To listen to “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” or “Roll Over Beethoven,” is to feel yourself transported back to the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s, where high school kids got their kicks in a post-war world that seems simple now, looking back. This was the era of rock ‘n’ roll commercialisation, the flowering of a new genre that stemmed from rhythm and blues in the Southern States or ‘race music’ as it was known. Some Jim Crow laws were still in place, and early rock ‘n’ roll hits by white artists w