Rock and Roll Music

One of six covers on the Beatles' fourth album, Beatles for Sale, Rock and Roll Music is an up tempo, Chuck Berry original (1957) in a 12-bar blues format (I-IV-V chord sequences), with a refrain-verse pattern, repeated four times between the intro and outro. The Beatles raised the key by a fifth and made the song much more hard-driven than Chuck Berry's version. It became a standard in the live set, starting out in the days of Liverpool and Hamburg, and then continuing from December of 1964 virtually until the end. Rock and Roll Music is quite possibly the principal anthem of the genre that the Beatles so warmly embraced and then revolutionized.