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Before Elvis shook his hips, before Chuck Berry duck-walked across a stage, and before anyone had smashed a guitar or pissed off their parents with a Beatles haircut, there was a DJ in Cleveland spinning records that weren’t supposed to be for white kids.
His name was Alan Freed.
Contrary to legend, Freed didn’t invent the term rock and roll. And he sure as hell didn’t invent the music. Black artists had been rocking and rolling long before he ever stepped behind a microphone.
But Alan Freed heard something happening that most of America didn’t. He played the original Black records instead of the watered-down white covers. He put Black and white artists on the same stage. He brought them to television and movie screens. And when Frankie Lymon danced with a white girl on national TV, the South lost its goddamn mind.
Freed helped turn rhythm and blues into a teenage revolution—and became one of rock and roll’s first celebrities in the process.
But there was another side to the story: money, songwriting credits, suspicious relationships with record labels, and the payola scandal that destroyed his career.
So was Alan Freed the father of rock and roll? A crooked DJ? A racial trailblazer? Or maybe a little bit of all three?
Tonight, we’re telling the story of the man who didn’t invent rock and roll… but turned up the volume.
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