“But then everyone wants to call EVERYTHING rock and roll because rock is established as ‘cool’ and ‘youth music’ and ‘Americana’.”
I call anything short and energetic with a back-beat rythm “rock ‘n’ roll” because I’m not a musicologist and am not familiar with the technical requirements.
I of course know where rock comes from—i.e. blues and country-western (but mostly blues)—but cannot rightly distinguish between various blues, r&b, rockabilly, country, and doo-wop songs of the same general era. For instance, when did doo-wop-type singers stop being doo-wop and start being rock/r&b? Are The Platters r&b or doo-wop? Are the Drifters rock, r&b or doo-wop? What is soul music? Is it r&b, jazz, doo-wop, and gospel? If so, when did it stop being all of the latter and start being the former.
Most importantly, if Pat Boone, Bobby Vinton, etc. weren’t rock and roll, what the heck were they? Pop? That’s not very important. Where did the sound come from? Jazz? Well, didn’t doo-wop and r&b come from jazz too?
I think all these labels are far more arbitrary than anyone lets on in casual conversation.
It all came from "of" something else. And not linearly.
Black R&B artists covered country songs and adapted them to their arrangements.
And Little Richard's Keep A Knockin' was a reworked of the same song that Louie Jordon had a hit with in the 1940s but that dates back to the 1920s.
The difference is that Little Richard's opens with a banging drum beat that is not at all genteel or polite and he's screaming his head off throughout the song (and Led Zepplin would later rip it off that drumbeat intro for "Rock and Roll").
Tiny Bradshaw may have originated "Train Kept A Rollin'" but the British bands (and later Aerosmith) all looked to the Johnny Burnette Trio's distorted rockabilly version.
These songs are not pleasant to tired ears and they don't play well with others. They ROCK.
At a point, rock and roll became "rock". But not everything called rock "rocks". (I'd say that you can DANCE more to rock and roll than to "rock"). But ultimately, the songs are about ****ing (initally) and then by the snotty 60s about the girl you can't have, or don't want.
And it isn't even right to say that "rock and roll is the white version of R&B" because not all R&B sounds that way but there are black performers who play rock and roll. And reading through a number of blues artists' interviews, they said that their parents didn't always allow blues records in the home. It was jukejoint music. Music from beer halls and the wrong side of the tracks about people doing wrong. Howlin' Wolf said that when you have evil on your mind, you got the blues.
Little Richard has been torn emotionally a number of times throughout his life for playing rock and roll (and the hedonistic excesses of his lifestyle he was living).
Rock isn't call "the Devil's music" strictly because it "is" black authored music (although there were racists in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond who levelled this charge).