Early Rhythm and Blues Page 2

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Blues-Based Styles:

The roots of rock 'n' roll are mainly to be found in rhythm and blues music, a term which, like the later expression rock 'n' roll, was coined to provide a convenient catch-all description for several distinct musical styles. Some of the styles of rhythm and blues shared musical features; all of them were produced for the Negro market.

Most of the styles contributed at least one singer to rock 'n' roll; all of them served as source material which in different circumstances was either used with care and understanding or simply plundered by singers (black and white) who had no direct experience of the background out of which the styles grew but who needed the music in order to satisfy the demand for rock 'n' roll.

The term rhythm and blues was first coined in the forties. Pre-war record companies had found it convenient to identify their blues product by calling it "race" music, and when Billboard began charting the sales of records in the Negro market in 1946, it used this term. By 1948, various companies, particularly the majors, were embarrassed by the expression, and they began using alternatives, including "ebony" (MGM), "sepia" (Decca and Capitol), and "rhythm and blues" (RCA-Victor). In June, 1949, Billboard, without any editorial comment, switched its own term to "rhythm and blues", and although as late as 1952, Decca was still advertising its product for the Negro market as "sepia" music, the expression "rhythm and blues" by then had become the generally accepted term to describe music and records for the Negro market.

In general, the expression was a satisfactory name for the music that had developed out of pre-war blues styles, for the most distinctive new element in this music was the addition of a dance rhythm. But "rhythm and blues" was a less satisfactory name for two of the most important later innovations of the period, the various group styles and the gospel-based styles, which were to become increasingly Popular as rock 'n' roll began to syphon off the unique spirit of Previous rhythm and blues forms. As a market category, however, "rhythm and blues" was simply a signal that the singer was black, recording for the black audience.*

Through the first three decades of the twentieth century the blues extended the difference established by black singers and musicians in New Orleans between the bands that played march and dance rhythms with several instruments and the singers who supplied their own accompaniment, usually on guitar. Of these two modes, the band music gradually subdivided into jazz (developed in most regions of the country by bands emphasizing instrumental improvization and harmony) and band blues (associated from the late twenties mainly with bands in the Southwest-Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and parts of Arkansas). At the same time, the self-accompanying blues singers who were first identified with small towns in the rural South began moving into larger towns and cities, and into the North, where they began collecting other musicians to support them, often on piano or harmonica.

Both kinds of blues singing-band- and self-accompanied-were radically affected by the improvements in electrical amplification introduced during the thirties, which enabled singers to be heard without shouting, and guitar-playing techniques to exploit the differences in tone and volume provided by electric amplification. The post-war blues styles of rhythm and blues were different from pre-war styles partly because of this difference in equipment; but they were also different because there were new experiences to be accounted for in music, and new moods that the blues had to accommodate. The singer (or musician) who grew up in the farm community life of Mississippi found a different kind of environment when he moved to Memphis and then to Chicago, different living conditions and different tastes, and his music had to reflect the new conditions. He had moved to the big city. For a time, jazz and band blues had been more or less the same thing, as in the repertoires of Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford. But once the experiments of the New York "bop" musicians abandoned regular rhythms, jazz and blues became two different kinds of music with different audiences. The most distinctive characteristic of all rhythm and blues styles was the presence of a dance rhythm, and it is primarily this characteristic that distinguished rhythm and blues from post-war jazz, which was rarely recorded as dance music and which could therefore dispense with the convention of maintaining a particular beat throughout a song.

There was a further difference between jazz and the blues in postwar music. In rhythm and blues, the soloists were generally more "selfish", concerned to express their own feelings, depending on the rest of the band to keep the beat going and the volume up while they blew their hearts out and their heads off. In jazz, there was usually more interplay between musicians, more exploration into melody and harmony, less reliance on the emotional force of the musician's tone.
The nature of the blues emphasizes particular qualities of character in its performers: they need to have a strong, consistent character, and a persuasive way of communicating their thoughts and feelings. They may use menace or high-spirited exultation, humour or complete despair, gentleness or rough strength, to set particular moods on an evening's atmosphere. But whatever each man uses, it must be his own, different from anybody else's (unless he intends to do no more than invoke adulation for some revered figure by imitating his style).

Although each man has his own style, there is always a tendency for people with common experience to have comparable styles, and an analysis of the blues can show connections between people from certain regions of the United States, and within those regions distinguish between men who sang with one kind of accompaniment, or in one kind of club, and those who sang with other kinds of accompaniment, or in some other kind of bar.

Accordingly, five main kinds of rhythm and blues can be distinguished in the music of the black culture in the ten years after the Second World War. There were three kinds of blues-dancehall blues, club blues, and bar blues. There were also two kinds of music that developed which were not strictly blues-various kinds of group singing, and gospel-based styles.

The following analysis of rhythm and blues is necessarily based mainly on the evidence of records, backed up with a considerable amount of material collected by researchers and interviewers over the past ten or more years. The discussion pays virtually no attention to pre-war forms of blues, or to jazz, which both have been well described and analysed elsewhere. There has also been some writing on the post-war period, particularly on the Chicago bar blues singers, and to a lesser extent on the dancehall blues musicians. The discussion here takes account of what has already been written, and focuses particularly on the singers and musicians who directly influenced rock 'n' roll. It also endeavours to point out the contemporary significance of certain figures who have had relatively little influence on subsequent music, yet were outstanding exponents of their styles.**

Of all the blues styles that were part of rhythm and blues, and from there shaped rock 'n' roll, the dancehall blues are the most various. Three categories are relevant here: big band blues; shout, scream, and cry blues; and combo blues.

i. The big band blues were played by the bands that were closest in stage presentation and musical arrangements to the pre-war Kansas City bands.

The atmosphere at a dance where a big band was playing has been well described by Malcolm X, who recalled working as a shoe-shine boy at the Roseland Ballroom in Boston:

"Showtime!" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers, would be making the Roseland feel like a big rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad. "Wail, man, wail!" people would be shouting at the band; and it would be wailing, until first one and then another couple just ran out of strength and stumbled off towards the crowd, exhausted and soaked with sweat .

Lloyd's Manor in Newark, N.J., was a place where they'd have groups, like Illinois Jacquet's, Erskine Hawkins', Earl Bostic's, Tab Smith's, Big Jay McNeely's and all the other wild swingers of the day. There were absolutely no holds barred, musically or socially, and a band was considered successful if it succeeded in blowing the dancers off their feet. There was also a place called the Graham Auditorium where they used to hold what were called "Teenage Canteens" but a lot of the people must have been teenagers for 20 or so years. It was a loud blur, climaxed by those shattering saxophone "battles" which featured heavy horns like Jacquet, McNeely and Ammons-Stitt groups and big throated singers like Wynonie Harris, Larry Darnell and Little Esther.

The post-war big band style evolved through several stages out of the music played by Kansas City bands during the late twenties. This music had been inspired by the optimistic feelings of people moving into the wide open spaces of the Southwest and, by all accounts, the wide open nature of Kansas City during the twenties, where crime and good living joined in defiance of Prohibition and the kind of morality it represented. During the thirties big bands were established in most big cities, with a few famous bandleaders-Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Jimmy Lunceford-able to recruit the best musicians and arrangers. Towards the end of the thirties, the demand was sufficient to draw some of the bands away from their local audiences: Andy Kirk and Jay McShann left Kansas, and Erskine Hawkins brought his band to New York from Alabama.

During the war, still more important bands formed or became nationally known, including those of Cab Calloway, Milton Larkins, Cootie Williams, Lionel Hampton, and Billy Eckstine. All of them were potentially capable of playing for either jazz or dance audiences, but by the end of the war most of the bandleaders found they had to choose one or the other. Those who chose the rhythm and blues dance music included Lucky Millinder, Tiny Bradshaw, Todd Rhodes, and Buddy Johnson. Compared to the "jazz" orchestras, the rhythm and blues bands used less imaginative arrangements and sometimes less skillful musicians. (The leaders mentioned here, though, were more rigorous than many others in rehearsing their bands and maintaining a varied repertoire.)

During the five years after the war, week after week a succession of magnificent bands followed each other through the towns that had enough black people to support a big dance hall. The bands were judged partly on their ability to generate intense excitement at the end of a dance. For this, they needed at least one saxophonist who could blow hard and long at fast rocking tempos, and at least one singer who could match him, with a clear strong delivery. But to balance these crescendos of sound, a band also had to have soloists who could make the mood soft and mellow, who could bring lovers together and encourage strangers to get to know each other better. A few versatile musicians and singers could be as effective in this role as when they were screaming, but most bands would feature a ballad singer and a shouter, a smooch tenor and a screamer. The instrumental soloists often were excellent, in control of their instruments even when they honked or screeched as if beside themselves with frenzied emotion. The same was true of the singers, who needed strong lungs and a good throat to compete with the roar of the band, but who also needed a sense of timing and the ability to let their voices ride with a rhythm.

Through the forties, the tendency was for increasing attention to be focused on the saxophone solos and decreasing care to be taken with the orchestral backdrop. Arrangements became simpler (which enabled a new man to fit into a band faster, and required less rehearsal time of new material). The bands soon became as well known for their stars as for their leader: Cootie Williams for Willis Jackson, Sil Austin, and Eddie Davis; Milton Larkins for Illinois Jacquet, Eddie Vinson, and Arnett Cobb; Lionel Hampton for Earl Bostic, Clifford Scott, Chuck Berry (and, after he took them from Larkins, for Jacquet and Cobb); Billy Eckstine for Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons (and for a number of musicians known for their jazz abilities).

Apart from the shout blues vocals, many bands also featured songs that were sung by half the band in chorus, and others that were presented in a sing-along style by the ballad or light-voiced singer. Some records by Millinder, Hampton, and Bradshaw featured such light entertainment singing. Jimmy Lunceford introduced one of the most influential vocal groups who used this style, the Treniers (originally a pair of twins but eventually a five-man team). Scat singing, comedy, and a lively stage act were expected of this kind of group.

The exceptional singers tended to use the shouting style, and most of the ballad singing with the big bands was poor, but a few such singers with a good sense of timing were featured, among them Al Hibbler with Duke Ellington and then Jay McShann, Billy Eckstine with Earl Hines and then with his own band, Sarah Vaughan with Eckstine's band, and Arthur Prysock with Buddy Johnson.

Most big bands which recorded for major companies favoured the "jazz" side of their repertoire over the danceable blues, and only Decca regularly encouraged its black big bands to make records which were likely to appeal as much to black record-buyers as to whites. Among the company's impressive roster of black bands in the forties were the bands of Buddy Johnson (often featuring his sister Ella Johnson as vocalist), Jimmy Lunceford, Lucky Millinder and Lionel Hampton, whose recordings were mostly supervised by Milt Gabler. Of the independent companies, King of Cincinatti and Savoy of Newark were the two which had most success with big bands. Millinder (after leaving Decca), Todd Rhodes and Tiny Bradshaw all recorded hits for King in the market which was becoming known as "rhythm and blues", while Johnny Otis brought an extraordinary series of eight huge rhythm and blues hits to Savoy in one year, 1950.

The Johnny Otis Show was one of the last successful big touring bands to be formed. He called his show a "Rhythm and Blues Caravan", and at various times featured a host of fine singers-Little Esther, a big-voiced ballad singer with a style close to Dinah Washington's; Willie Mae Thornton, a rough, almost country-styled singer: Mel Walker, a ballad singer; and Marie Adams, another strong-voiced blues singer. Able to accommodate to the shifting audience tastes in rhythm and blues, Otis's Caravan survived to enjoy success as a rock 'n' roll show.

In order to survive, big bands had to make such shifts, but it became increasingly difficult to do so, and by the mid-fifties almost all the big blues bands had folded. A few fortunate musicians were able to make money as session musicians on rock 'n' roll records.

The bands that played band blues had made an important contribution. At a time when the contemporary white big bands of Glenn Miller, Les Brown, the Dorsey Brothers, and Kay Kyser were tending to impose arrangements on their musicians, the black big bands had opened up and let their musicians run free. The sound of a sax solo breaking loose from a series of driving riffs is one of the most exciting experiences of this century's music. The tension created by the same band, harnessed to a slow tempo and a soft mood, while a singer called the blues in a strong, rich voice, easily took hold of listeners who understood the conventions of the music.

It seemed logical, then, that with the death of the big bands the soloists and the singers should want to achieve these moods by themselves, and for the audience to want the excitement of Illinois Jacquet pure, without having to wait through ensemble playing and solos by less impressive people. So, gradually replacing the big bands, came the featured singers and saxmen, the shouters, screamers, and criers.

ii For rock 'n' roll, the band blues shouters were generally too obviously accomplished (and therefore unable to get the necessary homemade sound in their work) and too adult in their concerns and terms of reference. The open sexual content of their songs needed change-but that could be handled, as Bill Haley showed with his treatment of Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll". But it wasn't just the words-the whole character of the shouted blues was adult, in the tone of voice used by the singers, the assumptions behind their songs, and the sophistication of the musical arrangements.

The most celebrated of the blues shouters, Joe Turner, had never been associated with a particular band. He had started singing semiprofessionally while still in his teens in Kansas City in the late twenties. His first records were accompanied only by the pianist Pete Johnson; of these "Roll 'Em Pete" (Vocalion, 1938), was a brilliant achievement by both men, the strong vocal and eager boogie achieving the kind of spirit even big bands of the day sometimes failed to get.

Turner's music was infused with the spirit of good-natured optimism which the writer Ralph Ellison has said was characteristic of the Southwestern states during the twenties. Men had come there, out from the deeper South, with hopes for a different kind of life, hopes that experience had not yet disillusioned. The feeling came through even in a musical obituary, one of Turner's best songs and performances, "Old Piney Brown is Gone":

Well he went to California,
Stood on Hollywood and Vine;
Yes, he went to California.
As soon as the news got round,
Yeah the girls all jump and shout,
"Here comes Mister Piney Brown."

The next time I saw Piney
He was standing on 18th and Vine.
The last time I saw Piney
He was standing on 18th and Vine.
Well I tell the world,
Sure was a friend of mine.

Through the forties, while other singers with similar styles were acclaimed as stars, Turner, surprisingly, was a relatively obscure name, moving restlessly from one record company to another without achieving any national hits. In 1950 Turner was contracted to Atlantic Records in New York and belatedly, but in a big way, became known to the black record buyers.

His first record for Atlantic, "Chains of Love" (written by the company's rhythm and blues producer, Ahmet Ertegun) was a major hit in the rhythm and blues market in 1951. Helped by strong sax and piano support, Turner transformed what might have been a trite song into a vehicle for the deep experience-based feelings of the blues. "Chains of Love" was followed by a series of other hits, including "Sweet Sixteen" (1952), "Honey Hush" (1953), and "TV Mama" (1954), the latter having an interesting accompaniment from the Chicago bottleneck guitarist Elmore James.

In 1954, Turner recorded the novelty blues "Shake, Rattle and Roll", whose boogie rhythm and raucous sax breaks attracted the attention of Bill Haley and Decca (looking for rock 'n' roll material). Turner himself later recorded songs by the rock 'n' roll writers Leiber and Stoller, including "Lipstick, Powder and Paint", but his voice betrayed his identity as a blues shouter-he couldn't sound like a rock 'n' roll singer.

The other singers in the style experienced comparable problems. Walter Brown, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Wynonie Harris, Bullmoose Jackson and Jimmy Witherspoon were probably the best shouters, and all had hits in the rhythm and blues market yet were virtually unknown to the rock 'n' roll audience only a few years later. Their performances were oriented to the kind of situation described in Charles Keil's Urban Blues, intimate, relaxed, loaded with sexual references and suggestive plays on words. Bill Haley had been able to clean up "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and still have a song that made some sense. But he could have done nothing at all with Vinson's "I'm Weak But I'm Willing", or "Something Done Stole My Cherry Red", with Wynonie Harris's "Lovin' Machine", or Bullmoose Jackson's "I Want a Bow-Legged Woman". The whole atmosphere of Jimmy Witherspoon's "No Rollin' Blues" (1949) depended on verses such as the following, which appeared in similar forms in several other rhythm and blues songs at the time:

Some people like to love in the parlor,
Others go down lover's lane,
But I like to love in the wee small hours of the morning
When it's pouring down with rain.

Unlike Hank Ballard's "Work With Me, Annie", these songs did not have a strong melody or distinctive rhythm that could be used with entirely different words. The blues shouters often used medium tempos, familiar melodies, even familiar verses, which they sang in such a way that the audience accepted their interpretation as being personal, effectively original.

Wynonie Harris was perhaps an exception, as he did sing with a distinctive melody and strong rhythm, so that structurally his fast records anticipated the northern band style of rock 'n' roll. "Good Rockin' Tonight", "Good Morning, Judge", "Bloodshot Eyes", and "Lovin' Machine" were all fast, memorable, and exciting-and sung with that tone of voice that identified an adult. Rock 'n' roll was supposed to be young people's music.

Among female blues shouters, the pattern was similar. Faye Adams, Little Esther, Varetta Dillard, and Big Maybelle were all committed too firmly to the conventions of the blues to be able to make the transition to rock 'n' roll, despite great reputations as rhythm and blues singers. Big Maybelle's records were particularly good-"Gabbin' Blues" (Okeh, 1952) had fine trumpet and a fascinating arrangement, but a totally adult framework. The two singers who did make an impression as rock 'n' roll performers both recorded for Atlantic-Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker.

Ruth Brown's early records for the company-"Teardrops From My Eyes" (1951, featuring a tenor solo by Budd Johnson), "5-10-15 Hours" (1952, featuring tenor solo by Willis Jackson)-were sophisticated blues-shouting at its finest and much smoother than equivalent records by other performers on King, with a hint of demure suppliance that was associated more with the tones of popular singers than with the blues. Gradually, Atlantic oriented Ruth Brown's records to a wider market, introducing deep vocal group harmonies on "Oh What a Dream" (1954) and a straight pop lyric, by Leiber and Stoller, on "Lucky Lips" (1956). Never a major rock 'n' roll singer, she was one of the few female singers to come close to capturing the feeling of the music.

LaVern Baker succeeded completely. Her records had always been only lightly rooted in the conventions of rhythm and blues, and from 1954 were evidently directed at the popular music market. "Tweedle Dee", with a light tone and a frisky beat, was one of the most charming records of rock 'n' roll, but the singer's biggest success was "Jim Dandy", a novelty song with a heavier beat. Baker proved to be the most adaptable of all the female rhythm and blues singers and she provided almost the only link between this group of singers and the more frequently successful female singers in the early sixties-Mary Wells, Dionne Warwick, and others.

Much more direct contributions to the vocal style of rock 'n' roll were made by singers who cried rather than shouted the blues. Roy Brown pioneered the style, and many followed. Among blues singers, Larry Darnell, B. B. King, Junior Parker, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson adopted styles originally inspired by Brown; James Brown, a gospel-styled singer, Bobby Bland, first a blues singer and later a gospel blues singer, and Little Richard, first a gospel blues singer and then a rock 'n' roll singer, were also influenced by him. Later singers were influenced in turn by these followers of Brown, so that eventually his influence was diffused throughout popular music, taking in the extravagant "Heartbreak Hotel" of Elvis Presley, the heartrending cries of Jackie Wilson, even the twisted shrieks of Chubby Checker.

The most impressive quality of Brown's style was his intense involvement in his singing. Whereas the blues shouters were always evidently in control of the sounds they made, Brown's voice was shaped by the passions of despair or exhilaration. Rocking frantically to a boogie beat, or wracked by desolate doubt, he committed all he was to the song's message.

Based at the start of his career in East Texas and New Orleans, Brown began recording for De Luxe of New Jersey in 1948, with his own composition "Good Rockin' Tonight": "I heard the news, there's good rockin' tonight." This was one of the songs that fired the imaginations of young people bored with white popular music, and several rock 'n' roll singers, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Frankie Lymon, testified to its influence by recording their versions.

Brown continued to record contagious dance records, including "Boogie at Midnight" and "Love Don't Love Nobody", and also impassioned slow blues, including "Hard Luck Blues" and "Big Town". "Big Town", recorded with Tiny Bradshaw's band, was a classic expression of a bid for independence foiled by personal insecurity. The singer woke up one morning and decided to leave for the big town:

I packed my old suitcase,
Told my family goodbye,
And my poor little wife,
She broke down. She began to cry,
She said, "Big fine daddy,
Please don't start runnin' wild ...
And leave me all alone,
Remember, I'm the mother of your child. "

But he went, and he spent money on a girl he met in town. When the money ran out so did the girl, leaving the singer to entreat:

I beg for a nickel,
Put in my telephone,
Got to call my baby,
Beg her, please let me come back home.

The impact of the style came from the conviction of Brown's singing, and when Bobby Bland and Little Richard started making records in the early fifties, they sounded like youthful Roy Browns. Bland allowed his voice to rise into tremulous cries in his version of Charles Brown's "Drifting", which Bland recorded for Modern in 1952, as "Drifting from Town to Town". Little Richard recorded several band blues songs for RCA in 1951 (at the age of fifteen) and a couple of records for Peacock in 1953, all in a cry blues style similar to Brown's. Both Bland and Richard gradually became more gospelinfluenced in their styles, using deliberately what Brown may have been unaware of. When Richard began recording for Specialty in 1955, his style was gospel blues.

By this time, Roy Brown's records for De Luxe had ceased to sell well, and he shifted to Imperial. Emphasizing the vocal qualities he shared with Little Richard-the "master" apeing the "pupil"-Roy Brown made a good rock 'n' roll record, which didn't sell, "Everybody"/"Saturday Night", and a very poor cover of two rock 'n' roll hits, which didn't sell either, "Party Doll"/"I'm Stickin' With You". Then, remarkably quickly, Brown vanished from the music industry, leaving only the important echoes of his style in the voices of several younger singers.

Apart from those who made a commercially successful rock 'n' roll style out of his high-pitched, intense delivery, there was one performer, B. B. King, who kept some of Brown's feeling alive in a blues style. King, once a Mississippi plantation worker, developed a sophisticated blues style while working as a disc jockey and singer in Memphis during the late forties. His guitar playing owed something to T-Bone Walker, and something to the intense Mississippi style of acoustic guitar playing, and something, too, to the bottleneck techniques of Kokomo Arnold and Robert Johnson. But the diverse influences merged into a style instantly recognizable as King'seconomical, glittering, sharp, and very moving. His singing was enlivened by occasional falsetto sighs, reminiscent of Roy Brown but also of gospel singers. He later credited both sources as having been influential.

King was one of the few rhythm and blues singers of his time who made no obvious attempt to reach the white rock 'n' roll audience. His records were often commercial in their arrangements, but the aim was to reach the black people who preferred ballads to hard blues. At their best his records were unrivalled cry blues: "Three O'Clock Blues" and "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer".

Although the shout and cry singing styles were hard for rock 'n' roll singers-particularly white singers-to imitate, the equivalent instrumental sound, "screaming" saxophone, proved much easier, and the sound endured through various changes in the fashions of musical arrangements and rhythm-rock 'n' roll, twist, soul. During the first period of rock 'n' roll, 1954 to 1956, its most distinctive "trademark" was a break two thirds of the way through the record, in which a saxophone player produced a sound that was liable to tear paper off the walls, a fast screech that emphasized almost every beat for several bars. Rudi Pompilli, the saxophonist of Bill Haley's Comets, was much more exciting in his solos than Haley ever managed to be in his singing, and King Curtis invariably enlivened the records of the Coasters with inspirational jabs during the verses and with stuttering breaks between them.

By far the most successful rock 'n' roll instrumental record was Bill Doggett's "Honky Tonk", in which Clifford Scott took the saxophone solos. The easy medium tempo rhythm was approximately midway between the typical rhythm and blues hits of the previous few years, which had varied from the rich, lyrical tones of Gene Ammons's "My Foolish Heart" (Chess, 1949), Sonny Thompson's "Long Gone" (Miracle, 1948, featuring David Brooks on tenor sax), and Lynn Hope's "Tenderly" (Premium, 1952), to the firmer attack and aggressive rhythm of Paul Williams's "Hucklebuck" (Savoy, 1949), Willis Jackson's "Gator Tail" (King, 1949), and Jimmy Forrest's "Night Train" (United, 1951). Most of these men, along with Sam "The Man" Taylor, Sil Austin, Red Prysock, Maxwell Davis, and King Curtis were responsible for establishing an authentic rock 'n' roll "sound" to accompany both the genuine rock 'n' roll singers (Otis Williams and the Charms, Gene and Eunice, the Coasters) and those who needed to sound as if they were (Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, the Diamonds).

In general, the shout and cry singers and the screamer saxophonists supplied rock 'n' roll with inspiration more than with performers who became stars themselves. The shouters' spirit, the criers' style, and the screamers' instrumental support were all made use of, but the bluesstyled performers who themselves became stars were invariably jump combo singers and musicians.

iii. Of the various blues-based styles, jump blues, through its boogie rhythm-variously modified as a jump or shuffle rhythm-had the most direct impact on the first singers to become popular with rock 'n' roll: Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino (who himself had been leader of a jump band).

Typical jump combos featured a strong rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass, and drums, and usually had a singer and a saxophonist up front, with sometimes a second sax man added. Between them, the various instrumentalists emphasized the rhythm that a boogie pianist had achieved alone with his left hand, and in the process of transcribing the effect to several instruments the difference between each beat was either emphasized more-in jump rhythms-or blurred-in shuffle rhythms. Several different regional variations of the style developed, in New York, on the West Coast, in the mid-South (St Louis/ Memphis), in New Orleans, in Chicago, and on the Eastern Seaboard.

The pattern for jump combos was set by Louis Jordan's Tympany Five, who in 1942 had one of the first big hits by a black band in the popular market, "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" (Decca). Singing and playing alto sax, Jordan presented an entertaining stage act, mixing witty lyrics with crisp rhythms to produce a style that appealed equally to black and white audiences. Nobody satisfied both audiences' tastes so effectively until the rock 'n' roll singers Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard.

Most of Jordan's songs concerned the standard topics of the blues-love, drinking, family life, partying-but he sang them without the typical involvement of blues singing. He tended to be detached-amused, perhaps bemused, in any case rarely affected strongly by the events about which he sang. This cool, in some ways corresponding to the attitude of crooners, enabled him to appeal to white audiences. Also, he sang very clearly, in contrast to many blues singers whose regional accents and slurred delivery often made them hard for white people to understand.

Jordan's appeal to black audiences may have derived from the unstated implications of many of his songs, which often seemed to be innocent, joking complaints about women of fate, but which at the same time implied an unjust society. "Saturday Night Fish Fry", a big hit for Jordan in 1951, recalled a night spent by the singer and a friend in New Orleans, where they were invited to a party "where some of the chicks wore expensive frocks,/and some had on bobby socks". Everybody seemed to be having a good time, until the police made a raid. "I didn't know we were breaking the law,/But someone reached up and hit me on the jaw". Arrested and booked on suspicion, the singer was released when "my chick came down and went my bail,/and finally got me out of that rotten jail".***

For more than ten years, Louis Jordan was a major figure in popular culture, inspiring many younger singers with his success. But few singers could assume such a regionless, cosmopolitan style as Jordan's, and most sang both with rougher voices that more firmly identified them with a particular area, and with less sophisticated instrumental accompaniment. Among the first to work out different styles of jump music were three West Coast singers, T-Bone Walker, Roy Milton, and Amos Milburn.

Walker was one of the most sophisticated blues performers, with a vocal style that tended sometimes to be blander that was usual, and a guitar technique that showed an interest in jazz phrasing as much as a need for emotional expression. Walker pioneered the use of electric guitar in jump combos and also developed a dazzling stage act that was reputed to have inspired Bo Diddley and Elvis Presley in its use of the guitar as a stage prop-sometimes for acrobatics, as the singer did the splits and held the instrument behind his head while he continued to play, and sometimes for sexual provocation, as he ground the guitar against his body or pointed it suggestively out at the audience. (Many other West Coast jump combos blended guitar and vocals in a style similar to Walker's, notably Lowell Fulson and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Fulson's main contribution was a classic performance of relaxed singing and economical guitar playing in "Reconsider Baby", a song that Presley later recorded.)

A rougher kind of jump blues was pioneered by Roy Milton and Amos Milburn, who were among the first performers to break away almost entirely from the relatively sophisticated arrangements of jazz, and even such jazz-influenced combo leaders as Walker and Louis Jordan. In the music of Milton and Milburn, emphasis was invariably placed first on the rhythm, and instrumental technique or vocal quality was of secondary importance. Roy Milton, who played drums and sang, has one of the strongest claims to be called "the inventor of the rock 'n' roll beat", as his "R.M. Blues", issued in 1945, was among the first records to reorganize the boogie rhythm and present it with an accented offbeat. The novelty and popularity of the sound is confirmed by the record's sales figures: issued on several labels owned by Milton and Art Rupe, and eventually on Rupe's Specialty label, the record accumulated sales of over a million copies, the first to do so in the Negro market.

Milton's style of combo was widely imitated and developed, on Specialty by Jimmy Liggins and Joe Liggins-both of whom had more expressive voices than Milton-and on the rival Aladdin label by Amos Milburn. Milburn's most famous records were a series of songs that concerned the motives, joys, and aftermath of drinking (several of them written by one of the best rhythm and blues songwriters, Rudolph Toombs)-"Bad, Bad Whiskey" (1950), "Thinkin' and Drinkin' " (1952), and others. But although the themes of these songs deprived Milburn of a rock 'n' roll audience, he recorded at least two fast dance records, "Chicken Shack Boogie" (1948) and "Let's Have a Party" (1953), that achieved more excitement than any of the derivative rock 'n' roll hits by Haley, Boyd Bennett, or Larry Williams.

Ironically, the sole rock 'n' roll hit in this West Coast jump combo style was not by Milton, Milburn, or the Liggins brothers, but by a less original singer, Jimmy McCracklin, whose "The Walk" (Chess) was a rather surprising hit in 1958. According to McCracklin, he made the record to prove just how easy it was to meet the simple taste of the rock 'n' roll audience. The success of the exceptionally simple and repetitive record made his point.

There were countless small jump combos playing throughout the country during the forties, but if they were not easily accessible to the studios in Los Angeles, Oakland, or New York, they mostly went unrecorded until the early fifties. In 1950, Joe Bihari of Modern made contact with some of the most popular bands in the Mississippi Delta region, and the following year Henry and Lillian McMurry started Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi. Between them, the two companies recorded some of the best music of the era, ranging from lively, jumping boogies to moody and menacing blues. For many of the performers, music was still a part-time activity, bringing in welcome extra pocket money on top of their regular earnings as farmers or labourers. But one by one they managed to put together enough separate sources of income from music for them to be able to make a living from it, playing residencies in clubs and bars in the small towns along both banks of the Mississippi, and getting their own shows on one of the local radio stations, where they played a couple of live numbers themselves, brought a guest or two in, played a few records, and read out the commercials from their sponsors.

Sonny Boy Williamson was the most famous of these bluesmen, with his own "King Biscuit Show" which he had been hosting on KFFA in West Helena, Arkansas since 1941. Despite his adamant insistence that he thought of the name first, most evidence suggests that Rice Miller should really have called himself Sonny Boy Williamson Number Two, granting priority to the Chicago-based harmonica player who had recorded for RCA's Bluebird label from the thirties until he was killed in 1948. Miller was also a harmonica player, and despite being close to fifty years old by the time he made his first record, he became one of the most influential musicians of the modern era, inspiring many other bluesmen to make use of what was widely regarded as a "toy" instrument; few of them ever managed such an effective combination of rhythmic intensity and atmospheric moods. Sonny Boy's recording debut was the customary rhythm and blues combination of a "jump" side and a "ballad"; "Crazy 'Bout You Baby" had a rollicking boogie piano behind Sonny Boy's urgently energetic vocal and his trademark "wah wah" harmonica riff, while "Eyesight to the Blind" had a funny lyric extolling a girl's attractions-"her daddy must have been a millionaire, 'cause I can tell by the way she walks." He recorded another ten singles for Trumpet in the next three years, most of them sounding as if only one microphone had been used to capture the sound of the whole combo, but all conveying the leader's formidable presence, alternately commanding attention with menace or beguiling it with insidious charm.

A similar combination of moods was represented in the records of another of the Delta's blues stars, Howlin' Wolf, but there was a frightening menace to his records even when he was trying to be friendly. Forty years old by the time he made his first records at Sam Phillips' studio in Memphis, Wolf had an unusual band featuring two harmonica players (himself along with either Junior Parker or James Cotton) but no bass guitar; instead, he used pianist Bill Johnson (known as "Destruction") and an electric guitar (Willie Johnson, Pat Hare or Hubert Sumlin) to play the boogie rhythm, with Willie Steele on drums. This was a powerful band which could swing, rock, and jump at fast tempos, or lay back on a heavy beat on slow numbers. Again, the first record mapped out the essential ingredients: "How Many More Years" bounced along on a relaxed groove, while on the other side "Moaning at Midnight" introduced a heavy reverberating guitar riff from Willie Johnson which was to echo through the next twenty years of popular music. Compared to the delicate, jazzinfluenced sound of most guitarists at the time (from T-Bone Walker to Merle Travis), here Willie Johnson sounded as if he was twanging baling wire with a six-inch nail. Undeniably effective as part of the rhythm arrangement, the device was surprisingly melodic too, acting as a kind of counterpoint to Wolf's mournful vocal, which sounded as if he might swallow the microphone and jump out of the juke box speaker at any moment. He had what would now be called "presence", and he became the object of a tussle between Modern Records, who thought they had contracted to release his records, and Chess, who put this one out.

On one of his early visits to the region, Joe Bihari of Modern had run across Ike Turner, already at only twenty the leader of his own band the Kings of Rhythm, and evidently an unusually alert organiser and businessman. Bihari deputed Turner to supervise his recording sessions, contributing arrangements and playing piano himself where appropriate, but somehow some of the tapes were sent up to Chess in Chicago, possibly by engineer Sam Phillips. Wolf subsequently recorded several singles for Modern's RPM subsidiary before Chess made an exclusive contract with him; Wolf moved to Chicago, and in effect bequeathed his band to Junior Parker, who made some intensely exciting boogie blues records for Phillips' new Sun label under the name of Little Junior's Blue Flames. "Love My Baby" in particular featured some blistering guitar playing by Pat Hare, which inspired the rockabilly style discussed elsewhere.

Among the other singers who recorded under Ike Turner's supervision, Jackie Brenston and Rosco Gordon made two of the most influential records in what could be called a Memphis Jump Blues style, although nobody used such a description at the time. Brenston was actually the baritone sax player in Turner's Kings of Rhythm, but he took the vocal on "Rocket 88", a mellow, cruising boogie which featured a tearaway solo from tenor sax player Raymond Hill; top of the rhythm and blues charts for Chess in 1951, the record was one of the first rhythm and blues hits to inspire a cover version, and although Bill Haley and the Saddlemen's record for Essex did not appear in any national charts, it was a significant signpost for what was to follow.

Rosco Gordon was younger than the country bluesmen like Sonny Boy and Howlin' Wolf, a pianist and singer who lived in Memphis and hung around the clubs and bars, fitting into bands with Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland, B. B. King and the other young hopefuls. In 1952 he recorded "Booted" with Ike Turner, which topped the rhythm and blues chart for Chess, and followed through with an equally successful record later the same year for RPM, "No More Doggin"'. Compared to the even beats of boogie, and the more emphatic backbeat of combo records being made in New Orleans at this time, "No More Doggin' " had an unusual emphasis on the first and third beats which never became widespread in American music, but which was picked up more strongly in Jamaica, where Rosco Gordon was particularly popular. During the sixties, that back-to-front beat became a distinctive feature of Jamaican ska, rock steady and reggae music, and it mostly stemmed from this early hit of Rosco Gordon's.

A different version of the jump blues had been developed farther south, in New Orleans and southern Louisiana, and was the source of the phenomenal success of Fats Domino, in the rhythm and blues market first and later as a rock 'n' roll singer. Compared to the other jump singers, the New Orleans performers put more emphasis on vocal expression, sounding either exceptionally exuberant or morosely sad. The rhythm varied accordingly, a lively, bouncing boogie beat on the happy songs, and a more intense, swirling shuffle on the depressed ones. Although Domino was easily the most famous exponent of the style, there were several other exceptional performers in both rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll styles.

One of them, Roy Byrd, was a powerful influence locally, although his national success in rhythm and blues was confined to one record, "Bald Head" (Mercury, 1950). A long time before it was conventional to assume bizarre names, Byrd recorded as "Professor Longhair and His Shuffling Hungarians", and though he never tried very hard to reach the rock 'n' roll audience, his penchant for witty novelty songs and his "mardi gras" rhythm served as the basis for the successful rock 'n' roll style of Huey Smith and the Clowns.

Apart from Byrd, all of the most successful New Orleans singers made their records for West Coast companies, and were provided with similar styles of accompaniment, invariably supplied by bands led by either Dave Bartholomew or Paul Gayten. The result may have been to make singers sound more similar to one another on record than they might have done in live performance.

Fats Domino, as already noted, was the only rhythm and blues singer to have an extensive series of hits in the rhythm and blues market and then continue having hits as a rock 'n' roll singer. Most rhythm and blues singers were never widely known to the rock 'n' roll audience, and of those that were, most had to make considerable changes in their styles (as Chuck Willis did at Atlantic, Lloyd Price at ABC-Paramount, and Ray Charles first with Atlantic and then with ABC-Paramount), and none had hits as consistently as did Domino.

In his first records, he sang in a high, nasal voice, full of good humour in his fast songs, which he expressed with whoops and scat singing as his records charged along to the beat of his full-chorded piano playing. His first record, "The Fat Man", made in 1949, when he was seventeen, was one of the biggest rhythm and blues hits of the period, and it showed him to be an accomplished pianist as well as a remarkably confident singer. Over the next few years the style was gradually modified, as his voice dropped to a deeper tone, the backbeat of the drummer became more pronounced, and Domino's piano playing lost some of its adventurousness.

Domino's complete transformation into a rock 'n' roll singer was possible because he sang with a plaintive tone which did not seem so adult and alien as did the tone of most of his contemporary rhythm and blues singers. He seemed to be singing about experiences equivalent to those his white listeners knew about, and he was able to take established pop songs like "My Blue Heaven" and "Blueberry Hill" and not sound incongruous while singing them, as say, Amos Milburn or Roy Brown would have done.

Compared to the typical songs of the blues shouters, those of the New Orleans jump band singers in general were less adult and explicit in their implications about relationships with women. In most of his songs, Fats Domino could have been a boy singing about a girl, and it was easy for the youthful white audience of rock 'n' roll fans to identify with him.

For the white audience, Domino maintained his strong Louisiana accent, which took on the charm of a novelty style, but he rarely sang with the high-pitched whoops he used in "The Fat Man". The rough qualities of his sound were eliminated or minimized, leaving a relaxed but infectiously rhythmic beat and a singer who easily communicated his happiness.

Understandably, most New Orleans singers were more impressed by Fats Domino's success than by Professor Longhair's idiosyncracies, and several followed his style quite closely, including Smiley Lewis, Lloyd Price, and Guitar Slim.
Lewis came closest to rock 'n' roll success in 1955, with a performance that was almost identical to Domino's style, "I Hear You Knockin"', but he lost out to Gale Storm's cover for Dot. Usually, Lewis did not sound quite so much like Domino, singing in a more intense style sometimes reminiscent of Joe Turner's, as in the lively "Bumpity Bump".

Lloyd Price eventually achieved rock 'n' roll success in 1959, with "Personality" and several other big-sounding productions, using arrangements that owed much of their inspiration to those conceived by Dave Bartholomew for Domino and Lewis. But Price had already been a successful rhythm and blues singer, again with a style close to Domino's. His biggest hit was his first record, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" (1952), which featured a pianist who was either Fats Domino or else sounded exactly like him. Price's voice on the record had a plaintiveness that was slightly more intense than Domino's, and it suggested very gently the kind of influence that gospel styles would come to have in blues singing. Two years later, in 1954, Specialty recorded another New Orleans singer with a slightly more emphatic gospel style, Guitar Slim. The arrangement for Guitar Slim's first record, "The Things That I Used to Do", was conceived and played by the pianist Ray Charles, and somehow emphasized the religious tone in the singer's voice, regretful, but philosophical. Both "Lawdy, Miss Clawdy" and "The Things That I Used to Do" were huge hits in the rhythm and blues market and both had incalculable effects both on rock 'n' roll and on the steadily growing tendency for singers to adopt gospel-influenced styles.

Apart from the "Longhair-shuffle" and "Domino jump" kinds of New Orleans combo blues, there was a third group of singers whose styles were independent of both of them-the duo Shirley and Lee, and the vocal group the Spiders. The duo had its greatest success as rock 'n' roll singers, using novelty effects and arrangements that drew from the West Coast combo styles of Roy Milton and Jimmy Liggins, but the Spiders were a rhythm and blues group whose lead singer Chuck Carbo used a blues voice rather than the cool style developed by most leads in the North. Although the group often sang fast songs, the accompaniment was not emphatically rhythmic, further isolating their sound from most of their contemporaries (The Clovers, discussed later, were perhaps the most similar.)

Most of the singers who perpetuated the boogie beat in some kind of jump or shuffle rhythm maintained piano in their line ups, even if they spread the responsibility for keeping the rhythm between several instruments. But a few men transferred the rhythm to guitar or guitars: they included T-Bone Walker, already discussed, John Lee Hooker, to be discussed in the section on bar blues singers, and Jimmy Reed.

Although Reed himself never had rock 'n' roll hits, his easy rhythm was one of the few identifiable influences on the generally innovative style of Chuck Berry, and, as already noted, his songs were widely used in the repertoire of other rock 'n' roll singers.

Reed's vocal style had the same slurred, indistinct quality that many of the Mississippi bar blues singers had, but it was much more relaxed and rhythmic than theirs, very rarely imperative or selfconfident in its tone but more often gentle, appealing, inquiring. Reed played harmonica and guitar fixed together so that he could play them at the same time, and he was backed by drums and a bass guitarist, Eddie Taylor, who played the equivalent of a pianist's left hand. The jaunty rhythm created by the bass line, and several melodic songs, produced a series of records which amounted to "sing-along blues". Compared to most other blues singers, Reed improvised relatively little, but established a pattern which he repeated each time he played a song. Despite a narrow range of melodic and rhythmic ideas, Reed sustained a long career, and inspired a "school" of imitators, particularly in the South, where Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Slim, and others recorded in a similar style. Reed's songs comprised brief, laconic phrases-as in "Honest I Do" (1955)-which rode easily on the bouncy rhythm:

I told you I love you,
Stop drivin' me mad:
When I woke up this morning,
I never felt so bad.

A relatively minor influence on rock 'n' roll, Reed was one of the most important influences on the rhythm and blues "revival" in the midsixties.

Of all the jump combo styles, the most sophisticated was developed on the Eastern Seaboard, chiefly by Chuck Willis and Wilbert Harrison, who both tended to use more sentimental lyrics, lighter accompaniment, less emphatic beats. Willis, from Georgia, started recording for Columbia/OKeh in 1951, and had a series of hits in the rhythm and blues market until 1955, when he shifted to Atlantic and a rather different style. A songwriter with a flair for simple but evocative images comparable to the Arkansas country singer Charlie Rich, Willis's hits for OKeh included the slow ballad "My Story" and the faster "I Feel So Bad", which began typically:

The rhythm dipped and flowed with a Latin feeling, suggesting the effect a bongo player might have achieved if he had tried for a boogie rhythm. Willis's high, wailing voice was sadder and softer than any other combo singer's, but curiously became more conventional when he moved to Atlantic.

Wilbert Harrison recorded, rather unsuccessfully, for Savoy from 1952 to 1956, in a style comparable to Willis's but lacking comparably distinctive material. He had a big hit in 1959, with a relatively even-shuffle rhythm, "Kansas City", and a minor hit-ironically more like his Savoy material-in 1970, with "Let's Work Together".

Between these various performers, the different styles of combo blues suggested an almost infinite range of ways in which a boogie beat could be accommodated by a small band and reshaped to suit individual needs. But when it became necessary to present a national style of music-rock 'n' roll-many of the local interpretations were lost as musicians and their producers merged several styles into one, so that it was difficult to hear the difference in sound between the accompaniment for Larry Williams (in Hollywood) and that for Bobby Darin (in New York).

However, although it seemed that rock 'n' roll had effectively "destroyed" a valuable complex of styles, it could equally be argued that the possibilities for the style had been exhausted-that the music would have changed anyway, even if rock 'n' roll had not drawn off some of the better singers and arrangers, and made others seem oldfashioned and obsolete. As evidence that the styles that were developed during the mid-forties had run their natural course by the mid-fifties was the decline of the club blues style, which was at one time as important as the combo blues and yet declined despite having relatively little contact with the forces of rock 'n' roll.

While the jump blues served to express whatever confidence people felt on the West Coast during and after the war, the quieter club blues expressed the more dominant mood there, one tinged with despondency, equivalent to the mood of "helpless frustration" that the critic Robert Bone found in a novel set in wartime Los Angeles, If He Hollers, Let Him Go by the black author Chester Himes. Living conditions and earnings in the West Coast cities-mainly Los Angeles and Oakland-were much better than they had been in Texas, but were still much worse for blacks than for the whites working alongside them.

During the war, the migration of blacks into California outpaced the provision of special facilities for them, so that for some years they shared the nightclubs with whites. The unusual integrated audience may have encouraged the black singers to minimize the blues content of their repertoire. In any case, "cocktail" piano playing was common-pretty right-hand tinkling with a light rhythm from bass and brushed drums. The club customers didn't like their conversations to be drowned by the music, so singers and musicians had to develop a style that instilled a mood without requiring that all the words be heard.

One of the originators of the club singing style was Nat "King" Cole, who was never a blues singer but a jazz singer/pianist who gave interpretations-with no particular characteristic mood-of popular songs.

Cole was already well known as a jazz pianist when his vocal abilities were discovered in 1943. He had made records as a pianist for Excelsior and other independent labels which were distributed as jazz to both black and white markets. Cole's popularity as a singer encouraged Capitol to contract him to sing, and his relaxed style was easily accepted by the white audience familiar with the crooning styles of Crosby and Como. That Cole was a Negro was irrelevant to his style and maybe even to his appeal, although possibly he attracted some attention through "exotic" associations.

Because his style had so little to do with Negro musical traditions, Nat "King" Cole was less popular in the Negro market than he was in the white market. Throughout the forties and fifties he was one of the few black singers to be readily acceptable to record company executives, radio programmers, and middle-class record buyers. His success generated a new kind of black singer who was not in any sense a blues, or rhythm and blues singer but a straight popular music ballad singer.

When Cole moved out from the Los Angeles nightclub circuit in 1945, as his popularity grew in the rest of the country, his place as the top West Coast attraction was taken by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, featuring Charles Brown on piano and vocals. In Brown's style there was none of the self-confidence of the jump combos, the shout singers, or (yet to be discussed) the bar blues singers. Instead, there was extreme sadness, intimately expressed to the gentle accompaniment from guitar, piano, and (sometimes) saxophone. Brown exemplified the fact that to a greater extent than ever before blues singers had become narcissistically preoccupied with the depths of their misery, seemingly unable to find cause for hope or gladness.

Brown's major hit in 1945, "Drifting Blues" (Aladdin), was typical of the club blues songs:

Well, I'm driftin' and driftin'
Like a ship out on the sea. [twice]
Well I ain't got nobody
In this world to care for me.

If my baby
Would only take me back again. [twice]
Well you know I ain't good for nothin' baby,
Well I haven't got no friends.

I'll give you all my money
Tell me what more can I do? [twice]
Well you just ain't no good little girl,
But you just won't be true.

This was the first of several hits for Brown, who recorded with the Three Blazers and under his own name for Aladdin, Modern, and Exclusive. His style pervaded the West Coast club blues, notably in Floyd Dixon's similar soft dragged-out way of pronouncing words. Cecil Gant, Ivory Joe Hunter, Percy Mayfield, Johnny Ace, Jesse Belvin, and Ray Charles were all influenced to some extent by Brown, although each moved on to something different from the club blues. Gant in particular deserves comment.

Gant was a pioneer in many ways, being among the first post-war singers to mix various blues styles into his repertoire, creating one of the first "cosmopolitan" blues acts. Born in Tennessee, Gant did not begin recording until he was almost thirty-years old, at the end of World War Two. A sleeve note on one of his albums reported how his career began:

Cecil Gant's magnetic personality and tremendous appeal to any listening audience was first demonstrated at a bond rally conducted from a street platform at the corner of 9th and Broadway in Los Angeles. During an intermission in the entertainment, Private Cecil Gant requested permission from the Treasury representative, acting as master of ceremonies, to come up on the platform and play the piano. The results were electrifying and formal request by the local campaign committee was filed with Private Gant's Commanding Officer to permit him to appear at the local bondselling campaigns.

At the end of the war, Gant was contracted to the Oakland company Gilt Edge, who billed him as "The G.I. Sing-Sation". His records included light club blues material, popular ballads, and faster jump songs, in an apparent attempt to appeal to the enthusiasts of Charles Brown, Nat Cole, and Louis Jordan.

"I Wonder", released in 1945, was one of the first rhythm and blues/race records to have massive sales, not only reaching across the national Negro market but also selling well in some white districts. (According to George Leanor, who now runs One Derful Records in Chicago but who then owned a record store, it was the success of "I Wonder" that led to the subsequent creation of many of the West Coast record companies.) The song had little connection with previous forms of blues:

I wonder,
My little darlin'
Where can you be
Again tonight
While the moon
Is shinin' bright, I wonder.

After three good years on the West Coast, Gant returned to Tennessee, where he performed locally and did new versions of his old songs for Bullet in Nashville. In 1950, he signed for Decca, and in New York he recorded several fast boogie piano songs, "We're Gonna Rock", "Shotgun Boogie", and others, which had several qualities of what became known as rock 'n' roll-strong beat, simple words, and an infectiously happy mood.

Ivory Joe Hunter, also influenced by Charles Brown, had a smoother, more melodic voice than Gant, and a knack for writing memorable songs which attracted the white audience and yet stayed near enough to the blues for the Negro audience to care about him. Born in Texas, Hunter made his first records for Exclusive with Johnny Moore's Three Blazers (with whom Brown also recorded), then recorded from 1947 to 50 for King, often with Duke Ellington's sidemen, and in 1950 moved to MGM for whom he cut the millionselling "I Almost Lost My Mind". In 1954 he moved again, to Atlantic, and gave the company its first major pop hit, "Since I Met You, Baby". Compared to Nat Cole, Ivory Joe Hunter did not indulge vocal mannerisms so much, and he had a blues singer's concern for expressing his feelings. But compared to conventional blues, the feelings of Hunter's songs were sentimental, and required a rather self-pitying tone from the singer.

While both Gant and Hunter were sometimes oriented towards the white market, Percy Mayfield almost never was, and he sang blues songs, mostly written by himself, in a soft ballad style. His "Please Send Me Someone To Love" (1950) was one of the most influential songs of the time, widely recorded by other people. In a gentle, modest appeal to heaven, Mayfield expressed his understanding of the wide significance of world conflicts but could not avoid pointing out his own immediate need-for someone to love. With a rare sense of balance that entirely avoided self-conscious irony, Mayfield brilliantly evoked the common dilemma of understanding the significance of others' problems yet being unavoidably bound up in objectively lesser but privately more important personal issues. Happening to coincide with the Korean War, the record sold well over a much longer period than was the normal "lifetime" for a hit-but sold primarily in the rhythm and blues market.

Johnny Ace, Jesse Belvin, and Ray Charles (with Swingtime, 1949 to 1953) all dealt with simpler, more openly sentimental themes than this, and were among the last of the singers who directed a ballad style at the black audience. Their successors invariably adopted a strong gospel influence-as did Ray Charles himself after he moved to Atlantic in 1953.

Among the last of the regional rhythm and blues styles to be discovered and widely recorded was the bar blues styles of Mississippi towns, Memphis, and Chicago. Although nobody sang rock 'n' roll in precisely this style, there were echoes of its brash spirit both in Memphis country rock and in the styles of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

Billboard, typically quick to recognize and analyse any new trend, commented in its issue of March 15, 1952:

Among the important developments that have been taking place in the rhythm and blues field over the past year, one of the most prominent is the increasing importance of the country or southern style blues and country style singer in this market. Another noticeable aspect is the tremendous influence of r & b styles in the pop market.

At one time there was a wide gulf between the sophisticated big city blues and rocking novelties waxed for the northern market, and the country or delta blues that were popular in the southern regions. Gradually, the two forms intermingled and the country blues tune, now dressed up in arrangements palatable to both northern and southern tastes, have been appearing on disks of all r & b labels. It is true that the largest market for the country blues tune is still in the south and west, especially in places like Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans and Los Angeles, but even the northern cities have felt their influence (i.e. Detroit).

This is not to say that the majority of tunes being waxed for rhythm and blues markets are country, since the sophisticated item is still more important, but that many diskings have the country tinge. Along with this country kick, some exclusively country artists have achieved popularity of late, including Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, Muddy Waters and other [exponents of the bar blues style]. Modern Records has noted the importance of this southern country market by forming a label called Rhythm and Blues [Modern's label was called Blues and Rhythm] which is recording artists from the Delta area almost exclusively…

The influence of the r & b disks on the pop market both as tunes and artists, has been of great import over the past year. Johnnie Ray, at present a "hot" personality in the pop field, with a singing style close to r & b vocalists, sells just as well in both fields. The same can be said of Kay Starr. In addition to this many r & b ditties have become very important as pops.

Apart from noting a new trend, Billboard's comment is particularly interesting for illustrating that the practice of covering rhythm and blues records was common some time before the expression "rock 'n' roll" was coined to describe the cover records, and for identifying a recurrent tendency in the styles of black music-that as some sophisticated styles became popular with the pop music audience, other more basic styles were adopted by the black audience.

In many ways, the bar blues contradicted the qualities of other then recently popular styles. Where Charles Brown and the other club blues singers had been reticent, insecure, and dependent, the bar blues singers were boastful, confident, and self-reliant. Where the combo singers had sung to a quick, light rhythm, the bar blues singers sang to a heavy, often irregular rhythm. Where both club and combo singers had tended to have smooth, round tones, the bar blues voices were rough and apparently careless of melody.

The bar blues was the only major post-war rhythm and blues style whose origins were clearly set in pre-war styles. Several singers who recorded for RCA's Bluebird label-among them John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson and Joe Williams-used comparable intense singing styles, dense rhythms, and a similar instrumental line-up, although drums, widely used in bar blues records after 1950, were rare before the war.

Typical versions of the bar blues were developed by a number of performer/singers-harmonica players and guitarists-who moved from Mississippi (or, less often, the Houston area) to Chicago.

With one exception (the relatively lyrical Little Walter), these singers were invariably raucous in their approach to music, immediately establishing their presence through menace, humour, or celebration, and more rarely through despair. The Mississippi singers were strongly influenced by a group of friends who lived and played in the Clarksdale, Mississippi, region before the war-Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, Son House, and Robert Johnson. The rasping, intense vocal styles and the scattered, impatient rhythms, searing guitar sounds, dramatic narratives, and strutting postures had all been heard before. But now the noise was louder, the rhythms more emphatic, though hot always more regular, and the accompaniment enhanced by several instruments.

Muddy Waters seems to have been the first of the younger downhome blues singers to get recorded, when he cut some singles for Aristocrat in 1947-48. He had left the South a few years before, and worked as a semi-professional in Chicago until meeting the Chess brothers (who changed their label from Aristocrat to Chess in 1949). Muddy's early records were accompanied, in addition to his own guitar, only by piano and bass. On "Gypsy Woman", "I Can't Be Satisfied", and others, he created a jaunty, aggressive mood through his confident singing and hard, mainly single-string guitar playing.

Muddy Waters rarely "sang", but contented himself with a rough shout, spitting and muttering with a harshness which had few parallels in recorded music. In part, the rawness reflected the spirit of the bars where he formed his style, which were rowdy with the laughter, shouts, and loud conversation of the drinkers, with whose noise the band had to compete. Melody and harmony as conventionally understood were irrelevant here; the Chicago bar blues shot emotion at its audience in heavy loads.

Muddy soon became one of Aristocrat/Chess's best-selling recording artists. Through connections with the Chicago radio and club owners, Chess was able to build him into the city's leading raw blues singer, and as good musicians came North from Mississippi they were either recruited to his band or else had to compete with him. The outstanding musician who joined the Muddy Waters band was the harmonica player Little Walter, whose sharp, melodic tone contrasted brilliantly with the lower pitch of Muddy's voice and guitar. The impact of Little Walter on the band's style can be heard in the comparison between two of Muddy's best records, "Rollin' Stone" (1950) and "Hoochie Coochie Man" (1954). In both songs, Muddy boasted his prowess as a lover, but in the first his tone was relatively casual, with bass and his own guitar setting an intimate mood, whereas in the second the drummer emphasized a much louder beat and the shrill tone of Walter's harmonica, echoing every vocal phrase, made the performance much more dramatic, seeming to encourage the singing to become more aggressive.

For a while, Little Walter was a much more successful recording artist than Muddy himself, adapting to a lighter, more danceable rhythm in his own records for Checker; the all-instrumental "Juke" topped the rhythm and blues charts in 1952, and the vocal "My Babe" repeated the trick in 1955. In between, Walter recorded several other successful records, and his fluent improvizations revealed another dimension to the harmonica, which was more often used by bluesmen to repeat rhythmic riffs and provide a dynamic contrast to the other instruments in the band.

But although Little Walter was one of the best-selling recording acts among his contemporary bluesmen, he did not have the organizational ability and charisma to hold together a top-class live group, and the only real contender to Muddy Waters oh that front was Howlin' Wolf. Brought north by Chess in 1952, Wolf took several years to come to terms with the different recording conditions at Chess, where bass-player Willie Dixon ruled the roost. Eventually Wolf brought up his former guitarist Hubert Sumlin, and in 1956 they finally recaptured the kind of spirit Wolf had achieved in his Memphis recordings; "Smokestack Lightnin"' revived a guitar riff that Wolf had featured in "Crying at Daybreak", and with the improved recording facilities that sound made much more impact. At the time, it was Wolf's use of harmonica and guitar riffs which influenced his contemporaries in both rhythm and blues and pop fields, but during the sixties various white rock singers began to adopt some of his ferocious vocal mannerisms too, notably the Los Angeles singer Captain Beefheart.

Of the other bluesmen who trekked north as Chicago became the mecca for the bar blues, Sonny Boy Williamson never consistently recaptured the spirit of his best records for Trumpet, but "Don't Start Me Talkin"' was a humorous top ten rhythm and blues hit in 1955, and he settled into some easy-going grooves in the early sixties which owed something to both Booker T. and the M.G.'s and to Jimmy Reed, most effectively on "Help Me" and "Bye Bye Bird".

Elmore James went to Chicago at about the same time as Williamson, but James made his best records while he was still in the South (for Trumpet and Meteor), when his distinctive jangling guitar style was still relatively new to him and to his audience. His style was fairly simple, involving a series of crashing chords, distorted by a bottleneck held across the fret-board, above which the singer declaimed his message. James's vocal range was narrow, but his involvement convincing. His band also had the unusual addition of saxophone, which provided a nominal link with band blues styles. His standard song was "Dust My Blues", a fine hard-driving song with a more regular dance rhythm than most bar singers used, and a slide-guitar sound that was a typical feature of the British blues of the late sixties. (The song was recorded for four or five different labels, but perhaps best for Meteor, 1953.)

Probably the most atypical bar blues singer-but one of the most important-was John Lee Hooker. Hooker's style was midway between the raucous bar blues style and a smoother boogie style (which he had in common with Jimmy Reed), having the former's intensity but the latter's concern with regular rhythm.

For Hooker the blues was a medium of autobiography-as it was for many other singers, but rarely so comprehensively. Yet despite the importance to Hooker of what he was saying, the overall result was often almost unintelligible, since he was always concerned to establish a rhythm even if it meant chopping off words or phrases to get the right cadence, or if it meant drowning the words with a sharper guitar chord. Playing a minimum of chords, Hooker achieved variety through his right hand, constantly shifting pressures and strokes, merging his voice into the melodic line of an upper string. "Moanin' Blues", recorded for King in 1949, exemplified the technique, and only after repeated playing does the message itself come through:

The words are those of any blues song, and are relegated to a minor role, giving Hooker something to say while he concentrates his and the listener's attention on the mood of despair he is after. From the first play, the desperate sadness is obvious and convincing. The rhythm of the guitar and voice stops and starts, stutters, goes on again, and, through the tensions in mood which it creates, becomes the source of the song's emotional expression.

Nobody at this time was using rhythm this way, and surprisingly few people even tried. Virtually alone in his style, Hooker was the only one who could supply what its audience wanted, and he was under great demand from many record companies. Modern, who released his first record, had a nominal contract with him, which he easily evaded by adopting various pseudonyms:

I did some as Johnny Williams, I did some as Texas Slim. At that time I was hot as a fire-cracker, and they would give me big money to do some material. Use a different name. Money's pretty exciting y'know, so I was Texas Slim for King, John Lee Booker for Chance and Chess and De Luxe and Johnny Williams for Gotham and Staff.

He was also The Boogie Man for Acorn, Johnny Lee for De Luxe, and Birmingham Sam and His Magic Guitar for Regent.

Hooker's disregard for any semblance of legal niceties reflected the disregard of some company staffs for their musicians. Saul Bihari was interviewed by a Billboard reporter and explained.

We used to bring 'em in, give 'em a bottle of booze and say "Sing me a song about your girl". Or, "Sing me a song about Christmas". They'd pluck around a little on their guitars, then say "O.K." and make up a song as they went along. We'd give them a subject and off they'd go. When it came time to quit, we'd give them a wave that they had ten seconds to finish .

The blues was a product which made money if it was handled right. If singers could be persuaded to create their art for a few dollars and a jug of whiskey, there was more money left for promotion. If the singers didn't know that as composers they were entitled to royalties from sales and public performance of their songs and records, this gave the record company producers an extra source of personal income.

Ironically, as the blues began to loose popularity through the fifties, many of the new singers were as naive about their rights as were the older blues singers they replaced. Young teenagers, just out of school and sometimes still in school, glad enough to sing and live, didn't look too hard at the contracts they signed, and didn't think about the thousands of dollars they might be entitled to if they were handed one hundred in crisp new notes.

* Until 1956, there was plenty of justification for classifying the Negro market separately. The black audience was interested almost solely in black singers. Only five records by white singers reached rhythm and blues top ten lists 1950-55, and three of those were rock 'n' roll records-Bill Haley's "Dim Dim the Lights" and "Rock Around the Clock", and Boyd Bennett's "Seventeen". (The others were Johnnie Ray's "Cry" and Les Paul and Mary Ford's "How High the Moon".) Few white singers had either the interest or the cultural experience to try to appeal to the black audience's taste-until, that is, rock 'n 'roll brought a new kind of singer into recording studios.

** There has been a curious tendency-as Charles Keil noted in a witty paragraph in Urban Blues for blues followers of the late fifties and the sixties to devote most of their attention to unsophisticated, "country" forms of blues at the expense of the slicker city blues. Recently, city bluesmen, such as B. B. King and Albert King have been better appreciated, as the audiences's interest has extended to include virtually every rhythm and blues singer who played a guitar. But at the time of this writing, there still is relatively little interest in men who played no instrument but merely sang in front of a band, and little interest too in men, who played the blues on saxophone, both sang and played the saxophone, or whose instrumental accompaniment was supplied by piano and saxophones rather than the currently favoured harmonica and guitar.