Rhythm and Blues

Original rhythm and blues took the harmonic vocabulary of blues, sped it up, and added horn sections, piano, and a strong backbeat for dancing. Tempos ran from slow ballads to driving boogies above 130 BPM. Vocals drew on gospel — call-and-response, shouted improvisation, melisma — and were typically the lead element over a shuffling rhythm section. Saxophone often served as a secondary lead voice. The style was the dominant African-American popular music between roughly 1945 and 1960, eventually splitting into soul, rock and roll, and what would become contemporary R&B.

Billboard adopted rhythm and blues in 1949 as a replacement for the previously used race records category. The music coalesced in Black urban centers — Memphis, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles — drawing on jump blues, boogie-woogie, big-band swing, and gospel. Labels including Chess, Atlantic, King, and Specialty built rosters of artists like Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, and Ray Charles. By the late 1950s, the music's faster, more polished variants were being marketed to white teenagers as rock and roll, while the gospel-infused side moved toward soul.

Listen for the backbeat — the snare hitting hard on beats two and four — which became the rhythmic foundation of almost everything that followed. The piano and horns trade short phrases while the vocalist lays back slightly behind the beat, a swing-derived approach. Ray Charles's What'd I Say (1959) shows the gospel-secular fusion in compressed form.

Start with Ray Charles's What'd I Say (1959). For an earlier female vocalist, Ruth Brown's Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean (1953); for the soul transition, Sam Cooke's You Send Me (1957).

The same artists were often released to two markets — R&B charts for Black audiences, pop charts for white audiences — sometimes with separate recordings or remixes. The industry's racial segmentation, not just musical taste, helped define what counted as R&B in the first place.