Rhythm and blues

Rhythm and blues, commonly referred to as R&B, is a musical style developed by Black Americans for Black American audiences in the United States in the early to mid-1940s. The genre combined the sounds of jump blues, traditional blues, jazz, swing, gospel, boogie, and big band to create a new, up-tempo musical style characterized by danceable backbeats and strong, emotional vocals.

Rhythm and blues developed in American cities during World War II. This era saw thousands of Black Americans migrate from poor rural communities to increasingly dense urban centers to take advantage of wartime employment opportunities. It was in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, and Atlanta that Black musicians started combining a diverse array of existing Black musical styles to create R&B. Bands featured traditional jazz and swing instruments such as pianos and saxophones that were intensified with the sounds of electric guitars, basses, and powerful drum beats.

Over the next few decades, the genre of rhythm and blues expanded significantly to encompass a wide range of musical subgenres, pioneered chiefly by Black Americans. New musical styles categorized under the umbrella term of rhythm and blues included doo-wop, Motown, soul, early rock and roll, funk, disco, and, later, hip-hop and rap. Pioneers of these R&B subgenres in the 1950s and 1960s included Ray Charles, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Gladys Knight, and Marvin Gaye. In the 1960s and 1970s, soul musicians such as Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton became instrumental in transforming traditional soul music into funk, a loose musical form involving driving beats, rhythms, and grooves.

Rhythm and blues continued to develop into the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, when it took on a more modernized flavor sometimes referred to as neo-soul, which featured some hip-hop influences as well. Prominent R&B artists in these eras included Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys, Mary J. Blige, Usher, and John Legend.

Background

Rhythm and blues originated as an urban musical style for urban audiences. American metropolitan areas started to become even more densely populated in the early 1940s with the United States' entry into World War II. The war created the need for thousands of new laborers in large cities' war-supply factories. Responding to these financial opportunities, many Black Americans left their impoverished lifestyles in the South and other rural areas and moved to more prosperous cities. The early to mid-1940s, therefore, saw the Black populations of cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Memphis, and New York increase dramatically, sometimes by more than 30 percent.

Black Americans became more financially secure in these cities, and their newfound resources allowed them to settle into their own vibrant, but racially segregated, communities. Numerous outlets of Black culture began appearing in these communities to accommodate the demands of the people in their new urban homes. One form of culture that became especially important to city-dwelling Black Americans was music.

These communities had brought to the cities their tastes for swing, jazz, blues, and jump blues. A variation on traditional blues music, jump blues was an up-tempo musical style that combined guitars, basses, and horn sections to create danceable music. Perhaps the most influential pioneer of urban jump blues was Louis Jordan, an Arkansas native who had played in a swing band in New York before establishing himself in the emerging jump blues scene in Los Angeles. Jordan's jump blues was performed by a six- or seven-piece band featuring three horns and a rhythm section of bass and drums. The musicians played fast-paced boogie-woogie bass lines interspersed with horn riffs while drums kept time. Jump blues was an extremely popular new musical form among Black and White audiences in the 1940s.

Multiple artists around the United States contributed to the ongoing development of rhythm and blues into the late 1940s and early 1950s. R&B radio stations started appearing in Atlanta, while in Los Angeles, the Texas-born blues musician T-Bone Walker incorporated jazzy horns with his own electric guitar performances. Meanwhile, the blues pianist Charles Brown produced the relaxing hit song "Drifting Blues" in 1945.

Improvements in recording equipment, such as the tape recorder, in the late 1940s and early 1950s made producing R&B records easier than ever before. This led to a proliferation of new record companies dedicated to generating and distributing R&B music. Notable record companies specializing in rhythm and blues included Chess Records, Stax Records, and Motown, all founded in the 1950s. R&B singers such as Ray Charles and Ruth Brown and R&B vocal groups such as the Drifters and the Coasters commanded the United States' R&B scene in the early to mid-1950s.

Charles carved out an especially distinguished career for himself; the Albany, Georgia, native sang, played the piano, and arranged his own music. He produced his first R&B hit in 1954 with "I Got a Woman," which featured his soulful voice accompanied by horns. Charles's mixture of blues and gospel music later contributed to the emotional style of soul music.

Traditional rhythm and blues began to change in the mid- to late 1950s, as electric guitarists helped create a new subgenre that later became known as early rock and roll. Rock's faster, more youthful sound brought younger audiences to R&B, leading record labels to start marketing the music to teenagers. R&B-influenced rock music was pioneered by Black artists such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Little Richard produced several hit rock-and-roll songs in the late 1950s, including "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti-Frutti," while Berry released the hits "Maybellene" and "Johnny B. Goode" in the same period.

Impact

The onset of the 1960s brought another divergence to rhythm and blues with the emergence of a new autonomous subgenre called soul. Soul music combined standard rhythm and blues, gospel, and jazz with deeply emotional, meaningful vocals. Soul itself encompassed numerous musical styles. The Motown label, for instance, produced catchy soul acts such as the all-female vocal group the Supremes, featuring the future solo soul artist Diana Ross. Stax, meanwhile, focused on laying horn sections over harder-edged soul songs. The record company enjoyed great commercial success with artists such as Otis Redding and the instrumental soul group Booker T. & the M.G.'s, a prime example of the Memphis soul sound.

Many more soul artists rose up the national R&B charts beginning in the early 1960s. These included Etta James, with her hit version of "At Last"; Sam Cooke, who produced such popular soul songs as "Chain Gang," "Cupid," and "A Change Is Gonna Come"; and Marvin Gaye, who earned positive reviews for his cover of the song "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and produced well-received R&B/soul albums into the 1980s.

Throughout the 1960s, soul would prove to be one of the most versatile musical forms to develop from traditional rhythm and blues. In the early years of the decade, soul remained mostly indistinguishable from its R&B base. In the mid- to late 1960s, however, soul singers and their producers began adapting the genre to suit the changing musical tastes of their audiences. Soul generally diverged into its own subgenres based on geographical location. In large cities such as New York and Philadelphia, soul became smooth and slick. The Motown label in Detroit started producing catchy, pop-oriented soul music, while Southern soul featured unusual rhythms and loud horn sections. These different types of soul enjoyed top spots on R&B music charts. Because of soul's strong pop influences, many soul songs also became crossover hits, meaning they attracted fans of both soul and pop, which increased soul's national exposure.

One of the most influential soul singers of this era was James Brown. Raised in Augusta, Georgia, Brown rose to fame in the late 1950s with such popular R&B songs as "Please Please Please" and "Try Me." His 1963 live album Live at the Apollo became a huge soul hit. Beginning around 1965, Brown started developing soul into a more intense and rhythmic brand of R&B called funk. His huge 1965 hits "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" exemplified the new style. Named after a slang term for stink, funk featured strong, primal, danceable rhythms created by electric guitars, basses, horns, and drums. Brown's unique brand of funk also involved frequent vocal interaction with members of his band during the songs.

Unlike all the other forms of R&B that had preceded it, funk music was not held together by a verse-chorus-verse structure, but rather it featured lengthy instrumental jams that fostered musical improvisation. Groovy guitar riffs, bass lines, and drum beats could appear or disappear at random to allow for complete musical liberation. Eventually known as the Godfather of Soul, Brown remained a colossal influence on the funk and soul genres over the next several decades, with his most successful period occurring in the late 1960s through the 1970s. Other well-known Brown songs in this era included "Cold Sweat," "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine," and "The Payback."

Two other highly influential developers of early funk were Sly Stone and George Clinton. Stone's band, Sly and the Family Stone, began as a soul outfit before creating its own type of psychedelic rock-influenced funk music. Clinton, meanwhile, turned funk into party music with the extended jams and humorous overtones of his bands Funkadelic and Parliament. Brown, Stone, and Clinton performed well on the R&B charts throughout the 1970s.

The late 1970s saw funk develop into the more smoothly produced sounds of disco, which had become popular in the United States by this time. The emphasis on slick production became a hallmark of rhythm and blues in the 1980s. The new R&B subgenre called urban music sounded more like pop than soul. It ultimately gave rise to such 1980s megastars as Michael Jackson and Prince. Urban music also led to the creation of hip-hop and rap in the early to mid-1980s. Artists such as Run-D.M.C. and Boogie Down Productions rapped lyrics over drum beats and occasional rock guitars. Other hip-hop singers such as MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice fused rap to pop to create a more accessible form of hip-hop. Rappers who preferred the more intense sounds of uncompromising hip-hop created the genre of gangsta rap, epitomized by groups such as N.W.A.

By the early 1990s, rhythm and blues had fused urban soul to hip-hop to create a new type of R&B performed by artists such as Mary J. Blige and Puff Daddy (Sean Combs). The twenty-first century saw all of these different forms of rhythm and blues being played together, with various R&B subgenres influencing others to create fused musical forms with crossover appeal. Vocalists such as D'Angelo and Erykah Badu helped to develop the sound of neo-soul in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, while Usher and Beyoncé fused R&B to pop and dance music. Other popular R&B/soul singers of the early twenty-first century included Alicia Keys, R. Kelly, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Frank Ocean, and SZA.

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