The world last week commemorated the 50th anniversary of allegedly the most important event in the history of popular music: Elvis Presley's recording of It's All Right Mama. But in fact, it was a turning point around which the history of music didn't turn.
For Presley didn't, at that point, change the musical world. That was done by Bill Haley, not in 1954, but in 1956. Along with 1963 - the year of the Beatles, Vietnam, JFK - and 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall - 1956 was one of the three most important years in the second half of the 20th century.
It was the last year of British imperial muscle, floundering in the criminality of Suez, and the US became the formal leader of the English-speaking world. It was the year that the Soviet Union learnt in Hungary that it could do whatever it liked in its empire. In Ireland, it was the year - once again - the IRA reverted to its traditions of idiotic, pagan savagery. And it was the year that Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock (from the previous year's film, Blackboard Jungle) swept the world.
According to The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, in 1955 all number one records were ballads - Softly, Softly, Stranger in Paradise, Dreamboat, Finger of Suspicion and so on - the sole exception being the trumpeter Eddie Calvert and his virtuous Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White. All blameless, sugary stuff, as appealing to teenagers as to pensioners. The subversiveness of rock and roll still utterly unknown, unsuspected: then in November 1955, Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock arrived.
That was the icebreaker smashing its way through the sheet-ice of popular song-forms which had remained largely unchanged since the emergence of the music-hall in the previous century. Other Haley numbers followed - most famously, See You Later Alligator. Then, in May 1956, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel entered the charts, and he dominated the rest of the year with - amongst other rock classics - Blue Suede Shoes and Hound Dog. By now, the very status of "youth" had dramatically changed. The name, "Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers" would have been risible even a few months before: in 1956, they reached number one with Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" Their next hit, I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent, spoke of the other phenomenon of the time: not just crime, but of an informal youth movement of dissent and non-conformity. In Britain, the teddy-boys - drain-pipe trousers, big-shouldered jackets, quiffed hair, and maybe a long-handled razor-blade - wrecked cinemas. In Dublin the Ugly Gang surfaced around Gardiner Street, and was promptly hammered into the ground by the legendary garda, Lugs Brannigan.
In July 1956, Gene Vincent's deathless Be Bop A Lula, still one of the most powerful anthems of rock, was released: it was still too revolutionary to register as a huge hit - it made it to number 30, before dropping out and briefly resurfacing twice, but never remotely approaching the top ten. Little Richard and Fats Domino also hit the charts: black artists making their own mark the very year that Martin Luther King made his own little debut, organising a boycott of segregated buses in Alabama. These are not coincidences, but symptoms of a huge cultural energy erupting.
Elvis Presley finished 1956 with Love Me Tender, its melody based on an English folk-song.
Which in a way is not so strange: rock and roll was largely a fusion of African, Scots-Irish and English musical forms which had mutated in the US, often enough through interpretations by Jewish songwriters such as Doc Pomus, Mort Schuman, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Indeed, it could be argued that the Jewish contribution was as vital to rock and roll as the others: subtract Jews from its creative and entrepreneurial development, and there might well have been no enduring rock and roll form at all.
So, like it or not, rock and roll is the dominant expression of popular culture in the world today, and its devotees are almost medieval in their worship: a modern Canterbury Tales would have a rock festival as its destination.
And only such a festival, amongst all the competing forms of mass ceremony, could manage what happened in Punchestown last weekend: some 45,000 people convening in the mud and the rain, and staying there, enduring vile toilets and general filth, to worship at the shrine of this American-African-British-Irish-Jewish art-form.
No, it's no longer for me, and though I had no choice about listening to it - living several miles from Punchestown didn't protect me from the rolling wall of noise for the entire weekend - I don't begrudge the revellers their music over a couple of days.
For rock and roll is one of the great liberating and unifying forces of the world: unconsciously and unintentionally, and therefore all the more powerfully, it utterly disposes of arguments about race, colour, class, nationality and creed.
All such divisions become irrelevant before its dynamic sweep.
So it's not surprising that Turkey, the most tolerant and culturally inclusive Muslim country in the entire world, has a vibrant culture of rock music. Wherever you have rock music, in its many forms, you will find less bigotry, more openness, more generosity.
Thus, contrary to what you've been told in the past few days, the truly great year to celebrate is not 1954, but the one that arrives a year next January: 1956, when the cultural world that we all know and inhabit was born in a couple of recording studios in the USA.