker, James Cotton & Floyd Murphy) fit in? What about 'heavy metal man' Pat Hare? Country/r&b crossover was already old hat by the early '50s, in both directions, thanks at least in part to Syd Nathan. Are Black covers of country songs r&b,  r 'n r or country? Is music by black people r&b, and music by whites r'n r? Where's Little Richard fit in? He was a
 ringer for Billy Wright when he started in 1951, but not that much different though; was he r&b in '51 and r 'n r in 1955, or always r&b? What about Chuck Berry? 
 
If there are styles/elements/techniques that can be shown to have been first, why shouldn't those people get the credit, instead of their followers/copiers? For some reason it reminds me of all the songs that Irving Mills and Lester Melrose (to use 2 examples) 'wrote' for the artists they recorded. 
 
Gene