Dave’s Music Database: Louis Jordan, the Father of R&B, Is Born: July eight, 1908
Shuffle blues
Thus, the Who, though a quintessential mod rock band, marketed their early performances as “Maximum R&B” to attract an viewers. Although bands that followed this technology—John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Fleetwood Mac, for instance—referred to as themselves blues bands, rhythm and blues remained the rubric for the Animals, Them, the Pretty Things, and others. Today a band that advertises itself as rhythm and blues is sort of certainly following on this tradition somewhat than that of the early pioneers.
It is in this sense of a sad frame of mind that one of many earliest recorded references to “the blues” was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she “got here home with the blues” as a result of she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her melancholy and later famous a variety of songs, similar to Poor Rosy, that had been popular among the many slaves.
Blues has evolved from the unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves imported from West Africa and rural blacks into a wide variety of kinds and subgenres, with regional variations throughout the United States. Additionally, there are theories that the four-beats-per-measure construction of the blues might have its origins in the Native American custom of pow wow drumming. The blues form is a cyclic musical form during which a repeating development of chords mirrors the call and response scheme commonly present in African and African-American music.
Blues is an African-American music that traverses a variety of emotions and musical styles. “Feeling blue” is expressed in songs whose verses lament injustice or categorical eager for a greater life and lost loves, jobs, and money. But blues is also a raucous dance music that celebrates pleasure and success. Central to the concept of blues performance is the idea that, by performing or listening to the blues, one is able to overcome unhappiness and lose the blues. In 1949, then-Billboard magazine reporter Jerry Wexler (who later went on to turn into an influential music producer) created the term for Billboard to designate upbeat popular music carried out by African American artists that mixed Blues and Jazz.
Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Willie Johnson are examples of artists usually categorized as blues musicians for their music, though their lyrics clearly belong to spirituals. Tampa Red’s classic “Tight Like That” is a sly wordplay with the double meaning of being “tight” with someone coupled with a more salacious physical familiarity. Blues songs with sexually specific lyrics have been often known as soiled blues.
He undersold us.” Generous contracts however, the three partners turned staff for the primary time, answering to a board of administrators. The irony is that Ertegun, who resisted going corporate, ultimately thrived in that surroundings, his diplomatic pedigree serving to him navigate boardroom tradition. Wexler was the wordsmith, and revered and respected his favourite authors — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James M. Cain and John O’Hara — as he did his favorite jazz and bluesmen.
Perhaps probably the most visible example of the blues fashion of music in the late 20th century came in 1980, when Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi released the movie The Blues Brothers. The film drew most of the largest dwelling influencers of the rhythm and blues genre collectively, corresponding to Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker. The band shaped also began a successful tour under the Blues Brothers marquee.
However, it was not until he ready a demo in 1954, that caught the eye of Specialty Records, that the world would begin to hear his new, uptempo, funky rhythm and blues that might catapult him to fame in 1955 and assist define the sound of rock ‘n’ roll. A fast succession of rhythm and blues hits followed, starting with “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”, which might influence performers such as James Brown, Elvis Presley, and Otis Redding. Robert Palmer described it as “urbane, rocking, jazz-based music with a heavy, insistent beat”.
Johnny Otis launched the R&B mambo “Mambo Boogie” in January 1951, featuring congas, maracas, claves, and mambo saxophone guajeos in a blues development. Ike Turner recorded “Cubano Jump” an electric guitar instrumental, which is built round several 2–3 clave figures, adopted from the mambo. The Hawketts, in “Mardi Gras Mambo” (featuring the vocals of a younger Art Neville), make a clear reference to Perez Prado in their use of his trademark “Unhh!” within the break after the introduction. For the modern fashion of music also called “R&B”, see Contemporary R&B. For the Japanese television station that uses the abbreviation RNB, see Nankai Broadcasting.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
R&B lyrical themes often encapsulate the African-American expertise of pain and the quest for freedom and joy, as well as triumphs and failures in terms of relationships, economics, and aspirations. Rhythm and blues is a style of American music with roots in earlier African American types like jazz, blues, and gospel. The term was coined in the late Nineteen Fifties by Billboard Magazine author and Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler. The term “rhythm and blues” has undergone numerous shifts in meaning. Starting within the mid-Nineteen Fifties, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the time period “R&B” became used to discuss with music kinds that developed from and incorporated electrical blues, in addition to gospel and soul music.