From Jump Blues to Doo-Wop
Postwar urban and gospel inflected recordings grow in popularity

R&B, as the “rhythm and blues” genre came to be known, was a loose cluster of styles, rooted in southern folk traditions and shaped by the experience of returning military personnel and hundreds of thousands of black Americans who had migrated to urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles during and just after World War II.

The top R&B recordings of the late 1940s and early 1950s included swing-influenced “jump bands,” Tin Pan Alley-style love songs performed by crooners, various styles of urban blues, and gospel-influenced vocal harmony groups. The reappearance of small independent record labels provided an outlet for performers who were ignored by major record companies. The development of portable tape recorders made record producers and studio owners out of entrepreneurs who could not previously have afforded the equipment necessary to produce master recordings. They visited nightclubs to find new talent, hustled copies of their records to local record store owners, and attempted to interest a major label in a particular recording or artist with crossover potential. By 1951 there were over 100 independent labels slugging it out for a piece of the R&B market.

Jump Blues
Small rhythm and horn driven jump bands achieve early success

Jump blues, the first commercially successful category of rhythm & blues, flourished during and just after World War II. During the war, as shortages made it more difficult to maintain a lucrative touring schedule, the leaders of some big bands were forced to downsize. They formed smaller combos, generally made up of a rhythm section and horn players. These jump bands specialized in hard-swinging, boogie-woogie-based party music, spiced with humorous lyrics and wild stage performances.

The most successful and influential jump band was the Tympany Five, led by Louis Jordan, who began making recordings for Decca Records in 1939. Jordan was tremendously popular with black listeners and able to build an extensive white audience during and after the war.

Jordan’s first big hit, “G.I. Jive,” reached Number One on Billboard’s “Harlem Hit Parade,” as the R&B chart was labeled in the earlier 1940s, held the top spot on the pop music charts for two weeks, and sold over a million copies. From 1945 through 1948 Jordan, working with a white record producer named Milt Gabler, recorded a string of crossover hits, including “Caldonia,” “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” and “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens.” The popularity of the Tympany Five was reinforced by a series of films featuring the band. These short musical features were rented to individual movie theaters and shown as a promotional device a few days before the band was due to hit town. Jordan’s films, like his records, were popular in white as well as black movie theaters, even in the Deep South. However, the fact that his music appealed to an interracial audience should not lead us to assume that Jordan’s career was unaffected by racism.

As R&B artists like Jordan began to attract a more diverse audience, the separation between white and black fans was maintained in various ways. Sometimes white R&B fans sat in the balcony of a segregated theater or dance hall, watching the black dancers below in order to pick up the latest steps. At other times a rope was stretched across the middle of the dance floor to “maintain order.” Then, as at other times, the circulation of popular music across racial boundaries did not necessarily signify an amelioration of racism in everyday life.
 

R&B, urban blues, and early rock 'n' roll artists, all built upon Louis Jordan’s work.
 

Blues Crooners
Smooth, laid-back blues singers forge a blues crooner style

If jump bands represented the hot end of the R&B spectrum, the cool end was dominated by a blend of blues and pop singing sometimes called the blues crooner style. The roots of this urbane approach to the blues reached back to a series of race recordings (records made by and for African Americans, including especially those who had joined the “Great Migration” to northern cities but wished to enjoy the Southern-flavored African-American music they had grown up with) made in the late 1920s and 1930s by pianist Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Carr developed a smooth, laid-back approach to blues singing that contrasted sharply with the rough-edged rural blues recordings of Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he attracted a national black audience. The late 1930s jazz recordings of the King Cole Trio, with its instrumentation of piano, bass, and guitar, were a more immediate influence on postwar blues crooners, although Cole’s later recordings took him well into the pop mainstream.

The most successful blues crooner of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a soft-spoken Texas-born pianist and singer named Charles Brown. Brown, who studied classical piano as a child, moved to Los Angeles in 1943 and joined Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, a small combo that played pop songs for all-white parties in Hollywood and a more blues-oriented repertoire in the black nightclubs along L.A.’s Central Avenue. His smooth, sensitive, somewhat forlorn vocal style attracted attention, and he began to develop a national reputation with the release of “Drifting Blues.” In 1948 Brown left to form his own quartet and had a Number One R&B hit the following year with “Trouble Blues.” Over the next three years he recorded 10 Top 10 hits for Aladdin Records and became one of the most popular R&B singers nationwide. A handsome, dapper, gracious man, Brown projected an image of ease and sophistication. His repertoire – which included blues, pop songs, and semiclassical numbers such as the Warsaw Concerto – suggested a man in touch with his roots but not constrained by them. Brown was never able to break through to the pop charts – Columbia Records offered him a solo contract in 1947, but he turned it down out of loyalty to his bandmates. But he was rediscovered by a new generation of R&B fans in the 1980s and went on to develop a successful international touring career, culminating in a Grammy nomination.
 

Charles Brown, the most successful blues crooner of the later 1940s and early 1950s.
 

Chicago Electric Blues
Mississippi Delta traditions updated for an electric, industrial age

A very different urban blues tradition of the postwar era, Chicago electric blues, derived more directly from the Mississippi Delta tradition of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. Chicago was the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad line, which ran up through the Midwest from the Mississippi Delta. Although Chicago’s black neighborhoods were well established before World War II, they grew particularly rapidly during the 1940s, as millions of rural migrants came north in search of employment in the city’s industrial plants, railroad shops, and slaughterhouses. The South Side’s nightclubs were the center of a lively black music scene that rivaled New York’s Harlem and L.A.’s Central Avenue. The musical taste of black Chicagoans, many of them recent migrants from the Deep South, tended toward rougher, grittier styles, closely linked to African-American folk traditions but also reflective of their new, urban orientation.

Chicago electric blues was a response to these demands. It could be argued that the rural blues tradition had almost completely died out as a commercial phenomenon by the time of World War II, as the urbanizing black audience sought out more cosmopolitan forms of entertainment. From this point of view, the mid-1930s recordings of Robert Johnson represent the final flowering of the Delta blues. However, the old Delta blues style didn’t really die out; it emerged in a reinvigorated, electronically amplified form. The career of Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) exemplifies these developments. Waters was “discovered” in the Mississippi Delta by the folk music scholars John and Alan Lomax, who recorded him in the late 1930s for the Library of Congress. In 1943 he moved to Chicago and found work in a paper mill, while continuing to work as a musician at nightclubs and parties. In response to the noisy crowds, and to the demand for dance music, Waters soon switched from the acoustic to the electric guitar (1944) and eventually expanded his group to include a second electric guitar, piano, bass, amplified harmonica, and drum set. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he was the most popular blues musician in Chicago, with a sizeable following among black listeners nationwide.

Like many of the great Mississippi guitarists, Waters was a master of bottleneck slide guitar technique. He used his guitar to create a rock-steady, churning rhythm, interspersed with blues licks, which were counterpoised with his voice in a kind of musical conversation. The electric guitar, which could be used to create dense, buzzing tone colors (by using distortion) and long sustained notes that sounded like screaming or crying (by employing feedback), was the perfect tool for extending the Mississippi blues guitar tradition. Waters’s singing style – rough, growling, moaning, and intensely emotional – was also rooted in the Delta blues. And the songs he sang were based on themes long central to the tradition: on the one hand, loneliness, frustration, and misfortune, and on the other, independence and sexual braggadocio.
 

Muddy Waters, the leader of the 1950s Chicago blues scene, influenced artists from R&B to country.
 

Doo-Wop
R&B vocal harmony groups blended black church and secular traditions

Another important thread in the tapestry of postwar rhythm & blues was vocal harmony groups. (Although this tradition is today sometimes called “doo-wop,” the earliest performers did not use this term.) During the postwar era, young singers trained in the black church began to record secular material. Many of these vocal groups were made up of secondary school kids from the black neighborhoods of cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., and interviews with the singers indicate that these groups served a number of functions: a means of musical expression, an alternative or adjunct to urban gangs, and a route to popularity. Few members of these groups initially saw singing as a way to make a living; this perception changed rapidly after the first vocal R&B groups achieved commercial success.

The vocal harmony group most responsible for moving away from the pop-oriented sound of the Mills Brothers and creating a new, harder-edged sound more closely linked to black gospel music, was the Dominoes, led by vocal coach Billy Ward, a strict disciplinarian and savvy entrepreneur. In 1950 Ward started rehearsing with a number of his most promising students and a 17-year-old tenor singer named Clyde McPhatter, whom he hired away from a gospel group. The Dominoes’ first big hit was “Sixty Minute Man.” But it was the Dominoes’ next big hit, “Have Mercy Baby,” that pushed vocal-group R&B firmly in the direction of a harder-edged, more explicitly emotional sound. “Have Mercy Baby” was the first record to combine the 12-bar blues form and the driving beat of dance-oriented rhythm & blues with the intensely emotional flavor of black gospel singing. The song’s commercial success was due to the passionate performance of Clyde McPhatter. McPhatter, the son of a Baptist preacher and a church organist, was like many other R&B musicians insofar as the black church played a major role in shaping his musical sensibility. While in formal terms “Have Mercy Baby” is a 12-bar blues, it is essentially a gospel performance dressed up in R&B clothing. With a few changes in the lyrics, McPhatter’s performance would have been perfectly at home in a black Baptist church anywhere in America.

To be sure, this mixing of church music with popular music was controversial in some quarters, and McPhatter and later gospel-based R&B singers faced occasional opposition from some church leaders. But in retrospect the postwar confluence of the sacred and secular aspects of black music, and its commercial exploitation by the music business, seem inevitable. Although it did not appear on the pop music charts, “Have Mercy Baby” attracted an audience among many white teenagers, who were drawn by its rocking beat and emotional directness. In addition, the Dominoes were featured on some of the earliest rock ’n’ roll tours, which typically attracted a racially mixed audience. Although McPhatter soon left the Dominoes to form a new group called the Drifters, the impact of his rendition of “Have Mercy Baby” was profound and lasting – the record is a direct predecessor of the soul music movement of the 1960s, and of the recordings of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin.
 

The Flamingos, a popular 1950s doo-wop group.