Various More Boss Black Rockers Vol.2 - Hokus Pokus (LP)

(Koko Mojo Records) 16 tracks

Following the huge success of the first “Boss Black Rockers” series, featuring 280 songs across ten volumes, the concept continues with “More Boss Black Rockers.” African American music, namely blues and rhythm and blues, gave the hillbilly and country sound of the 1930s and 1940s the wings—or rather, the hips—to embark on a worldwide triumph as rock ’n’ roll. Although “rock ’n’ roll” was also a label used to introduce white audiences to the disreputable “black” rhythm and blues, its protagonists did not stop playing their newly named music even in the 1950s; long before the Civil Rights Movement, popular music began to build the first tentative bridges between the separate spheres of “Black and White.”