As noted in adjoining articles, each of Ron’s musical creations represented a specific musical genre. From his years aboard the Apollo came Star Sound, while the Battlefield Earth album was unique for its use of natural sound and computer music.
For an insight into what made the Mission Earth album so special, rock legend Edgar Winter was to comment, “Up until my work on Mission Earth I had not been aware that Ron had a particular interest in rock music. But when I read his research I was amazed at what I found. Ron analyzed the history and development of rock music and came up with the exact formula of what makes a hit rock song. It was unlike anything I’d ever read before and made total sense to me.” The following, then, is Ron’s analysis and study of the “ins and outs” of rock, which formed the basis of the Mission Earth album. Written in February 1984, it is published here for the first time.
he following is an analysis of rock music. There are probably as many opinions about what is rock as there are tastes in music and you are perfectly at liberty to disagree with any of the following as it is simply a summary of what makes rock rock and you may be a devotee of rock or abhor it. But we are not dealing with taste here or preference, we are simply dealing with a very generalized analysis of a type of music.
The origins of rock are differently assigned by different experts on the subject. They do seem to agree that it originated as a genre in the mid-50s.
Rock seems to be a joining of at least two streams of music: One stream comes from the West Virginia Hills in the form of ballads. West Virginia music however traces directly back to the “buskers” – the street singers of England who covered themselves with buttons and were prominent in central London 200 or 300 years ago. The bulk of the songs you find in West Virginia originate as busker songs with the difference that the buskers sang the melodies much prettier in that they introduced minors. By the time the Scots and English with that music settled in the hills of West Virginia, their treatment of the same melodies which had been in minor chords took on the form of major chords.
The other stream would seem to be from New Orleans where jazz had gained a beachhead in America. Jazz actually comes from Africa on the route of the slave trade through Martinique and then to New Orleans. This music flowed up the Mississippi, often taking on the tinge of spirituals.
These two streams, possibly colored by others, arrived at centers of music, one of which was Nashville.
Rock is not a pure genre in the sense that it mushes together several real genres. But I can assure you that rock has been on the track almost as long as there has been music.
