29 July 2008

Rhythm & Blues: From Jump Blues to Doo-Wop

Postwar urban and gospel inflected recordings grow in popularity

Chuck Berry broke racial barriers hits like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Maybellene.”

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

Fats Domino’s hits include “Blueberry Hill” and “Ain’t That a Shame.”

R&B, as the “rhythm and blues” genre came to be known, was a loose cluster of styles, rooted in southern folk traditions and shaped by the experience of returning military personnel and hundreds of thousands of black Americans who had migrated to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles during and just after World War II.

The top R&B recordings of the late 1940s and early 1950s included swing-influenced “jump bands,” Tin Pan Alley-style love songs performed by crooners, various styles of urban blues, and gospel-influenced vocal harmony groups. The reappearance of small independent record labels provided an outlet for performers who were ignored by major record companies. The development of portable tape recorders made record producers and studio owners out of entrepreneurs who could not previously have afforded the equipment necessary to produce master recordings. They visited nightclubs to find new talent, hustled copies of their records to local record store owners, and attempted to interest a major label in a particular recording or artist with crossover potential. By 1951 there were over 100 independent labels slugging it out for a piece of the R&B market.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]