Overview
While white audiences were listening to the sounds of Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and Perry Como in the 1940s and 1950s, black listeners were consuming gospel music, doo-wop, and rhythm and blues. Although all of these genres are related to earlier styles of African American music, such as the blues, ragtime, and jazz, they all have specific features that make them unique. Technological advances in recording and broadcasting made it easier and easier to access music. As we will see, there were no color lines on the radio, which meant that white listeners began listening to rhythm and blues.
Objectives
- Identify several important types of African American music from the early part of the twentieth century, including gospel music, doo-wop, and rhythm and blues
- Examine genres of African American music and their distinct musical style and social function
- Examine the enormous appeal of rhythm and blues music with white audience and how this music became the foundation of rock and roll
From Gospel to Rhythm and Blues
One of the first artists to move freely between gospel music and rhythm and blues and achieve commercial success was Ray Charles. Charles lost his sight at age seven to a rare form of childhood glaucoma. He studied music in Florida at the St. Augustine School for the Blind, and he learned to read and write music in Braille. When his parents died, he left school at age sixteen to make it on his own as a musician. Wrapping the sounds and rhythms of black gospel music around traditional secular lyrics made Ray Charles one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. He used jazz-style horn riffs in many of his arrangements. He was among the first musicians to use the Fender Rhodes electric piano. He joined a hillbilly band for a short time and learned how to yodel.
He formed a female backup group called the Raelets, and they served as the model for later girl groups such as the Supremes. Charles had a strong and unmistakable style of his own—a raspy, passionate, gospel-soaked, oratorical delivery.
In 1952, Charles signed with Atlantic and began recording songs that freely blended gospel with rhythm and blues. Although some listeners were shocked at Charles’s combination of sacred and secular genres into this new style of gospel blues, he saw no reason to separate the two styles of music. In his autobiography, he wrote, "I’d been singing spirituals since I was three, and I’d been hearing the blues for just as long. So, what could be more natural than to combine them?" Charles’s combinations often took the form of adapting the melodies and lyrics of gospel songs into electrifying rhythm and blues numbers. He converted "Talkin’ ‘bout Jesus" to "Talkin' Bout You ♫" and "I Got a Savior" to "I Got a Woman ♫." "This Little Light of Mine" became "This Little Girl of Mine ♫." In "I Got a Woman ♫" (1954), Charles adapted the lyrics of the gospel song "I Got a Savior" and borrowed the melody and harmonic progressions from the Southern Tones’ gospel recording "Must Be Jesus ♫."
Charles added electric instruments, secular lyrics, and a high-energy performing style to his gospel sources. Charles has sometimes been called the greatest gospel singer alive, but he actually never recorded a straightforward gospel song. This hybridity of gospel and rhythm and blues is nowhere more apparent than in "What'd I Say ♫" from 1959, complete with moaning that treads the line between religious ecstasy and sexual delight. The frenzied music that builds to a fever pitch would be right at home in a religious service, and the groaned call and response passages between Charles and his backup singers are just as suited to a rhythm and blues recording as they are in a gospel song.
