In Before Elvis: The Prehistory of Rock ’N’ Roll, Larry Birnbaum aims to broaden the widely held view of rock ’n’ roll as rooted solely in blues and R&B traditions, and also dispel the myth that rock represented a ‘sharp break with past styles and a leap into uncharted territory’ (p. 21). An historically accurate portrait of rock's ‘prehistory’ as it developed in the 1920s–1950s, he argues, would account for the influence of swing, jazz, jump, jive, boogie woogie, hokum and even blackface minstrelsy. These subgenres were so deeply entrenched into mainstream music that ‘the first wave of rock ’n’ roll had all but ended by the time young whites discovered the music and claimed it as their own' (p. ix). Hallmarks of older styles that are readily discernable in 1950s rock music include the snappy rhythms of swing, the bawdy humour and basic structure of the verse and refrain hokum song (Birnbaum singles out this style as a particularly strong influence), and the left hand bass patterns of boogie woogie piano. The author equally emphasises the importance of jive's novelty element and nonsense lyrics (Sam Theard's 1937 recording of ‘Spo-Dee-O-Dee’ was an important progenitor) and the bluesy strains of 1930s big band acts, which evolved into postwar R&B. The upshot is that rock ’n’ roll was not nearly as unprecedented as some critics and historians have considered it to be.

Birnbaum's study is a comprehensive survey of popular music styles and performers active in the decades leading up to the 1950s. This insider's guide through pre-rock history leaves little doubt as to the author's extensive knowledge on the subject, and his study includes countless songs and artists both familiar and forgotten, from luminaries like Cab Calloway and T-Bone Walker to stars who once shone brightly but have since faded with time, like Louis Prima and Clyde McPhatter. In between his discussions of artists and band line-ups, Birnbaum traces song lineages at the hands of different acts, each of which reflected an artist's personal stylistic preferences. This approach is particularly profitable in his discussions of such tracks as ‘The Train Kept A-Rollin’, ‘Roll ’Em Pete’ and ‘Hound Dog’, which were covered by multiple artists and which served as flexible moulds that accommodated a wide range of styles. Studying these songs' genealogies makes sense, considering Birnbaum's focus on the evolution of sounds rather than on musical culture and personalities per se, but in his quest to thoroughly document rock ’n’ roll's stylistic roots, the author overloads his text with information, from the names of short-lived labels to now-forgotten session players and their undistinguished biographies. Compiling all of this data in a single volume is useful, but all too often the reader is hard pressed to distinguish the tastemakers from the also-rans and, while the author gives a clear sense of how many stylistic developments were happening concurrently, paring down this mountain of information to include the most relevant data to support his points would have produced a more tightly knit historical narrative.

Other shortcomings include the book's dry prose, which trudges along and reads at times like an encyclopaedia. This is surprising considering Birnbaum's pedigree as a rock journalist who wrote for Down Beat, Spin and the Village Voice. Also disconcerting is the author's tendency to supply a list of artists who covered the same song as validation for his points about stylistic provenance, when a brief musical analysis of a certain track or musical passage would have allowed him to dig deeper into the material and offer more compelling evidence for his arguments. Here too, including musical examples would have helped illustrate how certain passages or licks in older songs cropped up in countless rock ’n’ roll singles, such as the famous repeating triplets in Chuck Berry's opening guitar solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’. These quibbles aside, Birnbaum's book is a good addition to the benchmark literature on the subject, including Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, edited by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker, Rock and Roll: An Unruly History by Robert Palmer, and I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America by Albin Zak III.