Whole Lotta Shakin', the first episode of Dancing in the Street, begins the BBC's landmark 10-part series on the evolution of rock music with the innovators of the late-1940s and 1950s: renegade musicians, both black and white, whose blending of musical styles made their work impossible to categorize; record producers with the vision to record it anyway, and the colour-blind disk jockeys who spun these records for audiences that couldn't figure out - or didn't care - if the artists were black or white. Longstanding barriers of music, race and class began to buckle to the strains of what Cleveland DJ Alan Freed labeled "rock and roll", a black euphemism for sex.
