In 1941 Popular Science magazine coined the term teenager, and by the middle of the next decade members of this age group viewed themselves not as prospective adults but as a distinct group with its own identity, patterns of behavior, and tastes in music and fashion. Postwar prosperity provided teenagers with money to support their own choices and styles. In 1956 teenage boys were estimated to have a weekly income from family allowances or part-time jobs of $8.96 a week, up from $2.41 in 1944. Four years later, Seventeen magazine surveyed teenage girls and reported that they earned $9.53 a week. In 1959 Life magazine found that teenagers had $10 billion at their disposal, “a billion more than the total sales of GM [General Motors].” See Document Project 25: Teenagers in Postwar America.
Teenagers owned 10 million record players, more than 1 million TV sets, 13 million cameras, and what Life called “a fantastic array of garish and often expensive baubles and amusements.” They spent 16 percent of their disposable income on entertainment, particularly the purchase of rock ’n’ roll records. The comic book industry also attracted a huge audience among teenagers by selling inexpensive, illustrated, brief, and easy-to-read pulp fiction geared toward romance and action adventure.
Public high schools reinforced teenage identity. Following World War II, high school attendance grew. In 1930, 50 percent of working-class children attended high school; thirty years later, the figure had jumped to 90 percent. Also, from 1940 to 1960, the percentage of black youths attending high school doubled. For the first time, white middle-class teenagers saw the fashions and heard the language of working-class youths close-up and both emulated and feared what they encountered. Their parents told them to avoid young people who smoked cigarettes, dressed in blue jeans, wore leather jackets, and used expressions like “man” and “cat” to address each other, and to keep away from young women who wore tight skirts and sweaters. Nobody wanted to run afoul of such students in school bathrooms or on the playgrounds, but their clothes, hairdos, and swagger appealed to high school teenagers, many of whom incorporated them into their own behavior.
More than anything else, rock ’n’ roll music set teenagers apart from their elders. The pop singers of the 1940s and early 1950s—such as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, and Patti Page, who had appealed to both adolescents and parents—lost much of their teenage audience after 1954 to rock ’n’ roll, with its heavy downbeat and lyrics evoking teenage passion and sexuality. Black artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Antoine “Fats” Domino and groups such as the Platters, the Channels, the Chords, the Chantels, and the Teenagers popularized the sound of classic, up-tempo rock and its soaring, harmonic variation known as doo-wop.
Although blacks pioneered the sound, the music entered the mainstream largely through white artists who added rural flavor to rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley was not the first white man to sing rock ’n’ roll, but he became the most famous. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and living in Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis adapted the fashion and sensuality of the black performers he encountered to his own style. Elvis’s snarling singing and wild pelvic gyrations excited young people, both black and white, while upsetting their parents. In an era when matters of sex remained private or were not discussed at all and when African Americans were still treated as second-class citizens, a white man singing “black” music and shaking his body to the frenetic tempo of the music caused alarm. When Elvis sang on the popular Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, cameras were allowed to show him only from the waist up to uphold standards of decency. Four years later while Elvis was in the army, Congress targeted rock ’n’ roll through its investigation of payola and the notorious deejay Alan Freed.