“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” General Motors adopted that advertising slogan in the 1980s to revitalize one of its storied brands, and the formulation has sprouted like mushrooms after the rain ever since. The 2009 J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek reboot billed itself as “not your father’s Star Trek,” for instance. It’s safe to say that we have accumulated enough years of “not your father’s” that it was about darn time for its opposite to arrive.

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Which brings us to the 800th entry in Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, Elijah Wald’s Rock ’n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction. This slim volume is your father’s rock ’n’ roll experience in book form, assuming your father was American or possibly British and born anytime between, say, 1945 and 1965.

Oxford prizes academic credentials for contributors to its Very Short Introduction series, and the publisher has found a few to pin on Wald. He has a doctorate in “ethnomusicology.” He has taught at universities in some capacity or other. More promisingly, the jacket copy leads with the fact that he’s a Grammy Award-winning musician. He’s also the author of a previous Very Short Introduction on the blues.

Fittingly, he is back for an encore. His earlier effort sketched the history and composition of the blues, and though it wasn’t stuffy, his rock ’n’ roll follow-up is far more freewheeling. The book concludes........

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