Up to this point we've talked about the growth of mainstream pop music in the period up to 1955. And we've talked about the development of country music up to 1955 as well and the establishment of Nashville, Tennessee as as the home of country and western music. Bringing together country and western, and launching one of the first big stars of country music. Hank Williams in the early, late 1940s, early 1950s. We now turn to the third style that I promised at the very beginning of this series, and that is the music of rhythm and blues. Now, the first thing I think it's important to say about rhythm and blues is that Rhythm and blues is a way of describing a market category. It's a way of describing a demographic. Rhythm and blues was thought of as music made by, and consumed by, African Americans. It was music from and for black listeners and musicians. but inside rhythm and blues, there are there's a lot of different kind of music going on. So, you know, as a, as a sort of, you know, musicologist it isn't so much a it, it is a stylistic label, but it's a troubled one because its, its first definition seems to have to do with who's making it and who's consuming it, as opposed to the musical qualities that it has. Now of course, the musical qualities are, are consistent and it is kind of stylistic, but it's just important to say that that's a lot broader category than you might think just by looking at them. Now, we've talked about the different charts and the different markets. And when we get into 1945 and forward, we're going to think a lot about how there were different charts that were for rhythm and blues music, for country and Western music, and for mainstream pop. Mainstream pop being, by far the biggest market sort of the, sort of the kind of the normative market, mainstream pop, and these two other niche markets. country and western music, which was originally called Hillbilly Records and rhythm and blues, which were really called, which were originally called Race Records. and, it's important, I think, to point out that people will say well, there's, there's a certain amount of racism involved in this, and the truth is, I think, that in fact there was, there was a lot of racism going on in the country, but my experience is that people in the music business don't care so much about white, or black, or brown, what they care about is green. They will take anybody's money, and they'll make it wherever they can. And so I don't think the music business is responsible for fostering this racism. But it certainly is accepting it and trying to exploit it for all it's worth by separating these charts out. And so rhythm and blues is, is separated out, maybe a little bit more, well, probably a lot more drastically than country and western is that we were talking about just now. But, it is important to understand that these charts were divided for the merchant's use and not really for the fans. That is, when we start to talk originally about magazines like Billboard and Cashbox, those weren't designed for fans to sort of buy and sort of see what the big hits were. They were designed for people who ran jukeboxes or eventually, for people who ran radio stations, for people who ran record stores, so they could know what records were hot, so they could make sure they had the records that everybody seemed to want to buy. Had plenty of those on hand, but weren't stuck with a bunch of ones that nobody wanted anymore. And so you had a service that tried to provide a kind of a predictor, almost like a kind of a weather service for sales and that's really what that was about. And so, you know, from a pragmatic point of view, if you're, if you're in a black neighborhood and you're selling R&B records and you, there's probably no likelihood that white musicians and white customers are going to come in to buy records from you, you don't really need to know what it is their going to like because you don't need to have that product on hand and vice verse. As rhythm and blues starts to emerge from our, in our historical consciousnesses in the early 20th century, maybe one of the first important figures we're going to think about is a guy by the name of WC Handy who sold a lot of sheet music pre-World War One with songs like Memphis Blues and Saint Louis Blues. But the first blues recordings we have date from the 1920s and the biggest star of the 1920s, it's clear in blues music is a singer by the name of Bessie Smith. Her Down Hearted Blues From 1923 sold over a million records. Bessie's performances are maybe, if you don't know her music, they're a little bit more polished than you might think would come from blues artists of the 1920s. We're so used to thinking of Delta Blues and those, those, those recordings being a lot more sort of raw and rugged. But these are, these are these are very and there is some very sophisticated singing, and there's, you know, not much of the usual sort of guitar playing stuff on it. But in the wake of, of Bessie Smith's tremendous success people sort of think we'll let's, let's go out in the country and see if we can find people who, who can do this blues music, and we can maybe sell some records. and so, one of the most famous of these musicians who's discovered during this period is Robert Johnson, another one of these guys who died very young. died in 1938 at a at a very young age. He's mostly associated with Delta or Rural blues. Blues that came from the Mississippi Delta era, area, or, or, or from places in the South that were not particularly built up or urban. the music will often feature one singer, maybe there will be another person along, with that, that singer, playing the guitar, maybe playing another instrument, or banging, tapping their foot on the floor. And so, that music tends to be very loose. If a singer wants to add an extra beat or an extra measure or whatever like that. No problem, they can just do it, as as the spirit moves them. They don't have to worry about coordinating with other musicians. So it's a very, expressive, sometimes very raw, sound, And so Robert Johnson is really the, the true master of that. Probably the song you need to know, at least the one that hooks up mostly with what we're going to talk about in the history of rock, is his Cross Roads Blues of 1936. Eric Clapton and Cream covered that tune in the late 1960s. And Eric Clapton in many ways is responsible for bringing to our attention the fantastic recordings of, of Robert Johnson. Most of them that were done in a couple of years. Right there, around 1936, there's also kind of a fun story, which is almost certainly not true, that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil, to get his fantastic guitar playing skills, he met him at the crossroads and made a deal with the Devil. Anyway, colorful story but I don't think, it probably worked out like that. At least, we have no historical evidence to prove that it's true. As we go onto the 1940's and the war years. Jump Blues starts to come in. Jump Blues is a form of big band jazz. This, what's happens when you can't afford to bring all those horn players around on the road anymore and you break it down to just a couple of horn players. and you get this sort of Jump Blues style. And nobody was better at jump blues during the 1940's than Louie Jordan and His Tympani Five. And here's another case of a black artist crossing over onto mainstream pop charts. those records of his Caldonia from 1945 and Choo Choo Ch'boogie from 1946 were big hits not only on the R&B charts but also on the mainstream pop charts. Well, in the next video, we'll see what happened with R&B in the time after World War II. [BLANK_AUDIO]
