Rick,


Music was important in breaking down the barriers in th South--You get some sense of this from reading "Deep Blues"--where many of the blues musicians who played on the radio were aware that that they had many fans in white homes and businesses--

Ruth Brown talks about rural dances where the rope that separated the races typically was breeched late in the evening while the powers that be looked the other way--And of course there were the growing numbers of whites, like Elvis, who attended black churches to hear those gospel quartets--

The backlash against rock and roll was, in a lot of ways, the white establishment fighting back against the spread of black music--