Consisting of several hybrid styles of pre-World War II, World War II, and post-World War II black popular music, early rhythm & blues derived its essential elements from the spirituals, gospel, blues, ragtime, jazz, and jump blues. Initially called “race music,” rhythm & blues began as an umbrella term for all styles of African American music produced and performed by African American musicians exclusively for African American enjoyment and entertainment. Which is to say, as Paul Oliver pointed out in Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era (2006), Karl Miller observed in Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (2010), and Diane Pecknold and her colleagues emphasized in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (2013), just as pre-Civil Rights Movement American society was strictly segregated, so too was the pre-Civil Rights Movement American music industry. As will be discussed below, this sonic segregation created the very conditions under which African Americans were able to evolve the African American musical aesthetic virtually free from the “crossover” and “pop” pretensions of later forms of rhythm & blues (and rhythm & blues-derived) music (e.g., rock & roll, soul, funk, disco, techno, house, rap and neo-soul).
Evolving out of both the Northern bebop jazz and jump blues styles and the Southern boogie-woogie and Southern-inspired “electric” or “urban” blues styles, what came to be called “rhythm & blues” in the late 1940s was a sonic synthesis of arguably each and every major form of African American music from enslavement through to the post-World War II period. Similar to rap and other forms of hip hop music, classic rhythm & blues between 1945 and 1965 mixed or, rather, remixed African American musical history and culture, especially the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic. Like contemporary hip hop DJs and producers, early rhythm & blues musicians drew from disparate aspects of previous African American music, culture and politics, in this instance pre-rhythm & blues music, culture and politics, to create music and messages that reflected a rising racial, cultural, social and political consciousness that reached back to the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, and Harlem Renaissance, among other classical black popular movements.[7]
More than any previous form of black popular music, at its emergence rhythm & blues represented the wide range and wide reach of contemporary African American thought and culture. Borrowing the frenzy feeling and aural otherworldliness from the spirituals, the driving beat and droning sound from work songs, the blue notes (or “worried notes”) and tragicomic narrative tradition from the blues, the “exotic” and erotic sounds of the red light district from ragtime, and the jive talk and updated juke joint sounds from bebop and jump blues, early rhythm & blues symbolized the sound of African Americans in transition in mid-twentieth century America. In other words, early rhythm & blues was a music of motion, the sound of a people on the move—figuratively, physically, socially, and politically speaking.[8]
Retaining the up-tempo and energetic drive of jump blues, early rhythm & blues’ instrumentation was stripped-down and the overall emphasis was on the passionate performance of song lyrics, not improvisation (à la jump blues and slightly later bebop). In essence, it contained coded comedic or romantic lyrics sung over blues chord changes featuring an insistent backbeat. Distinguished from jump blues and bebop, early rhythm & blues openly embraced new technology, including the amplification and electrification of instruments. In fact, early rhythm & blues introduced and popularized the use of the electric bass in black popular music, in time evolving into a propulsive, dance beat-based music with unrelenting rhythms that seemed to perfectly mirror the migration, mores, and socio-political movements of mid-twentieth century black America. It is important here at the outset to emphasize that throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, the term “rhythm & blues” has two meanings, one musical and the other decidedly extra-musical.[9]
Consequently, this chapter will examine classic rhythm & blues in relationship to the overarching aesthetics and politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Going back to the notion that black popular music in essence serves as a barometer with which to measure the political, social, and cultural climate in black America, here classic rhythm & blues represents one of the major black popular music mouthpieces of the Civil Rights Movement. Frequently the connections between black popular music and black popular movements are downplayed and diminished in favor of ahistorical and apolitical analyses that whitewash black popular music and black popular movements.
By (re)contextualizing classic rhythm & blues and (re)placing it within the social, political, cultural, and musical world of its origins and early evolution we are provided with new musical and extra-musical—we might go so far to say, historical musicological, cultural musicological, and socio-political musicological—tools that could (and, indeed, should) aid us in our efforts to revive, re-historicize, and re-politicize classic rhythm & blues in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. Whether my readers concede that there are many extra-musical elements in black popular music or not, is all beside the point. What most of us can agree on is the fact that some aspects of at least some of the black popular music produced and performed during the Civil Rights Movement years, indeed, did build on and carry over the “we can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say” aesthetic that has been unambiguously traced back to the spirituals and the blues, as well as jazz and, as we witnessed in the prior chapter, gospel.
Classic rhythm & blues was more than merely young black folk’s foolishness in the face of American apartheid, which is not to say that it was not sometimes used as an escape or to express youthful energy and aspirations. However, if one really listens and hears classic rhythm & blues and carefully considers the racially segregated and economically exploitative conditions under which it emerged, it is almost impossible to miss its multiple meanings, double entendres, and cultural codes, as well as the fact that it was incredibly political by appearing to be apolitical and utterly unconnected to the Civil Rights Movement. Ingeniously, the pioneers and popularizers of rhythm & blues created a new and novel way to sing the blues and get the post-war world to listen and dance to both the new rhythms and the new blues of black America.
Jumpin’, Honkin’, and Shoutin’ the Blues: From Jump Blues to the Emergence of Rhythm & Blues
The emergence of rhythm & blues coincided with the World War II migration of African Americans from the South to the Northeast, Mid-West, and West to escape racial oppression and dehumanizing Jim Crow laws. African Americans also migrated from the South during this period in search of better economic, employment, and educational opportunities. Leaving their dream-destroying jobs as sharecroppers, general laborers, tenant farmers, washerwomen, and domestics, an estimated 5 million African Americans moved out of the South between 1940 and 1970.
However, these migrants quickly found out that the Northeast, Mid-West, and West were not the “promised land.” Although they did, for the most part, find higher-paying jobs, especially in the wartime industries, life in the new cities was generally just as racially segregated and devoid of civil rights as it was in the South. Anti-black racist redlining quarantined African Americans to segregated and impoverished communities (i.e., ghettos), effectively turning their dreams into seemingly never-ending nightmares as more and more black folk sought refuge from the new and unfamiliar forms of Northern racism in alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, gambling, and other illicit activities.[10]
By the end of the migration period between 1940 and 1970 African Americans had become a city-centered and urbanized population. In fact, as African Americans entered into the Black Power Movement years (circa 1965 to 1975), more than 80 percent lived in cities. 53 percent remained in the South. Furthermore, 40 percent lived in the North, and 7 percent in the West. It could probably go without saying that all of this would ultimately impact the origins and evolution of rap music, hip hop culture, and the Hip Hop Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[11]
From rhy
thm & blues forward, virtually each and every major form of black popular music has been city-centered. But, astute African American musicologists might also emphasize jazz’s city-centered roots, and that is whether we discuss its Southern city origins, New Orleans, or the Mid-Western city, Chicago, or Northeastern city, New York, of its early evolution. Unlike the spirituals and the blues, which captured and conveyed the sights, sounds, and sorrows of African American life during the enslavement, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction years, respectively, jazz, ragtime, and rhythm & blues reflected African Americans’ simultaneous post-enslavement segregation, industrialization, and urbanization. No longer predominantly widespread throughout the rural regions of the South, black popular music in the twentieth century symbolizes African Americans’ transition into urban environments, whether North, South, East, Mid-West, or West. However, even as they moved from rural regions to urban environments anti-black racism fiendishly followed them and reared its ugly head (and horns) at seemingly every twist and turn.[12]
Socially alienated, culturally isolated, and economically impoverished, segregated African American communities in the first half of the twentieth century created effervescent artistic practices and entertainment districts in virtually every major city in the United States. In the context of their new cities, the more than 5 million black migrants transformed old rural traditions into new urban forms of African American expression and entertainment, specifically with regard to the present discussion, inventing innovative musical styles predicated on a new city-centered set of criteria, cadences, and customs. The new city-centered aesthetic had a profound impact on African American music, as black musicians increasingly sought to incorporate the sights, sounds, sorrows, and celebrations of the city into their work. Hence, first urban blues, then jazz, and later rhythm & blues sonically signified city life, with its emphasis on regional customs, social conventions, local cuisine, communal rhythms, street noises, factory sounds and, of course, new technologies—especially, the amplification and electrification of instruments. It was this synthesis of African American folk music and folk culture with the then emerging African American urban music and urban culture that led black musicians to the intense period of experimentation that initially yielded bebop, jump blues, and ultimately birthed rhythm & blues (and rock & roll soon afterwards).
Classic rhythm & blues has a hallowed place in the history of modern African American music because it is fundamentally the musical foundation, the bedrock on which all modern black popular music has built its house or, rather, its houses—or maybe even its mansions. In other words, every major form of modern African American (or African American-derived) music, from rock & roll and soul to funk and disco, has utilized the innovations of early rhythm & blues as sonic paradigms and points of departure.[13] By critically exploring the origins and evolution of early rhythm & blues we are provided with a musical Rosetta Stone that will enable us to decipher the deep double entrendres and coded cultural messages buried beneath the basic structure of modern black popular music, many of which were, however unwittingly, inherited by early rock & roll. In fact, I am convinced that we will have a greater appreciation of, and be able to offer more contributions to, as well as more constructive criticisms of, post-Civil Rights Movement musics such as soul, funk, disco, rap, and neo-soul once we have a serious—as opposed to a superficial—sense of the history, culture, and struggles that coalesced to create the conditions under which rhythm & blues was pioneered and popularized. Needless to say, it is virtually impossible to fully understand early rhythm & blues without comprehending the ways in which it served as a harbinger and sonic symbol of the emergence, politics, and aesthetics of the Civil Rights Movement.
Where classic rhythm & blues represented the sonic landscape of African America between 1945 and 1965, the Civil Rights Movement represented the socio-political landscape of African America between 1945 and 1965. As argued in the foregoing chapter, African American music is more than merely music. It is also the spiritual, sexual, cultural, social, and political expression of an alienated and oppressed group who has historically had few other areas in which to fully express itself on its own terms. It is with this understanding that classic rhythm & blues may be interpreted or, rather, reinterpreted, as musical and spiritual, sexual, cultural, social, and political expression.
Moreover, when this line of logic is calmly conceded then it may also be openly acknowledged that classic rhythm & blues, along with its myriad extra-musical implications, has long served as a musical paradigm and a political point of departure for contemporary hip hop music: from neo-soul, commercial rap, conscious rap, and reggaeton to glitch hop, trip hop, krunk, snap music, and wonky music. Just as each of these musics express elements of the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of the diverse hip hop communities they were created in, likewise classic rhythm & blues conveys the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of the conditions under which, and the various communities in which it was created. In fact, where classic rhythm & blues may be understood to be musical and spiritual, sexual, cultural, social, and political expression, the Civil Rights Movement can be interpreted as a decade-long synthesis and translation of classic rhythm & blues’ extra-musical ethos into action, into collective struggle and radical political praxis via the mass meetings, prayer vigils, boycotts, marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration drives, and other protest activities that came to be the signatures of the Civil Rights Movement. And, indeed, as the hands of history have revealed, black folk sitting-in, registering to vote, marching, demonstrating, and protesting within the world of 1950s and 1960s America was nothing else if not “radical.”[14]
It may not be going too far afield to observe that even though most classic rhythm & blues scholars locate its origins in the rambunctious early rhythm & blues of Louis Jordan & the Tympany Five, who began performing and recording in 1938, it is equally important to acknowledge early rhythm & blues’ roots in the African American protest music tradition. Undoubtedly one of the finest protest songs ever produced was Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” recorded in 1939, the same year that saw the senseless violence of World War II begin (although the U.S. would not enter into the war until 1941). By observing rhythm & blues’ relationship with broader struggles for justice and social transformation in mid-twentieth century America we will be able to more easily comprehend the ways in which black popular music represents more than music to the communities, musicians, and audiences who invented and continue to evolve it. Hence, both Jordan and Holiday’s work hints at the hallmarks of not only early rhythm & blues, but of black popular music for the remainder of the twentieth century. With the work of Leslie Gourse (1997), Angela Davis (1998), David Margolick (2000, 2001), Farah Jasmine Griffin (2001, 2013), Stacy Jones (2007) and Evelyn Simien (2011), it is easy to understand how Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” unambiguously contributes to the black protest music tradition. However, a closer look at Jordan’s work demonstrates that he was much more than a jump blues “jive clown.”[15]
Over the years there has been a lot of ink spilled concerning the comedic nature of Jordan’s colorful narratives and performances. Without in anyway downplaying the freewheeling and outright fun-filled elements of his work, it is important not to lose sight of the undeniable fact that Louis Jordan was a serious musical and lyrical innovator. His songs were loaded with wry social commentary and coded cultural references. Interestingly, one of the most striking features of his slang-laden lyrics—as on his hit songs such as “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town,” “G. I. Jive,” “Caldonia,” “Buzz Me,” “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie,” “Ain’t That Just Like A Woman,” “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” “Boogie-Woogie Blue Plate,” “Beans and Cornbread,” “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” “Blue Light Boogie,” and “Weak-Minded Blues”—was the fact that he did not sing in the traditional sense but instead rendered his stories in an unusual rapid-fire, semi-sung, semi-spoken vocal style. Jordan’s rhyming semi-sung, semi-spoken
narration de-emphasized the lyrical melody while privileging highly syncopated phrasing and the percussive effects of alliteration and assonance. In other words, Louis Jordan arguably offered one of the earliest examples in American popular music of the slang-filled vocal stylings that eventually evolved into what we currently call rap music.
All of this means that rap music’s roots, at least partially, can be traced back to the music that Louis Jordan helped to popularize and eventually helped to evolve into early rhythm & blues: jump blues. Jump blues was essentially the late 1930s and early 1940s synthesis of blues and jazz. Many interpreted the term “jump blues” to mean “bluesy jazz” or, rather, “jazzy blues” because by the late 1930s and early 1940s blues and jazz were simply two sides of the same coin, and most black musicians blurred the lines between these genres by being adept at playing both styles. Other than its emphasis on an updated and heavier rhythmic conception of big band-based swing, jump blues was characterized by its boisterous vocalists, flamboyant performances, and frequently lighthearted songs about partying, dancing, drinking, and jiving. The emphasis on partying, dancing, drinking, and jiving in jump blues can be easily explained by seriously considering the conditions under which it was created, and black migrants’ cravings for an updated, city-centered juke joint experience. Which is also to say, jump blues emerged in racially oppressed and economically impoverished environments and, therefore, served as a kind of bridge music linking black life in the North and the South during a period of widespread musical and spiritual, sexual, cultural, social, and political transformation and transition in African America. Needless to say, ultimately what began as jump blues evolved into rhythm & blues in the mid-1940s.[16]
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