Rock in a Hard Place: Grassroots Cultural Production in the Post-Elvis Era

Abstract

The emergence of rock and roll transformed the world of popular music in the mid-1950s. It inspired many teenagers to consider making music themselves, and they invented a new cultural form, the teen rock and roll band. Drawing on my research on the first generation of grassroots bands in the post-Elvis era, I describe how the social structure and status system of schools shaped this new cultural form and why it developed as a male-dominated form of cultural production. Drawing on research on cultural capital, status attainment, and deviant subcultural involvements, I develop a framework for understanding how participation in grassroots cultural production affects life-course trajectories.

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