Why Isn’t Pat Boone in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
If we remove Elvis, Pat Boone would have been the King of Top 40 radio in the ’50s
ANOTHER QUESTION ON QUORA that caught my attention was “Who was the first rock & roll superstar to be discarded and forgotten to time?” I answered with Bill Haley, Pat Boone, and Connie Francis. Each singer was a BIG star in their heyday — I don’t believe the word “superstar” existed then — but each has been under-appreciated by most critics and historians since rock & roll became self-reflective years after their heyday.
In response to my answer, Dean Gibson added a comment agreeing with me on Haley and Francis but questioned my championing Boone. He reiterated the almost universal belief that Boone and other white artists deprived black artists of a more lucrative career:
“What he did, in my opinion, was take market share, attention, and money away from the black artists who originally did the songs, contributing to the obscurity of otherwise superior performances of those songs. Pat Boone helped make deserving black R&B artists end up discarded and forgotten when perhaps they should have been superstars.”
This is a common belief because it seems so obvious, but it isn’t. Please keep in mind that the United States was just beginning the long…
