The second part of this series about the birth of dicso explores the beginnings of R&B as we know it.

The nature of popular music in America changed significantly after the war years, keeping pace with its listener's hearts and pocketbooks: Artists began collecting royalties from both live and pre-recorded performances for the first time after the American Federation of Musicians strike in 1942.

One of the more unfortunate legacies of the strike was the subsequent decrease in commercial and jukebox exposure for artists due to the new fees and licensing. The end of the war brought higher prices for the bands themselves in the form of gasoline, hotels and new members. Equipment enhancements and record pressing had additionally taken a back seat to rationing, so those bands that weren't overseas experienced a lull in innovation and eventual loss of focus. 1946 saw the mass departure of Swing's biggest leaders, including Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown and Benny Goodman.

Pop music began to mirror America's longing for distant lovers overseas and its empty dancehalls, pushing the ballad into the spotlight. The once crucial brass section cut its bold shouts in favor of wails and teary strings. Big bands of all compositions felt the pinch in recording, producing and touring and trimmed the fat of extra members to increase mobility. Stripped to the acoustic and physical bare minimum, most groups began to focus on the vocalist to carry the weight of the tune. Crooners like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra represented the new sentimentality of commercial music.

Black legacy musicians from the Big Band era regrouped in Harlem to push jazz to the next level, unencumbered by touring schedules, bandleaders and expectant audiences. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk collaborated with other early jazz masters to create the new sound: Be-Bop. "Bop" was instrumentally pared down compared to earlier forms of jazz, but was the most rhythmically sophisticated to date. The bands were generally built around a couple of horns, a stand-up bass and a drum kit with brushes as well as sticks. Each instrument carried it's own rhythm, converging only at random points unrelated to standard climaxes and breaks. Dancing audiences found the music to be too textured for dancing, so an elite group of devoted listeners formed around the groove and it's messengers. Be-Bop was America's first experience with the concept of Cool, and the original IDM. The studied inaccessibility of the music was the reflected in the image of its creators. With their impeccably elegant clothing, dark glasses, and elusive slang, Boppers like Dizzy became demigods to urban white and black youth alike.

Older, mainstream black taste celebrated the roots of its original music, rejecting the string-backed popular ballads for blues vocals with jazz backing. This style grew exponentially with the wide-scale migration of Negroes to Northern and Midwestern cities. The term "Rhythm and Blues" was coined in 1947 by Jerry Wexler as a replacement for the term "race records" during a reorganization of the Billboard charts. Artists such as Louis Jordan (Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens) and Joe Williams (Goin' Back to Chicago) presented velvety tales of burgeoning city life to the half million blacks that migrated north during the decade, backed by smaller big bands like the Count Basie Orchestra. Bluesmen John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson also hopped the train north and found the same success they had back home waiting for them at the station. New jobs and opportunities called for celebration, and the "Boogie Chillun" went crazy for these new "jump blues". The sound of R&B in 1950 had only tenuous links to disco, but the emphasis on narrative vocals, carefree themes and experimentation with blues' 12-bar structure would remain through the next 30 years.

R&B's new talents were introduced on a one-hit basis, as were the earlier heroes of the juke joints. Orchestra talents like Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole enjoyed the promotion of their large sponsors Decca, Capitol and MGM as house bands and headliners for their "sepia" divisions. Less popular artists were incubated by an increasingly large number of independent record labels housed in the Los Angeles area. The talent came from back East, but many of R&B's biggest fans were the black GI's who remained after the war to create a new homeland in Southern California. Jewish venture capitalists seized the opportunity to invest in the West coast R&B sound, sensing an undiscovered treasure and relieved of the racial barriers erected by the Wall Street banking establishment.

Family staffed labels such as Atlantic, Chess, and Imperial were joined by Don Robey's black owned Peacock in 1952. Robey was a figure larger than life, sort of a Suge Knight of his time. Talent agencies, nightclubs, security, transportation and artists were all under his occasionally shady touch. Musicians began to receive advances and royalties with some frequency, and began to see more of the fruit of their labor, although many fell into the pit of bad contracts, desperate friends and flashy Cadillacs. The labels, for their part, began to send some of their biggest white fans as promoters to record stores and radio stations. The first waves of integration washed up on the shores of radio. For their efforts, the DIY aesthetic of early R&B labels ensured the constant production of independent dance music through the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Now, we begin to see the early efforts of Martin and Block come full circle, as integrated radio transforms the deejay into missionary.

A tremendous number of Negro achievements in the arts and sciences during the early 50's resulted in wide-scale white curiosity about the race as a whole for the first time. Corporate America struck first, seeing an entirely new marketing demographic and profit opportunities that they had been unwilling to tap into before. A young writer named Alex Haley wrote a piece for the mainstream Harper's magazine that gave them the key to the door. Titled "Black Radio", it expounded on the jobs, marketing and branding opportunities and community exposure that were waiting to be taken advantage of. The advertising dollars soon poured in, creating new black radio stations as well as integrating some of the older white ones.

While blacks were denied management positions and the most coveted airtime, as deejays they brought the newest R&B plates and the ability to speak to the community in a language they could understand, gaining the utmost loyalty of their listeners. It was this use of language that distinguished an announcer from a Personality. Some black deejays made efforts to make their voices as racially antiseptic as possible to gain maximum exposure or to satisfy management, but those that pushed the envelope changed the art form forever. Infused with the latest Be-Bop slang and the storytelling traditions of the Negro race, deejays like Chicago's Al Benson (the Midnight Gambler) could drive a neighborhood into madness over any product or track that crossed his slippery tongue. New York's Jocko Henderson, with his "Great gugga mugga shooga booga", and a collective of jocks nicknamed the "Original 13" succeeded Benson and laid the foundations for Dub. Re-cueing, exclamatory voiceovers and multiple plays only added to the hype and potential of a track by featuring its best parts.

There were no unions in radio at that time, and the deejays themselves were responsible for talent scouting, multiple shows, and marketing on meager salaries with little opportunity for advancement and thick glass ceilings. Payola was the norm for introducing new R&B throughout the 50's, and possessed as much influence as the deejays' own discoveries. Business practices aside, when larger stations saw the profits and attention generated from R&B programming, they rushed to hire white deejays with a "black" sound to promote white versions of the hits to the main audience and gain black listeners. In 1954, Dewey Phillips of WHBG debuted Elvis Presley's first single "That's All Right" from Sun records in Memphis. The rest is 'his-story'.

Luckily, technology came to the rescue of R&B before it's popular demise. In the early 1950's, Jesse Stone of the now major Atlantic record label encouraged his R&B talent to concentrate on a dynamic, forceful rhythm section as an alternative to bold vocals and horns. His tours of Southern juke joints convinced him that rhythm would propel the music into the future. Les Fender's invention of the electric bass guitar in 1954 couldn't have come at a better time. The force of the current behind the bass guitar alone brought it instantly to the forefront of any composition, and the R&B community was abruptly smitten. The youth, always first to grasp and employ the newest technologies, strapped on the bass, cranked up the tempo and sped straight on into Soul. Rhythm based up-tempo would be the wizardry that created an entire dance culture from a few brilliant tunes.

Sources:

Books:
George, Nelson, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (Penguin, 1988)

Web sites:
The R&B Highway: http://members.aol.com/rnbhighway/journey.htm

The R&B Music Primer: http://www.rhythmandtheblues.org.uk/pdhist.shtml

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