8. Rhythm & Blues

Rhythm & Blues (or known colloquially as R&B) was a term introduced in 1949 by Billboard Magazine to replace “Race Records” (Floyd, 1995). Previously, the term “Race Records” had been used as a marketing tool but had later been deemed “unacceptable” after the war. This move may seem like a departure from a racial definition but as Brackett (2003, p.128) commented, rhythm and blues (alongside “mainstream popular music” and “crossover”) was a conventional label “used by those who make, consume, and profit from popular music in the United States”. According to Ellison (1989, p.4), R&B was seen as a “jazzed up” version of the blues and gained a “great hold on the public imagination”. Some of the most notable musicians of the early R&B era included Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who had also been influential in preceding genres such as (jump) blues and would go on to mould the sound of rock ‘n’ roll. Picking up from where the Chicago blues of the 1940s left off, the electric guitar became a prominent instrument in the movement. Jazz also lent its style to the genre, with an emphasis on its use of the saxophone. Examples of this included Ruth Brown’s R&B Blues, which featured a “one-chorus tenor saxophone solo” (Floyd, 1995, p.177), Illinois Jacquet and Big Jay McNeely, who were also proponents of the technique (Grove Music, 2013). R&B’s first heyday was during the 1950s, when it became synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll, thanks to Little Richard and Chuck Berry who emerged as the main black rock ‘n’ roll artists of the mid-50s (Floyd, 1995, p.177). Floyd also noted Berry’s message during this time as being “essentially African” but “tempered by a pop and country oriented delivery” (Floyd, 1995, p.178). This could be an example of the homogenising of genres, both black and white, during this time. Country music was a predominately white genre and by this time and most pop musicians who were defined as being “pop” were also white. While Berry was amalgamating music on the stylistic front, Little Richard was blurring the racial and cultural lines, with his own brand of Call-Response. His biggest hits came in 1956 in the forms of “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti”, which made a huge impact on 1950s youth culture (Floyd, 1995). Thanks to these two influential musicians, a genre that had previously been characterised by race – specifically, the black race – now had a more balanced identity comprising of both black and white musicians