"ALL SHOOK
UP"
Popular Music and American Culture,
1945–1955
Rank
rock 'n' Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth," the New York Times
announced on April 15, 1957. In a fracas between white and black
boys and girls following a rock 'n' roll show attended by ten thousand
fans, fifteen-year-old Kenneth Myers of Medford, Massachusetts, was
stabbed and thrown onto the tracks at a subway station. Myers missed
touching a live rail by inches and scrambled back onto the platform
seconds before a train sped into the station. "The Negro youths were
responsible for it, police lieutenant Francis Gannon told reporters.
“The fight was senseless ... but we expect difficulty every time a rock
'n' roll show comes in.”1
For two years the Times printed dozens of articles linking destruc-
tive activities at, outside, or in the aftermath of concerts to "the beat
and the booze" or the music alone.2 Public interest in rock 'n' roll was
so great, Times editors even viewed the absence of a riot as news-
worthy. “Rock 'n' Rollers Collect Calmly," readers learned, following
a concert at the Paramount Theater in New York City. The journalist
attributed the good order on this occasion and several others that year
to the police, who arrived early and in force, as many as three hundred
strong, some of them on horseback, to set up wooden barriers along
the sidewalk, separate the crowd from passersby on Times Square, and
then station themselves in the aisles and at the rear of the theater to
co