Rhythm and Blues

“Rhythm and blues” began as a euphemism: in 1949 Billboard retired the chart heading “race records” and needed a new name for Black popular music. What the name covered was a postwar boom — Louis Jordan’s jump blues (swing shrunk to a combo, riffs and comic storytelling over a shuffle), honking tenor saxophones, blues shouters like Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris, the smooth vocal groups, and the electrified blues of Chicago and the coasts (Palmer 1981).

R&B was a business as much as a sound. Independent labels — Atlantic, King, Specialty, Chess — built it outside the major companies, selling on jukeboxes and late-night radio that leapt the color line: white teenagers tuning in were the advance audience of rock ‘n’ roll. “Rock ‘n’ roll” itself, as first sold in 1954–55, was substantially R&B records renamed for that white market (Britannica, “Rock and roll”).

In the web, R&B is the great junction box of postwar Black music: child of the electric blues, wired by swing, parent (with gospel) of soul, and the direct feeder of rock ‘n’ roll. Ray Charles, Little Richard, and James Brown all began as R&B artists before they bent the current somewhere new.