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Wax Museum Records

The Uncyclopedia of Rock : The Way It Really Was (Secondhand)

The Uncyclopedia of Rock : The Way It Really Was (Secondhand)

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The roots of rock & roll stretch back to eighteenth century Africa and the songs of tribesmen who were captured in the hundreds of thousands for the slave trade. The vast majority of these slaves were exported to the United States which explains why rock & roll was eventually born in America, rather than in, say, Belgium. Although slaves were sold in Belgium, most of them escaped and fled to the Southern States of the U.S., preferring a life of incredible hardship and cruelty in the plantations to the stultifying boredom of living in Brussels.

It was this life of unremitting toil that prompted negroes to develop a heart-ren- ing plaint, bewailing life's cares, that they called "The Blues', and others were to call "That Bloody Awful Noise'. Nobody quite knows why these distinctive twelve-bar songs were called 'The Blues' but after intensive research the eminent entomolo- gist, Professor Krimmel of the Depart- ment of Linguistics at the University of Peru, Indiana, has posited that they were named after the colour of the underside of a specie of cockroach found only in remote parts of rural Georgia.

Whatever the reason for their name, 'The Blues' were mournful folk songs that invariably started with the words: I woke up this morning... And then went on to give a minute-by-minute account of the day's catalogue of woe. The songs were, if anything, even more depressing than the life led by the singers.

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