Stuff I wrote for my college campus newspaper - 20

R & B Music Demystified

By Sanket Kambli (with inputs from R & B aficionados)

Rhythm and Blues (R&B) was and still is a term used for a number of post-war American popular music forms. The term is credited to Jerry Wexler when he was editing the charts in Billboard magazine (1947). The term was used in the chart listings from 1949 onwards and the charts in question encompassed a number of contemporary forms that emerged around that time. R&B clearly has its origins in the secular folk music of the American black musician - the Blues. Blues is essentially about emotional expression and is predominantly a vocal medium - although there are many examples of blues instrumentals to refute this assertion, it is the singer who expresses the feelings of the blues; and there are a number of vocal techniques which are used to create the desired effects. There are of course, a range of blues instrumentations which accompany the central vocal performance (the bending of guitar strings, the classic bottleneck of so many of the great blues guitarists, the harmonica imitating the idioms of the human voice etc. etc.) and which clearly help to create the unique blues performance. It is clearly influenced by the work songs of the deep South, ragtime, church music and folk, even some forms of white popular music. The earliest and most frequently cited references to the form are to be found in the early 1900s and one of the early musical reference points is the W.C. Handy composition 'Memphis Blues'. Interestingly however, perhaps the first real blues recordings were made in the 1920s by the women of the blues, artists such as Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and the wonderful Bessie Smith. At this stage their performances were still largely based on their stage backgrounds, backed by the leading jazz players of the day. One of the critical external factors which moved the blues form forward was the economic migration from the American South to the cities of the North by millions of black southern workers. The blues went with them, adapting to a more sophisticated urban environment. The themes of blues songs understandably became more urban, the solo bluesman was joined by a number of other musicians and the blues combo was born. The piano, harmonica, bass and drums and, most importantly of all, the electric guitar became the cornerstone of a sound of increasing rhythmic intensity. The Blues has influenced just about everything musically which subsequently developed. Not least of which was the emergence of what came to be known as Rhythm and Blues. One of the major advances for the genre was the development of an R&B roster within Atlantic Records, where Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, along with engineer Tom Dowd proved instrumental in shifting R&B to a wider audience. They showcased some of the great female names in R&B, including Ruth Brown and Lavern Baker and, of course, they recorded one of the greats of modern black American music - the wonderful Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter and Chuck Willis throughout this period and such artists, along with the aforementioned Ray Charles, can now be seen as the clear links between the blues and R&B of the 1940s and 50s and the classic soul of the 1960s and early 70s. By the early 1960s rhythm and blues, in its narrowest sense, was an ageing and waning genre, certainly from the perspective of straight record sales. Soul was the term adopted to describe black popular music as it evolved from the 1950s into the heady heights of the 60s and through to the early 70s. There are those who saw it as simply a new term for Rhythm and Blues but this interpretation does miss one of the most important facets of the soul era - many of the great performers of the soul period did much to redefine R&B and black popular music in general, radically reinterpreting the sounds of the rhythm and blues pioneers. Critically many, though not all, found success with the white record buying public in a way that would have been unrecognized by the R&B pioneers of the 30s, 40s and even the 50s. Very simplistically put, if rock'n'roll can perhaps be seen as a white artist interpretation of rhythm and blues, then soul was quite clearly a return to the roots of black music - to the blues and in particular gospel and the church. The style retains similarities with the blues; the emotional honesty, the vocal intensity, the use of call and response, its glorious, in turn uplifting and heartwrenching, sometimes beautiful or achingly sad. Always true to a spirit, an emotional honesty, that is hard for other genres to match.

NOTE: - It's an attempt to illustrate the music, but it cannot lay claim to be a theoretical, academic or scholarly treatise.