1950s Music Quotes

I really love what Chuck Berry did with Christmas music, and also the Rat Pack Christmas stuff, which I listened to all through my childhood.

The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.

I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.

Early on I was more interested in gypsy jazz music until rock and roll came around and I listened to a lot of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and skiffle singer Lonnie Donegan.

When I talk about rock n' roll, to me, that goes back to the beginning of the 1950s. Blue suede shoes and sideburns, man. Pink and black coloured clothes. Turn your collar up, comb your hair in ducktails. And the music was cool. It was a whole culture then - a different world.

My dad sat me in front of the TV, and instead of putting on Nick Jr. or something, he put me in front of 'Jailhouse Rock' and all the Elvis movies.

I'm so old, I can remember before rock 'n' roll come along.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you'll see you had to be sharp onstage.

The first songs I learned was 'Crazy' by Patsy Cline and 'At Last' by Etta James. I had been growing up with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, great bands.

I'm a fan of all music, and probably my first - well, not the very first music I listened to, but back in the late fifties, when I first started hearing rock & roll, it was definitely tinged with doo wop and also Elvis and all those great songs.

My pop culture ended somewhere north of Elvis but not too far.

I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters.

I was obsessed with Elvis Presley when I was little.

The '50s was the golden age of music all over the world for some crazy, 'X-File'-like reason I can't quite understand.

I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the '50s, and I realized that I didn't fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.

Duane Eddy is somebody I wanted to play like. I discovered him before The Beatles, and he totally got to me. He sent me a note back in 1977 and said that he really liked what Cheap Trick were doing. That's one of those 'Wow!' moments, you know?

I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it's much better musically than much of what's available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content.

But in those days - in the mid-'50s, early '60s - there was less than 300 radio stations that were playing country music and a lot of that wasn't full time.

I was playing with Chuck Berry, who sounded like an English teacher. Did you ever listen to his records? He pronounces every word.

I'm very obsessed with pop culture of the mid-century and it goes hand-in-hand with the music that I studied in school.

I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

I came in after the Smokey Robinsons, Temptations, Clovers, and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. I came along at that level, when there was harmonizing.

My own musical ambitions were born when I was five, watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. When Elvis Presley burst on to the screen, singing 'Don't Be Cruel,' I felt my first sexual thrill, though I didn't know what it was at the time.

I was madly in love with Elvis Presley. Dad wasn't into it at all, at least not for himself as a performer. He used to say, 'Mr. Cole does not rock n' roll.'