Methodology

Data selection

Two main selection criteria were defined to obtain the list of the first Rock & Roll musicians.
The first one is that they had to be affiliated to this music genre or other styles associated to
Rock & Roll (i.e. Rockabilly, Early R&B). The second criterion is that they had to start their
discographic career in the early 1950s decade. Allmusic database was selected to this task
firstly because it is one of the largest databases about music artists (size) and secondly because
it categorizes artists by genre and style, as well as it identifies their active periods, including
the starting decade of their career. Two main music genres were explored, Pop/Rock and R&B
(Rhythm & Blues). Inside Pop/Rock, Rock & Roll / Roots subgenre was selected to extract
artists labeled with the following styles: Rock & Roll and Rockabilly. From R&B, Early R&B
subgenre was selected and New Orleans R&B, R&B Instrumental and Doo Wop styles were
searched. The list of performers was limited to musicians that started their career in the 1950s
decade in the United States and Canada, obtaining a list of 486 artists.

These performers were searched in SecondHandSongs, the largest database of cover songs,
finding 436 profiles. The remainng ones could be artists no identify by SecondHandSongs or
without cover/covered songs.

Figure. Coupling (arcs>2 and gigant component=161 nodes, 1181 arcs), layout= Force Atlas 2),
node size=degree

Figure. Cocitation (arcs>2 and gigant component=651 nodes, 1973 arcs), layout= Yifan Hu),
node size=degree