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.