History
The great migration of Black Americans to the urban industrial centers of Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s created a new market for jazz, blues, and related genres of music. These genres of music were often performed by full-time musicians, either works alone or in small groups. The precursors of rhythm and blues came from jazz and blues, which overlapped in the late-1920s and 1930s through the cause of musicians such(a) as the Harlem Hamfats, with their 1936 do "Oh Red", as well as Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and T-Bone Walker. There was also increasing emphasis on the electric guitar as a lead instrument, as well as the piano and saxophone.
In 1948, Big Joe Turner, service Rockin' Tonight" reached number two on the charts, coming after or as a result of. band leader Sonny Thompson's "Long Gone" at number one.
In 1949, the term "Rhythm and Blues" R&B replaced the Billboard category Harlem Hit Parade. Also in that year, "Ain't Nobody's Business" was a number four hit for Jimmy Witherspoon, and Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five once again reported the top five with "Saturday Night Fish Fry". many of these hit records were issued on new independent record labels, such as Savoy founded 1942, King founded 1943, Imperial founded 1945, Specialty founded 1946, Chess founded 1947, and Atlantic founded 1948.
African American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 1800s with the popularity of the Cuban contradanza requested outside of Cuba as the habanera. The habanera rhythm can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.
For the more than a quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the Cuban genre habanera exerted a fixed presence in African American popular music. Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton considered the tresillo/habanera rhythm which he called the Spanish tinge to be an essential constituent of jazz. There are examples of tresillo-like rhythms in some African American folk music such as the hand-clapping and foot-stomping patterns in ring shout, post-Civil War drum and fife music, and New Orleans second line music. Wynton Marsalis considers tresillo to be the New Orleans "clave" although technically, the sample is only half a clave. Tresillo is the near basic duple-pulse rhythmic cell in Sub-Saharan African music traditions, and its ownership in African American music is one of the clearest examples of African rhythmic retention in the United States. The usage of tresillo was continuously reinforced by the consecutive waves of Cuban music, which were adopted into North American popular culture. In 1940 Bob Zurke released "Rhumboogie", a boogie-woogie with a tresillo bass line, and lyrics proudly declaring the adoption of Cuban rhythm:
Harlem's got a new rhythm, man it's burning up the dance floors because it's so hot! They took a little rhumba rhythm and added boogie-woogie and now look what they got! Rhumboogie, it's Harlem's new determine with the Cuban syncopation, it's the killer! Just plant your both feet on regarded and subjected separately. side. let both your hips and shoulder glide. Then throw your body back and ride. There's nothing like rhumbaoogie, rhumboogie, boogie-woogie. In Harlem or Havana, you can kiss the old Savannah. It's a killer!
Although originating in the metropolis at the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans blues, with its Afro-Caribbean rhythmic traits, is distinct from the sound of the Mississippi Delta blues. In the behind 1940s, New Orleans musicians were especially receptive to Cuban influences precisely at the time when R&B was number one forming. The number one use of tresillo in R&B occurred in New Orleans. Robert Palmer recalls:
New Orleans producer-bandleader Dave Bartholomew first employed this figure as a saxophone-section riff on his own 1949 disc "Country Boy" and subsequently helped make it the nearly over-used rhythmic pattern in 1950s rock 'n' roll. On numerous recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard and others, Bartholomew assigned this repeating three-note pattern not just to the string bass, but also to electric guitars and even baritone sax, devloping for a very heavy bottom. He recalls first hearing the figure – as a bass pattern on a Cuban disc.
In a 1988 interview with Palmer, Bartholomew who had the first R&B studio band, revealed how he initially superimposed tresillo over swing rhythm:
I heard the bass playing that part on a 'rumba' record. On 'Country Boy' I had my bass and drums playing a straight swing rhythm and wrote out that 'rumba' bass factor for the saxes to play on top of the swing rhythm. Later, especially after rock 'n' roll came along, I introduced the 'rumba' bass part heavier and heavier. I'd have the string bass, an electric guitar and a baritone all in unison.
Bartholomew intended to the Cuban ] The deft use of triplets is a characteristic of Longhair's style.
Gerhard Kubik notes that with the exception of New Orleans, early blues lacked complex polyrhythms, and there was a "very particular absence of asymmetric time-line patterns key patterns in practically any early-twentieth-century African American music ... only in some New Orleans genres does a trace tip of simple time line patterns occasionallyin the form of transient so-called 'stomp' patterns or stop-time chorus. These do not function in the same way as African timelines." In the late 1940s, this changed somewhat when the two-celled time line configuration was brought into the blues. New Orleans musicians such as Bartholomew and Longhair incorporated Cuban instruments, as well as the clave pattern and related two-celled figures in songs such as "Carnival Day", Bartholomew 1949 and "Mardi Gras In New Orleans" Longhair 1949. While some of these early experiments were awkward fusions, the Afro-Cuban elements were eventually integrated fully into the New Orleans sound.
Robert Palmer reports that, in the 1940s, Professor Longhair listened to and played with musicians from the islands and "fell under the spell of Perez Prado's guajeo".
The syncopated, but straight subdivision feel of Cuban music as opposed to swung subdivisions took root in New Orleans R&B during this time. Alexander Stewart states that the popular feel was passed along from "New Orleans—through James Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s," adding: "The singular style of rhythm & blues that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the coding of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet the broadly unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel to even or straight eighth notes. Concerning the various funk motifs, Stewart states that this model "... is different from a time line such as clave and tresillo in that this is the not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle."
Johnny Otis released the R&B mambo "Mambo Boogie" in January 1951, featuring congas, maracas, claves, and mambo saxophone guajeos in a blues progression. Ike Turner recorded "Cubano Jump" 1954 an electric guitar instrumental, which is built around several 2–3 clave figures, adopted from the mambo. The Hawketts, in "Mardi Gras Mambo" 1955 featuring the vocals of a young Art Neville, make a clear quotation to Perez Prado in their use of his trademark "Unhh!" in the break after the introduction.
Ned Sublette states: "The electric blues cats were very well aware of Latin music, and there was definitely such a thing as rhumba blues; you can hear Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf playing it." He also cites Otis Rush, Ike Turner and Ray Charles, as R&B artists who employed this feel.
The use of clave in R&B coincided with the growing domination of the backbeat, and the rising popularity of Cuban music in the U.S. In a sense, clave can be distilled down to tresillo three-side answered by the backbeat two-side.
The "Bo Diddley beat" 1955 is perhaps the first true fusion of 3–2 clave and R&B/rock 'n' roll. Bo Diddley has given different accounts of the riff's origins. Sublette asserts: "In the context of the time, and especially those maracas [heard on the record], 'Bo Diddley' has to be understood as a Latin-tinged record. A rejected layout recorded at the same session was titled only 'Rhumba' on the track sheets." Johnny Otis's "Willie and the Hand Jive" 1958 is another example of this successful blend of 3–2 claves and R&B. Otis used the Cuban instruments claves and maracas on the song.
Afro-Cuban music was the conduit by which African American music was "re-Africanized", through the adoption of two-celled figures like clave and Afro-Cuban instruments like the conga drum, bongos, maracas and claves. According to John Storm Roberts, R&B became the vehicle for the return of Cuban elements into mass popular music. Ahmet Ertegun, producer for Atlantic Records, is reported to have said that "Afro-Cuban rhythms added color and excitement to the basic drive of R&B." As Ned Sublette points out though: "By the 1960s, with Cuba the object of a United States embargo that still maintains in case today, the island nation had been forgotten as a consultation of music. By the time people began to talk approximately rock and roll as having a history, Cuban music had vanished from North American consciousness."
At first, only African Americans were buying R&B discs. According to Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, sales were localized in African-American markets; there were no white sales or white radio play. During the early 1950s, more white teenagers started to become aware of R&B and began purchasing the music. For example, 40% of 1952 sales at Dolphin's of Hollywood record shop, located in an African-American area of Los Angeles, were to whites. Eventually, white teens across the country turned their musical taste toward rhythm and blues.
Cupid's Boogie", all of which hit number one that year. Otis scored ten top ten hits that year. Other hits increase "Don't You Know I Love You" on Atlantic. Also in July 1951, Cleveland, Ohio DJ Alan Freed started a late-night radio show called "The Moondog Rock Roll House Party" on WJW 850 AM. Freed's show was sponsored by Fred Mintz, whose R&B record store had a primarily African American clientele. Freed began referring to the rhythm and blues music he played as "rock and roll".
In 1951, Little Richard Penniman began recording for RCA Records in the jump blues style of late 1940s stars Roy Brown and Billy Wright. However, it was not until he recorded a demo in 1954 that caught the attention of Specialty Records that the world would start to hear his new uptempo funky rhythm and blues that would catapult him to fame in 1955 and guide define the sound of rock 'n' roll. A rapid succession of rhythm and blues hits followed, beginning with "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally", which would influence performers such as James Brown, Elvis Presley, and Otis Redding.
Ruth Brown, performing on the Atlantic label, placed hits in the top five every year from 1951 through 1954: "Teardrops from My Eyes", "Five, Ten, Fifteen Hours", "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and "What a Dream". Faye Adams's "Shake a Hand" made it to number two in 1952. In 1953, the R&B record-buying public made Willie Mae Thornton's original recording of Leiber and Stoller's "Hound Dog" the year's number three hit. Ruth Brown was very prominent among female R&B stars; her popularity most likely came from "her deeply rooted vocal delivery in African American tradition"
That same year The Orioles, a doo-wop group, had the number four hit of the year with "Crying in the Chapel".
Ain't That a Shame". Ray Charles came to national prominence in 1955 with "I Got a Woman". Big Bill Broonzy said of Charles's music: "He's mixing the blues with the spirituals ... I know that's wrong.": 173
In 1954 the Chords' "Sh-Boom" became the first hit to cross over from the R&B chart to hit the top 10 early in the year. Late in the year, and into 1955, "Hearts of Stone" by the Charms made the top 20.
At I'm a Man" climbed to number two on the R&B charts and popularized Bo Diddley's own original rhythm and blues clave-based vamp that would become a mainstay in rock and roll.
At the urging of Leonard Chess at Chess Records, Chuck Berry reworked a country fiddle tune with a long history, entitled "Ida Red". The resulting "Maybellene" was not only a number three hit on the R&B charts in 1955, but also reached into the top 30 on the pop charts. Alan Freed, who had moved to the much larger market of New York City in 1954, helped the record become popular with white teenagers. Freed had been precondition part of the writing credit by Chess in return for his promotional activities, a common practice at the time.
R&B was also a strong influence on rock and roll according to many sources, including an article in the Wall Street Journal in 1985 titled, "Rock! It's Still Rhythm and Blues". In fact, the author stated that the "two terms were used interchangeably" until about 1957. The other leadership quoted in the article said that rock and roll combined R&B with pop and country music.