The new genres of the 1940s

During and after WWII,  three new styles of music popped up starting in early 1940’s that were made up of small combos of five to eight musicians in response to the need to cut costs. These three were “be bop jazz”, “country & western (C&W)” and “rhythm and blues (R&B). Music was now becoming more and more urban in nature, it was amplified and electrified. The role of the rhythm section changed to a back-beat way (of life) which inherently fueled the dance.

In jazz, most of the big bands of the swing era became too “big” to maintain economically and financially and gave way to smaller combo groups of five or six performers in the new Jazz genre of “Be-Bop”. This pairing down of the band technique would allow for a rhythm section (piano, bass, drums) and maybe two horns (sax or trumpet) who then, went well beyond the average parameters of musical expression. Be bop was a very esoteric form of jazz, starting a new divergent stream of jazz within jazz (and may have helped accelerate swing jazz’s demise), but the music of be bop was music made to listen to, not necessarily to dance to.

The next genre was combined from several genres from the south and from the west of the United States, several styles of music were combined and were re-marketed as “Country and Western” or (C&W). A catch all phrase, it was used to describe the many divergent and similar styles of indigenous American folk music like “hillbilly”, “honky-tonk”, “blue grass”, “Delta Blues” “Western Swing” and “Western Boogie”, music from the Appalachain down to Georgia; and the swamp; the deep south; all the way to Texas and beyond to southern California; from cities like Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, just to name a few.

The third new major genre, like it’s white cousin C&W, was also made up of several merging genres, combining a mixing of “boogie woogie” jazz, “jump blues”, “gospel” and “electric blues” style, coming out of Chicago and other mid-western cities like Memphis and St. Louis. All of this predominantly black music was then marketed for black people, it was all combined under the heading of “Rhythm & Blues” music or R&B for short. The music was very danceable, up-beat and good humored and would start an almost revolution for the next two decades.

Initially, there were many great R&B bands supporting the great jump blues shouters of the late Forties like Big Joe Turner, and bands headed by Count Basie and Louis Jordan. But then, later, the birth of a vocal R&B genre later to be known as “doo-wop”, would come of age and would go on to be one of the most successful forms of the R&B category and be a vital and essential component of rock & roll.

Race Records

Before the 1940s, throughout the heydays of the 1920s and into the 1930s “race records” were available from many ethnic groups. Anything from Pop Tunes & Vaudeville, to comedy routines, Blue Grass (“hillbilly”), The Blues along with Inner City ethnic recordings from cultures as diverse as “Indian”, “Klezmer”, “Polish”, “Irish”, “Congo”, “Caribbean”, “Spanish Tinge” and even “Chinese”, were available on record. You name it, they had it.

Many of the recordings in the race records category between the two world wars (1920-1941) were filled with dialogue and comedy in one way or another that was blatantly racist, demeaning, and insulting to many of the ethnic groups living in America, hence the name “race records”. Unlike the “politically correct” 21st century, these kinds of records were acceptable in the backward and bigoted under currents of social mores pre-1940s white American society, where racism was a mater of course. Gradually, by the end of WWII, race records were becoming records of the new musical genres of Bop, C&W and R&B, rather than comedic dialogue recordings.

Race Records

Before the 1940s, throughout the heydays of the 1920s and into the 1930s “race records” were available from many ethnic groups. Anything from Pop Tunes & Vaudeville, to comedy routines, Blue Grass (“hillbilly”), The Blues along with Inner City ethnic recordings from cultures as diverse as “Indian”, “Klezmer”, “Polish”, “Irish”, “Congo”, “Caribbean”, “Spanish Tinge” and even “Chinese”, were available on record. You name it, they had it.

Many of the recordings in the race records category between the two world wars (1920-1941) were filled with dialogue and comedy in one way or another that was blatantly racist, demeaning, and insulting to many of the ethnic groups living in America, hence the name “race records”. Unlike the “politically correct” 21st century, these kinds of records were acceptable in the backward and bigoted under currents of social mores pre-1940s white American society, where racism was a mater of course. Gradually, by the end of WWII, race records were becoming records of the new musical genres of Bop, C&W and R&B, rather than comedic dialogue recordings.

The label “Rhythm and Blues”

Clever marketers started keeping charts like Billboard magazine’s “Harlem Hit Parade” in 1942 to keep track of black records marketed to black buyers. What was previously called “race records”, after WWII, were now called R&B records that were considered to be objectionable in part, R-rated or too “racey” for regular pop mainstream.

The term Rhythm & Blues or R&B for short, was coined by Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine in 1948. The term was used as a catch all phrase for the kind of black music that had a more street or “ghetto” feel to it and made up predominantly by “rural blues”, “gospel”, “jazz – boogie woogie style”, and the new urban blues like “Chicago blues” and “jump blues” and even some “western swing” which all utilize that strong “Back-Beat”.

The new technology

The Electric Guitar

Just as had been throughout the jazz age, there was a lot of shifting of the sands early on in the new genres. The music industry and the technology made some adjustments. A good example is the new use of the “electric guitar”, made popular and recorded by Charlie Christian starting in 1938. Before that time, you could hardly hear an acoustic guitar in recordings because they were out-blasted by the horns. In the 1940s the electric guitar began to be a “lead” instrument like a trumpet or saxophone. T-Bone Walker influenced a young generation of Chicago electrified blues guitarists on the usage of this new electrified “blues” genre who in turn would influence a generation of rock & roll guitarists in the fifties.

The Jukebox

After the war, the jukebox industry was re-instated which energized the record buying industry. Jukeboxes were responsible for a spike in record buying in the post WWII years and began replacing live music and the “player pianos” (self playing mechanized pianos) first in “juke-joints” or bars and clubs, and then eventually in diners.

The late 1940s saw the technology begin to advance enough to allow for better recordings that could now capture the exhilarating sounds of a live performance with all its volume levels. Also, audio fidelity and authenticity and timbre of the sound characteristics all had improved in the years following the war.

Marketing and Promotion: the Music Industry in the 40s

R&B came into America’s consciousness because of this new, fresh, strong sounding back-beat that made one want to get up and dance. Many of Louis Jordan’s hits had very catchy, dance-able back-beats peppered with lyrics, themes and topics that were considered R rated at the time in the forties.

Because of the times and because of the attitude towards race records, Louis Jordan, like Cab Calloway before him, was able to escape great controversy over the lyrical topics then they would today. This was all good for a time after the war, that is until the good old, all-American white kids started listening to these “objectionable” race records of R&B and/or Be-Bop jazz in the early 1950s.

America was changing rapidly in the years of post WWII, the lifestyles of middle-class America had more leisure time and more spending money than their parents, who were used to a more conservative lifestyle. Because of this “new way of life”, the youth had more time to explore more creative and alternative lifestyles. This led to the rise of the creative and philosophical “Beatnicks” in the late 1940s and the “rebels without a cause” in the 1950s,

The music industry also started to become a big money-making industry with more investment in promotion and marketing. in the early 50s, as time went on, more and more black artists were getting hits on popular radio and jukeboxes record sales.

It’s funny how quickly the color green (money) would be a catalyst to change corporate America’s practice of excluding artists because of race, starting in the 1950s the record industry would exploit black artists. The record companies would make these new black artists household names while ripping them off out of contractual, publishing and royalty rights.

In the years after WWII, popular music, by far, was dominated by white artists. When it came to mass exposure, promotions and sales, it was with white performers who got preference. Artists such as Bing Crosby, Perry Como, the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kay and Dinah Shore plus the popular swing bands like Glen Miller’s & Tommy Dorsey’s big bands dominated the charts. They were all in the top ten pop charts, had the most public exposure, sold the most records in the late forties and they were all white.

There was only Nat “King” Cole, the Inks Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on the mainstream popular charts early on in the 1940s along with later artists Billy Eckstein and Sarah Vaughan in the very early 1950s. The only other black acts to make it big on the charts in the 1940’s were early R&B bands headed by Count Basie & his Orchestra, Cab Calloway and his band and Louis Jordan & his Tympani Five.

Many talented black artists and performers were shut out of this exposure unless there turned out to be a lot of interest in sales but these same black artists would be exploited and underpaid anyway. In the 1940s, black jazz artists still had to enter a venue from the side or back alley and were denied the dignity of being able to just walk through “the front door” of a venue, under a marquee with their name on it!.

Much of showbiz in the standards era and the jazz era (1920-1960) was of a very rigid, restricted and regulated nature. Rules where written as well as unwritten in both music and musical arrangement, lyrical content and themes as well as what was perceived to be acceptable in “civilized” society. The sensors were hyper-sensitive and ruled with an iron fist.

Many of the unwritten rules regarded race and gender, such as the rule to exclude blacks from speaking parts and leading roles; no mixing of the races;  the exclusion and/or exploitation of woman; the unequal pay for women and minorities and other shameful acts of prejudice were rampant in the show business of the forties and the fifties.

R&B Crossover of 1955 and 1956

The dominance of popular music in the 1950s started to lose it’s popularity to the new genre of rock & roll first in 1955. In that year, Fats Domino would be the first R&B act to get a top ten hit with “Ain’t It A Shame” (the Dominoes were the first vocal R&B act to break into the mainstream charts in 1951 with “Sixty Minute Man”) , and then later in February of 1956, the Platters would be the first R&B act to get a number one hit on the on the Billboard mainstream pop charts with “The Great Pretender”.