<P> Also formative in the sound of rock and roll were Little Richard and Chuck Berry . From the early 1950s, Little Richard combined gospel with New Orleans R&B, heavy backbeat, pounding piano and wailing vocals . Ray Charles referred to Little Richard as being the artist that started a new kind of music, which was a funky style of rock'n'roll that he was performing onstage for a few years before appearing on record in 1955 as "Tutti Frutti ." Chuck Berry, with "Maybellene" (recorded on May 21, 1955, and which reached #1 on the R&B chart and #5 on the US pop chart), "Roll over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), refined and developed the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, focusing on teen life and introducing guitar intros and lead breaks that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music . Early rock and roll used the twelve - bar blues chord progression and shared with boogie woogie the four beats (usually broken down into eight eighth - notes / quavers) to a bar . Rock and roll however has a greater emphasis on the backbeat than boogie woogie . Bo Diddley's 1955 hit "Bo Diddley", with its B - side "I'm A Man", introduced a new beat and unique guitar style that inspired many artists without either side using the 12 - bar pattern--they instead played variations on a single chord each . His more insistent, driving rhythms, hard - edged electric guitar sound, African rhythms, and signature clave beat (a simple, five - accent rhythm), have remained cornerstones of rock and pop . </P> <P> Others point out that performers like Arthur Crudup and Fats Domino were recording blues songs as early as 1946 that are indistinguishable from later rock and roll, and that these blues songs were based on themes, chord changes, and rhythms dating back decades before that . Wynonie Harris' 1947 cover of Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight" is also a claimant for the title of first rock and roll record, as the popularity of this record led to many answer songs, mostly by black artists, with the same rocking beat, during the late 1940s and early 1950s . Big Joe Turner's 1939 recording "Roll' Em Pete" is close to 1950s rock and roll . Sister Rosetta Tharpe was also recording shouting, stomping music in the 1930s and 1940s, such as "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), that in some ways contained major elements of mid-1950s rock and roll . Pushing the date back even earlier, blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow has stated that "Crazy About My Baby" by Blind Roosevelt Graves and his brother, recorded in 1929, "could be considered the first rock' n' roll recording". </P> <P> By contrast, musician and writer Billy Vera argued that because rock and roll was "an evolutionary process", it would be foolish to name any single record as the first . Writer Nick Tosches similarly felt that, "It is impossible to discern the first modern rock record, just as it is impossible to discern where blue becomes indigo in the spectrum ." Music writer Rob Bowman remarked that the long - debated question is useless and cannot be answered because "criteria vary depending upon who is making the selection ." </P>

What instrument is most responsible for the transition from rock and roll to rock