The golden age of rock and roll, in my humble opinion, was from the 1950's until the early- to mid-1960's. The death of rock and roll can be traced, roughly, to the release of "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen. Although rock attempted to survive after "Louie, Louie" it was essentially doomed at that point.

Many songs, like "Louie, Louie" had actually been released in the 1950's. (How many people really know what the lyrics of "Louie, Louie" are talking about?) A lot of the early Beatles' and Rolling Stones' music had been done earlier, as well.

I have a fairly extensive collection of oldies, and if you are interested you can have a look. It's sorted in two ways--based upon artist and based upon title. There's about 1000-1500 different songs listed. Actually, this database is not quite current--I've added a number of albums since this was put together. It gives a sense of what's out there, however.

(This section of my website was developed "just to see if I could do it" -- take a database and translate it into HTML. Not impressed? I did it with ClarisWorks in 1997, largely adding HTML code via find and replace with wildcard characters. Still not impressed? Okay.)