The
Horror
Hop

  Horror music web pages often cover recent heavy metal derived goth music but give little if any attention to the trend of horror in early rock ‘n’ roll. The years between 1954-67, from the birth of rock 'n' roll to the beginning of the rock era, were a particularly fertile period for horror in popular music.  Unlike glam rock in the seventies and the nineties' goth movement, horror in the rock 'n' roll era was not limited to one sub-genre but permeated the whole genre from doo-wop to rockabilly to girl groups, making it a more pervasive subject but, at the same time, a more unwieldy one, harder to contain and codify.

    Already on the web are multitudinous sites dedicated to the Goth movement and themes of horror in glam and heavy metal, but with the exception of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the grandfather of goth perhaps, very little is available on horror in early rock 'n' roll.  That information, furthermore, can only be found in bits and pieces through laborious search.  The Horror Hop is an attempt to collect in one space information about horror-related songs from the rock 'n' roll era and to investigate the origins, themes, and implications of these songs.

 

    

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