This is a true statement.
“Roll” is sweet, as a noun. Lush. Soft. Eschewing every traditional Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ, recently freed New Orleans slaves were calling it a “jelly roll” over 100 years ago. So juicy did they find the expression that it came to mean [the male reproductive organ] as well as [the female], both genders singing about “my jelly roll.” The first great jazz composer called himself Jelly Roll Morton. Then there’s “roll of fat,” “roll of bills” -- that kind of roll. And as a verb (Roll the verb!), it can move and it can move and it might never stop, end over end over infinity. Oceans roll.
Putting the two together, “rock’n’roll” was a term from the juke joints of the South, long in use by the forties, when a music started being heard that had no name, wasn’t jazz and wasn’t simply blues and wasn’t Cajun, but had all those elements and could not be ignored. In those juke joints “rock’n’roll” hadn’t meant the name of a music, it meant “to [have sex].” “Rock,” by itself, had pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least. “Rock’n’roll” was a juicy elaboration on the old usage. When, finally, in the mid-fifties, the songs started being played by white people and aired on the radio -- “Rock Around the Clock,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Reelin’ And A-Rockin”’ -- the meaning hadn’t changed. The word was so prevalent that the music began to be called “rock’n’roll” by disc jockeys who either didn’t know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. The term stuck. Michael Ventura, Hear That Long Snake Moan.
:applause: