Rhythm and blues

• 1. Introduction

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  Rhythm and blues began in African American communities in the 1940s, at a moment when record companies needed a new name for music that was changing everything around it. The old label was blunt: "race music", a term coined by Okeh producer Ralph Peer, drawn from how the African American press described itself. By 1948, a Billboard journalist named Jerry Wexler had a replacement ready, and the phrase he landed on would prove elastic enough to stretch across eight decades and reshape popular music worldwide.

  What did it actually mean to call something rhythm and blues? That question turns out to have no single answer. The term was applied to blues records in the early 1950s, then to gospel-inflected rock and roll styles by the mid-1950s, then to soul and funk by the 1970s, and then to a digitally produced contemporary form by the late 1980s. Writer Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, described it simply as an umbrella term invented for industry convenience, one that embraced all black music except classical and religious music. The genre's identity was always partly a marketing category, partly a living tradition, and partly a battleground over who got to own American popular music.

  How did a style rooted in Chicago and New Orleans nightclubs end up shaping the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and eventually Drake? And what does Cuban dance music have to do with any of it?

• 2. A Name Before the Music

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  Jerry Wexler gets the credit for coining "rhythm and blues" as a musical term in the United States in 1948, but the phrase had already appeared in Billboard as early as 1943. Before either date, the industry's first tracking of black popular music ran under a different heading: the Harlem Hit Parade, created in 1942, listed the most popular records in Harlem. That chart became the direct predecessor to the Billboard R&B chart, with the category name changing from Harlem Hit Parade to Rhythm and Blues in 1949.

  The phrase "rhythm and blues" itself was chosen partly to retire a predecessor label that had grown uncomfortable. "Race music" had been the standard industry designation, but as the 1940s wore on, record companies quietly began replacing it with terms like "sepia series". The Billboard chart carried the heading "Hot Rhythm and Blues Singles" from June 1949 until August 1969, when it was renamed "Best Selling Soul Singles".

  Writer and producer Robert Palmer offered a candid definition: rhythm and blues was "a catchall term referring to any music that was made by and for black Americans". That catchall quality proved to be the term's greatest strength and its greatest source of confusion. By the early 21st century, "R&B" was still in use in some contexts to categorize music made by black musicians, even as its sonic meaning had drifted far from its 1940s origins.

• 3. The Sound of the Forties

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  Louis Jordan dominated the R&B charts in 1948, placing three songs in the top five while two of those top five entries rested on boogie-woogie rhythms that had risen to prominence across the decade. Jordan's band, the Tympany Five, which he had formed in 1938, featured him on saxophone and vocals alongside musicians on trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass, and drums. Robert Palmer described the sound as "urbane, rocking, jazz-based music... with a heavy, insistent beat".

  The independent record labels that housed this music were mostly new operations. Savoy was founded in 1942, King in 1943, Imperial in 1945, Specialty in 1946, Chess in 1947, and Atlantic in 1948. These small companies moved quickly, recorded prolifically, and served communities that the major labels had largely ignored.

  In 1949, saxophonist and band leader Paul Williams put out "The Huckle-Buck", and it sat at number one on the R&B chart for nearly the entire year. The song was written by musician and arranger Andy Gibson and was described as a "dirty boogie" for its raunchy character. Williams's concerts were sweaty, riotous events that were shut down on more than one occasion. One teenager from Philadelphia summed it up plainly: "That Hucklebuck was a very nasty dance." The lyrics were credited to Roy Alfred, who later co-wrote the 1955 hit "(The) Rock and Roll Waltz".

• 4. The Cuban Thread

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  African American music had been weaving in Cuban rhythms since the 1800s, when the Cuban contradanza, known outside Cuba as the habanera, gained popularity. Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo/habanera rhythm, which he called the Spanish tinge, an essential ingredient of jazz. Tresillo is the most basic duple-pulse rhythmic cell in Sub-Saharan African music traditions, and its presence in African American music represents one of the clearest examples of African rhythmic retention in the United States.

  New Orleans became the specific site where Cuban rhythm entered R&B. Producer and bandleader Dave Bartholomew first used tresillo as a saxophone-section riff on his own 1949 disc "Country Boy". In a 1988 interview, Bartholomew described hearing the figure on a Cuban record: "On 'Country Boy' I had my bass and drums playing a straight swing rhythm and wrote out that 'rumba' bass part for the saxes to play on top of the swing rhythm." He later applied the same figure to Fats Domino recordings, assigning the repeating three-note pattern to electric guitars and baritone sax, creating what he called a very heavy bottom.

  Professor Longhair, a New Orleans pianist, fell under the spell of Perez Prado's mambo records in the 1940s and blended Afro-Cuban rhythms directly into rhythm and blues. His track "Longhair's Blues Rhumba" overlays a straight blues with a clave rhythm, and his style was known locally as rumba-boogie. Johnny Otis released the R&B mambo "Mambo Boogie" in January 1951, featuring congas, maracas, claves, and mambo saxophone guajeos in a blues progression. Ike Turner recorded "Cubano Jump" in 1954, built around several 2-3 clave figures drawn from the mambo. Atlantic Records producer Ahmet Ertegun reportedly said that Afro-Cuban rhythms added color and excitement to the basic drive of R&B. By the 1960s, however, as the United States embargo isolated Cuba, the island's foundational role in shaping the music had been largely forgotten.

• 5. Crossing Over

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  At first, only African Americans were buying R&B records. Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records noted that sales were localized in African American markets, with no white sales and no white radio play. That began to shift in the early 1950s: records from Dolphin's of Hollywood, a shop located in an African American area of Los Angeles, showed that 40% of 1952 sales were to white buyers.

  Cleveland DJ Alan Freed accelerated the crossing. In July 1951, he started a late-night radio show on WJW called "The Moondog Rock Roll House Party", sponsored by Fred Mintz, whose R&B record store had a primarily African American clientele. Freed began calling the rhythm and blues music he played "rock and roll", and when he moved to the much larger New York City market in 1954, he helped carry artists like Chuck Berry to white teenage audiences. Berry's "Maybellene" reached number three on the R&B charts in 1955 and crept into the top 30 on the pop charts.

  The 1956 "Top Stars of '56" tour illustrated how thoroughly the two audiences had begun to merge. Headliners included Al Hibbler, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Carl Perkins, whose "Blue Suede Shoes" was popular with R&B buyers. In Annapolis, Maryland, 50,000 to 70,000 people tried to attend a sold-out performance with only 8,000 seats; roads were clogged for seven hours. By 1957, two Elvis Presley records reached the R&B top five, including "Jailhouse Rock" at number one, an outcome the source describes as unprecedented acceptance of a non-African American artist in that category.

• 6. The British Detour

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  British rhythm and blues took shape in the early 1960s, built largely on recordings that African American servicemen stationed in Britain and seamen visiting ports like London, Liverpool, Newcastle, and Belfast had brought with them. Bands in the developing London club scene worked to replicate black R&B performers and arrived at a rawer, grittier sound than the more polished beat groups of the same era.

  Geno Washington, an American singer stationed in England with the Air Force, was invited in 1965 by guitarist Pete Gage to join what became Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band. They landed top 40 hit singles and two top 10 albums before splitting in 1969. The Rolling Stones, working in the same milieu, covered Bobby Womack and the Valentinos' "It's All Over Now" and earned their first UK number one in 1964. British white R&B musicians popular in the UK included Steve Winwood, Frankie Miller, Van Morrison and Them from Belfast, and the Animals from Newcastle.

  For most of these bands, R&B was a foundation rather than a ceiling. None played rhythm and blues exclusively, but it remained at the core of their early albums. The music that came back across the Atlantic during the British Invasion carried American R&B's DNA in altered form, transformed by musicians who had learned it secondhand from records and then added their own regional character.

• 7. Soul, Funk, and What Came After

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  By the early 1960s, the music industry had begun calling the category "soul music"; similar music by white artists was labeled blue-eyed soul. Motown Records earned its first million-selling single in 1960 with the Miracles' "Shop Around". In 1961, Stax Records scored its first hit with Carla Thomas's "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)", and quickly followed with the Mar-Keys' instrumental "Last Night", which introduced the rawer Memphis soul sound for which Stax became known.

  In 1969, the Grammys added the Rhythm and Blues category, a form of institutional recognition that the genre had waited decades to receive. By the 1970s, the term had expanded again, serving as a blanket label for soul, funk, and disco. Then in the late 1980s, the arrival of new jack swing artists like Teddy Riley, Guy, and Keith Sweat, alongside the rise of hip-hop, pushed R&B into yet another transformation. Newer artists such as Usher, TLC, Aaliyah, and Mary J. Blige found success under the category.

  In 2004-80% of the songs that topped the R&B charts also reached the top of the Hot 100, a period the source identifies as the all-time peak for R&B and hip-hop on the Billboard Hot 100 and Top 40 Radio. Sales declined from roughly 2005 to 2013. Since 2010, hip-hop artists such as Drake have adopted a softer sound that draws from traditional R&B, opening debates in both genres about where one ends and the other begins. In 2010, the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame was founded by LaMont "ShowBoat" Robinson.