The wooden floor of Southern California’s Rendezvous Ballroom had become part of the amplification problem by 1961. Thousands of young people could fill the room, dance, shout toward the stage, and create an acoustic environment that ordinary guitar equipment had never been designed to defeat. Dick Dale stood in front of them with an exceptionally…
The collision at Sun Studio in July 1954 had been years in the making. Elvis Presley and Scotty Moore may have supplied the moment that Episode 2 left behind, but the conditions that allowed such a record to exist had been assembled elsewhere: in California workshops, radio control rooms, small recording studios, jukebox routes, neighborhood…
Between 1940 and 1970, roughly five million African Americans left the South during the second wave of the Great Migration. Many traveled toward industrial centers such as Chicago and Detroit, carrying musical traditions developed across Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and the wider South into neighborhoods built around factories, rail lines, apartment blocks, clubs, and storefronts….