Each month, Our State senior editor — and resident soundtrack maker — Mark Kemp, a former music editor of Rolling Stone, curates a one-of-a-kind Spotify playlist featuring North Carolina songs and musicians.

Rock ’n’ roll is a malleable term. It’s almost completely subjective. If you don’t believe that, just listen to the complaints each year when The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame announces its latest inductees. “Dolly Parton isn’t rock ’n’ roll,” some will groan. Or: “Rap isn’t rock.” Some even make eloquent arguments distinguishing between “rock ’n’ roll” and just plain old “rock.” That’s because, if truth be told, there’s no real definition of rock ’n’ roll. It’s like the old saying about art or obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a playlist of 25 rock ’n’ roll songs from North Carolina acts spanning from the 1950s to the 2000s. Six of these artists — Link Wray, The “5” Royales, The Shirelles, The Drifters, Funkadelic, and James Taylor — are bona fide Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees. A full 15 of them have been inducted into The North Carolina Music Hall of Fame: Wray, Arthur Smith, The “5” Royales, Wilbert Harrison, Little Eva, Billy “Crash” Craddock, Shirley Reeves and Doris Jackson of The Shirelles, Ben E. King of The Drifters, George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic, Betty Davis, James Taylor, Charlie Daniels, Nantucket, Mitch Easter of Let’s Active, and The Avett Brothers.

No matter how you define rock ’n’ roll, the songs in this playlist have greatly contributed to — or been inspired by — the American-born musical genre that first shook the world when Little Richard screamed his way out of Macon, Georgia, and Chuck Berry crafted the guitar riff that inspired so many Rolling Stones songs, prompting that group to begin calling itself “The Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World.”

The earliest rock ’n’ roll borrowed its guitar sound from the blues, its grit from country, its soulfulness from gospel, and its sense of adventure from jazz. Combining all or some of those ingredients, pioneering musicians created songs that have made an indelible imprint on our culture.

And many of those songs came from North Carolina artists. Take Wray’s 1958 hit “Rumble” — it inspired later guitar players from Jimi Hendrix to every punk rocker who ever picked up an instrument and beat it into submission. There’s the late, great Charlotte-based hillbilly musician Arthur Smith, whose gritty picking on songs like “Guitar Boogie” made a profound impact on later rockabilly acts. And then there’s Lowman Pauling of Winston-Salem’s The “5” Royales, whose stinging guitar sound on songs like “Think” inspired later rock ’n’ roll guitarists like Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MG’s.

To some listeners, The Drifters and The Shirelles were more pop/R&B than rock ’n’ roll, but you couldn’t go to a rock ’n’ roll sock hop in the early ’60s without dancing to “This Magic Moment,” “Stand By Me,” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” And the same goes for “The Loco-Motion” by Belhaven-born Little Eva or “Mockingbird” by the Greensboro duo Inez and Charlie Foxx.

By the later ’60s, with rock ’n’ roll a firmly established American-born musical genre, North Carolina kept churning out the music. Kids from Charlotte (The Paragons) to Lumberton (Cykle) began making rock ’n’ roll in their garages, and their raw, homemade music would inspire a new generation of rockers — like Chapel Hill’s Arrogance and the spate of new wave and punk bands (The dB’s, Let’s Active, Southern Culture on the Skids, and Superchunk) that formed in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, making the Triangle area a hotbed of alternative rock.

And North Carolina continues to produce great rock ’n’ roll: One of the biggest, most dynamic live acts of the current millennium is a little rock ’n’ roll band formed by a pair of siblings from Concord: The Avett Brothers.