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Even evangelists have adapted to the new beat. A group of Episcopal students from the University of Maryland, armed with electric guitars and bongo drums, have been celebrating with great success a big-beat "rejoice" Mass at several churches in the Washington-Maryland area, including a service that President Johnson and Lady Bird attended. In London, the Salvation Army has formed a rock 'n' roll street-corner group called the Joy Strings, whose repertory includes such numbers as We're Going to Set the World A-Swinging. "Our square approach," explains Drummer Captain Joy Webb, "wasn't getting us anywhere."
Rocked Curtain. The rock 'n' roll beat has proved to be more than the Iron Curtain can resist. All over Bulgaria, Beatle-like mushroom haircuts are sprouting faster than the crops—so much so that the government has plastered the countryside with posters ridiculing the hairy youth for their capitalistic degeneracy. They know better in Poland. When a correspondent for the daily Zycie Warszawy wrote contemptuously of Beatlemania two years ago, so many indignant letters poured in that the paper finally had to publicly disassociate itself from the reporter's views. Now Poland is overrun with rock 'n' roll bands, and hundreds more are playing in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, among them, Bratislava's Beatmen and Prague's Hell Devils. Though the "disgusting dynamism" of big-beat music is officially deprecated in the U.S.S.R., a rock 'n' roll group from Jaroslaw is accompanied by an army of finger-snapping fans whenever it goes on tour.
The sudden public acceptance of rock 'n' roll by so many people who supposedly should know better came as no surprise to the record and radio industries. Their surveys have long shown the existence of a vast underground of adult rock 'n' roll fans, including those who were raised on Elvis Presley and, though too embarrassed to admit it, never outgrew their hound-dog tastes. Today more than 40% of the "teen beat" records sold in the U.S. are bought by persons over 20. When a Manhattan rock 'n' roll disk jockey solicited votes for a "rate the record" feature one recent school-day morning, the station was deluged with 18,000 phone calls, all but a few from housewives. The same feature, aired during prime teen-age listening times, never drew more than 12,000 calls. With a seismographic eye on their markets, many of the sponsors for rock 'n' roll radio and TV shows are such Mom-oriented products as detergents, baby lotions and dishwashers.
Out of Misery. The origins of rock 'n' roll go deep—Deep South, U.S.A. There, in the 1930s, in the fields and shanties of the delta country, evolved an earthy, hard-driving style of music called "rhythm and blues"—played by Negroes for Negroes. Cured in misery, it was a lonesome, soul-sad music, full of cries and gospel wails, punctuated by a heavy, regular beat. With the migration to the industrial North after World War II, the beat was intensified with electric guitars, bass and drums, and the great blues merchants, like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, made their first recordings.