What's the difference between Rhythm & Blues and The Blues?
My husband asked me that (now that because I spend all my hours here at this site learning I'm supposed to know how to answer any question on the blues. HA!) This is the best simple answer that I could come up with that I gave to him through email:Rhythm and Blues is a mixture of lots of different styles including jazz, blues, gospel, pop and rock. Blues is the slave music of the American South. Field chants mixed with gospel and some country. As the blues moved up to places like Chicago after WWI, it changed a lot adding in the electrification and swag of white men with money which lead up to the rhythm and blues. R&B is more instrumental and the old fashioned Blues usually has someone singing about their sad fate or playing their harmonica about it. When blues musicians add too much jazz or too much aggression (those nasty spitting and coughing sounds I told you about rather than just the moaning sounds), I don't like it nearly as much. [That's just my little personal opinion I told the hubbie.]Being a beginner in the genre of the blues, I'm going to post this question on the blues harmonica forum and see if other think my definitions are correct - or even in the ball park. I "should" be able to answer such an easy question! Did I get that at all right?
That makes sense. Thank you for that Winslow and...
Was what I wrote the hubbie also correct?
What you wrote is much more concise I think. I really like having the simplicity of "R&B is black music from 1950 to 1980" and there's some overlap.
Much easier to remember. :)
When do you think the blues actually came into being? I read something about 1910???
Something just hit me. My grandfather was a professional harmonica player back in the 1920's through the 50's in New York. His name was Humel. Piano too. I wish so bad now that I could pick his brains!
R&B is a more vague term that just blues, as it's a catch-all for black popular music from roughly 1950 to 1980, evolving along the way into categories such as soul and Motown in the 1960s and "urban" in the 1980s. Sometimes in the 1950s it just meant black rock&roll - Little Richard was R&B while Elvis Presley was rock.
Otis Redding: R&B/soul
Stevie Wonder: R&B/Motown.
A lot of 1950s R&B was very close to blues. You could argue that Jimmy Reed was an R&B artist with songs like Honest I Do; at that time there was significant overlap.