In The Birth of Rock and Roll, Americana collector Jim Linderman has arranged a storyboard of sorts that dramatizes the spirit of rock and roll in its early days—when "a juke-joint with fifty patrons was a big show," as Linderman writes in his introduction. "A church with fifty congregants was a full house. The annual square dance at the town hall, a rent party, a fish-fry, the honky-tonk piano in the whore house, the union meeting … There was no real money in it. A performer was lucky to be fed, get drunk and get laid." The photographs have little to do with the conventional iconography...