Rock and Roll and the Amateur Aesthetic

Elvis' Sun recordings were the products of collaborations amongst amateur and professional artists, Elvis being the amateur. Does this mean that amateurs can achieve levels of creativity that match or better those of professionals? In some cases, yes. Amateurs established new institutions, new standards and new practices, but they would not have done so if professionals had not played key roles in their success. Elvis would not have carried off his recordings without the help of professional musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black.

While not all amateurs reach the levels of creativity achieved by the Sun artists, amateurs can sometimes offer fresh perspectives and approaches when a discipline has grown stale. Amateurs gain specialized knowledge of their medium and discourse not through the standard institutions, but through alternative educational cultures.

Rock and roll artists shared the experience of hearing the history of recorded music through DJs like Dewey Phillips. Phillips played songs that would not be played together anywhere else, producing surprising juxtapositions. The musicians intuited patterns and traditions in these unusual juxtapositions and developed their insights into critical advances that found common stylistic and thematic features between songs of different genres. From hearing the history of music, the rock and roll musicians perceived the assumptions on which traditional forms rested and they invented new conceptual models to set the stage for the music they would make.