By the way, if anyone is interested in this who doesn't know the incredible story of the Detroit proto-punk band Death, it's sort of a glimpse into a parallel reality in which all this didn't happen (but it did happen, so they were forgotten for 30 years). The missing black Ramones, Stooges, Clash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwehxN2ipCU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZ9R2t5Jd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIsE8TyNEL4
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/music/15rubi.html?_r... ("Their musicianship tightened when their mother allowed them to replace their bedroom furniture with mikes and amps as long as they practiced for three hours every afternoon")
This interview is so great, everyone reading this thread should just watch it:
Of course --- no story about being lost to history, though! --- there's the impact of Bad Brains on punk/hardcore as well.
The nice thing is that you have unbelievable amounts of incredible music to discover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=764iHBRjAVw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6gptd01mY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MouM59AbnE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McOmcNwqprA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJKe2j9Wjh4 (<-- unusually good youtube comments if you like that kind of thing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQXqkiKXiHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IlSP9vVpMQ (<-- not rock and roll, but the Animals sure were)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k
Those are all songs that were done later by white artists who had big hits with them. How much money the original performers got is an exercise for the reader. I could give you dozens of other examples but, alas, HN has shot my memory.
It's important to know that in most of these cases the white artists adored the black artists and were playing their songs because they loved them—as musicians do. But it doesn't change who got the raw deal.
So how did this really happen? The mechanisms of cultural collaboration didn't really exist, but I would love to be corrected. I doubt it is different from hip-hop: it's built almost in it's entirety on the Black cultural underground, and some talented white people who skirt around the edges eventually learn enough to make a stab at the "mainstream".
All this changed with Beatles and Bob Dylan, because they made it the expectation that "real artists" wrote their own material. This caused the idea of the "original version", and consequently the "cover version" which was a recording by any other artist than the original writer/artist.
So not to dispute that Rock n Roll was originally black music which made a lot of white artists rich and famous, it is still interesting to note how many of the songwriters at the time were Jewish. Just another aspect of the story!