In the Newcastle offices of Britain's longest-running rock'n'roll magazine, Now Dig This!, editor Tony Cajiao lets out a hollow chuckle. "It's like who shot JFK," he says. "It's one of those debates that's going to go on forever. It's one of those questions that there's no answer for. It would be nice for me to tell you that the first rock'n' roll record ever made was by Fred Bloggs, but it's an impossible thing to do. You're never going to get a definitive answer."
So it would appear. I have spent the past few weeks in search of the first rock'n'roll record and I am more confused than ever. I have spoken to expert journalists, septuagenarian former record company bosses and, in one notable case, a British rock'n' roll DJ so old he can clearly remember when teddy boys were forced to beat up other teddy boys because no one had invented mods yet. Along the way, I have been ignored by Ike Turner, heard a variety of genuinely tragic tales about forgotten musical pioneers and discovered a bizarre link between the lost world of late-1940s rhythm and blues and Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. Nevertheless, I am ready to admit defeat.
And to think it once appeared so straightforward. I was spurred into action by the fact that 2004 has been widely proclaimed as rock'n'roll's Golden Jubilee year: the 50th anniversary of the release of Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock and the recording of Elvis Presley's That's Alright Mama. This seems a triumph of marketing over the truth. As every pub quiz bore knows, neither Rock Around the Clock or That's Alright Mama can genuinely claim to be the first rock'n'roll record. They were simply the first white artists' interpretations of a sound already well-established by black musicians almost a decade before. It was a raucous, driving, unnamed variant of rhythm and blues that came complete with lyrics that talked about "rocking" - a term that previously had been used by gospel singers to denote spiritual rapture, but developed more earthy connotations in the postwar world.
However, attempting to define the moment where rhythm and blues turns into rock'n'roll has led me into a sea of bewildering arguments and counter-arguments. Some of these have involved minutely detailed descriptions of snare drum accents and eight-to-the-bar boogie-woogie rhythms. They are the kind of discussions that could, in the parlance of the day, turn even the coolest cat into a real gone daddio in a matter of seconds.
The most widely held belief is that the first rock'n'roll single was 1951's Rocket 88, written by Ike Turner, sung by Jackie Brenston (the saxophone player from Turner's backing band The Kings of Rhythm), and recorded by Sam Phillips, who later went on to found Sun records and discover Elvis Presley. "I've had this argument with many many people over the years, but when people talk about rock'n'roll, my own personal view would be Rocket 88," says Wildcat Pete, who has been a rock'n'roll DJ since his schooldays in the mid-50s, and has the sort of phlegmatic manner that presumably comes with a lifetime spent playing records to audiences of baying teds. "Why? Nobody knows why. It's a chicken and egg situation."
Some, however, feel that Rocket 88's reputation may have more to do with Sam Phillips's vociferous later claims he had discovered rock'n'roll long before he discovered Elvis than with its actual sound. Despite featuring a distorted guitar and a lyric which, in true rock'n'roll style, conflates the power of the singer's car with his virility, it apparently lacks those all-important snare accents.
My attempts to get the notoriously volatile Ike Turner to talk about snare accents, or indeed anything else, meet with failure. I track him down to Memphis, but he won't come to the phone. "It's all kind of dependent on whether he's in a good mood," explains one of his managers. Like most people who have read his former wife Tina's biography, I have an inkling of what Ike Turner might be like when in a bad mood. I decide not to press the issue.
In any case, if Turner is not willing to speak about the roots of rock'n'roll, there are plenty of others who are, particularly on the internet. There is, for example, an optician from New York who maintains a website that exists largely to lambast those who dare claim Rocket 88 deserves its pioneering status. "The reason Rocket 88 has the tradition of being the first rock'n'roll record is the same reason the Brooklyn Bridge has been so marketable over the years," it insists. "There's one born every minute."
Another website pushes the case for New Orleans singer Roy Brown and his singles Good Rocking Tonight - the first record to pun on the gospel term "rocking" - and its follow-up Rocking at Midnight, recorded in 1947 and 1948 respectively. It claims that Elvis Presley stole so shamelessly from Brown that when he came face to face with him backstage, a mortified Presley immediately wrote Brown a cheque on the first thing that came to hand: a brown paper bag.
There are others that cheerlead for Wynonie Harris, whose 1948 cover version of Good Rocking Tonight was much faster than Roy Brown's original, or claim the title belongs to Rock and Roll, a particularly raucous R&B track recorded in 1948 by a Detroit boxer-turned-saxophonist called Wild Bill Moore.
Former Mojo editor Paul Trynka, who spent two years in the mid-1990s travelling around the deep South, interviewing aged musicians for a book on the blues, notes that "a lot of black musicians I spoke to would say that Louis Jordan was the first rock'n'roller". I then discover a book published in America in the 90s, which comes to the disheartening conclusion that any one of 50 records could be candidates for the coveted title. Finally, I come across a website for a US radio station called WFMU, which seems to suggest that the first rock'n'roll record was something released on a wax cylinder in 1899 called All Coons Look Alike to Me, by Arthur Collins. By this stage, I'm so confused that I'm not entirely sure if they're joking.
"In more recent times it's become more hotly debated, because there's more information available, more room for discussion, things are more easily accessible," says Cajiao. "All these early interesting things have been thrown up that sound like rock'n'roll, they've got that groove."
But if the flow of information and number of available recordings has increased over the years, then the number of people with first-hand memories of the postwar rhythm and blues scene has dwindled to almost nothing. Ike Turner aside, all the artists in question are dead, as are virtually all the people who recorded and released them.
The one exception is Joe Bihari, the former vice-chairman of Modern records, a label best-known for discovering blues star BB King, but which also released Wild Bill Moore's Rock and Roll. Modern should have released Rocket 88 as well, but Bihari claims Sam Phillips swindled them and gave it to rivals Chess instead. "You had contracts in those days, but it didn't make a difference," he says from his Beverly Hills home. "Musicians would sign a contract every time someone gave them $100."
Now 79, Bihari claims that he "can't remember everything that happened 55 years ago", but he does highlight why the debate over the first rock'n'roll record has a tendency to become deeply emotive: race. There is little doubt that Wynonie Harris or Roy Brown failed where Bill Haley succeeded in breaking through to a mass market not because their records sounded significantly different, but because of the colour of their skin. "Was it hard getting those records played on the radio at that time? Darn right! There was very little airplay for R&B records, because there were very few black DJs, and very few black stations that played black music. Also, it wasn't easy, particularly in the south, for white kids to bring home black music in the 1940s. Their parents frowned on it."
I'm rather hoping that Bihari will staunchly defend the claim of the Wild Bill Moore single to the title of first rock'n'roll record, but he seems surprised by the suggestion. "No. I don't think so. It was titled Rock and Roll, but that title probably just came out of my head. Bill Moore was a saxophone player and that record was released during the hucklebuck era, when that honking sax first became big. I think Rocket 88 was a more melodic record. Rock and Roll was a lot of saxophone playing."
The debate gains further pathos because none of the R&B pioneers mooted as the makers of the first rock'n'roll record had much success in the years after Elvis. Wynonie Harris and Wild Bill Moore faded away - the latter became a session musician and played on Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On. As it turned out, they were the lucky ones. Ike Turner aside, the only figure among them to gain serious celebrity in later years was the least known at the time. Scatman Crothers sang an uncredited lead vocal on Wild Bill Moore's Rock and Roll, and later became known as an actor in the US: his biggest role was as chef Dick Halloran in The Shining.
As for Jackie Brenston, although Rocket 88 was a number one hit in 1951, his life quickly began to unravel. He left Turner's band, then rejoined, but never had another hit and became an alcoholic. Singer Jimmy Thomas, who joined Turner's band in the late 50s, later recalled Brenston "drinking that really bad shit - stuff you probably wouldn't allow in your house, not even to wash the floor". Brenston finally quit music, became a truck driver and died forgotten in 1979.
Despite Elvis's debt, Roy Brown had no better luck. In 1952 he attempted to sue his manager for unpaid royalties, but succeeded only in getting himself blackballed from the music industry. He spent much of his life as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, dying in 1983.
Another rock'n'roll DJ I speak to, Tony Thorpe, worries that those who spend all this time obsessing over what was the first rock'n'roll record are missing the point. "I often wonder if people who are into all the information side actually lose what rock'n'roll is all about," he says. "They're more interested in who was making the coffee in the studio than the actual music, the feeling. You can enjoy a record even if you don't know or care who it's by."
After a few weeks of reading up on the pivotal importance of snare accents, you can see what he means. But perhaps the point of all those nitpicking internet arguments, and indeed about the ongoing debate over who produced the first rock'n'roll record, is to afford some musical pioneers a courtesy they were denied while they were alive: a degree of respect.
Meanwhile in Newcastle, Tony Cajiao has changed his mind. Earlier, he had plumped for Rocket 88, on the grounds that "if it was good enough for Sam Phillips, it's good enough for me". Now he's not sure. "You know, even though you'll find things with an even earlier recording date that sound just like rock'n'roll," he muses, "you have to say that Rock Around the Clock was the first record that really brought everything together, that made tremors around the world."
I stifle a groan: weeks later, I appear to be back where I started.