Credit: Far Out / NASA / Uwe Conrad
Mon 10 August 2026 23:00, UK
You can make a case that rock and roll, as a genre, has only really existed since the 1950s, but if you were to examine its roots and origins, it stretches back considerably deeper into the 20th century.
There may not always be noticeable similarities between each end of the chain of connection, but rock and roll stemmed from blues music, and blues music in itself stemmed from jazz. While jazz itself has many disparate origins that we can trace back further, this is where the expedition ends for today, arriving at what is considered to be the earliest significant song in the history of rock and roll.
That is, as far as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are concerned. Upon the opening of their official museum in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1995, the Hall of Fame collated a playlist of the ‘500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll’, spanning from the 1920s through to the 1990s, before updating the list to include a further 160 more contemporary songs that bring the list up to the year 2006.
However, the earliest released song that appears on the list goes all the way back to 1928, with Louis Armstrong’s rendition of ‘West End Blues’, a song that had originally been written and performed by Joe ‘King’ Oliver and his Dixie Syncopators earlier the same year. Despite recording multiple versions of the song, Armstrong would then make the most well-known and popular version of the track within a month of the original’s release, and despite it being a jazz composition, it sits on the Hall of Fame’s list with pride.
Now, it bears little resemblance to the later permutations of rock and roll, with its gently swung metre, scat singing and tasteful horns all making it feel considerably distant from where the genre would be by the time of its genesis in the 1950s.
But, if you bear in mind that this is the sort of thing that would have been immensely popular in the 1920s, the fact that other recording artists would develop on this, cover the song, and be inspired to move forward with their own innovations as a result of its existence, then its importance suddenly becomes clear.
Billie Holiday would later go on to credit the song with having introduced her to scat singing, and given how she herself would go on to directly impact both the development of jazz and rock and roll, the bigger picture begins to emerge. Now regarded as a jazz standard as a result of it having been interpreted by countless other artists, this tribute to the West Side of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, a hub of music in itself, has evidently had an impact on the expansion of modern music over the last century.
Further reading: From The Vault
While Armstrong’s version is the oldest recording that appears on the Hall of Fame’s list, it isn’t the song that dates back the furthest in origin, with Roy Acuff’s 1936 recording of ‘Wabash Cannonball’ being a rendition of a folk song that dates back to the mid-19th century. Once again, with folk music being an even older musical form, from which jazz, blues and rock and roll all borrow their DNA, it’s understandable as to why this would also make it onto the list, although the version that the Hall of Fame selected is more recent than Armstrong’s interpretation of Oliver’s composition.
Now almost a century old, the popularity of ‘West End Blues’ may have dwindled significantly, but that doesn’t mean that its importance has faded over time, and it continues to be a marker for one of the most pivotal moments in the history of musical evolution.
