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Rhythm & Blues Timeline
1877 Invention of the Phonograph
1896 Jim Crow Segregation laws
1908 Introduction of 2-sided records
Black Diaspora from the south
Blues formatted as 8 or 12 bar chorus
1920 1st American Radio Station
1922-7 Boom in sales of radios
1925 New electrical recording process
1925 78rpm record standardized
1927 Lindy-hop introduced
1931 Invention of the Microphone
1932-42 Bluebird Records
1933 Repeal of Prohibition Act
1935 Mass-production of Jukeboxes
1938 1st recording of the electric guitar
1938 Spirituals To Swing Concerts
1942 AFM Musicians strike
1942 Billboard Harlem Hit Parade
1942 US entry into Second World War
1944 Louis Jordan #1 in pop charts
1945 End of Second World War
1946 1st mass-produced TV sets
1948 WDIA 1st black radio station
1948 Columbia unveils 33rpm LP
1949 Billboard Rhythm & Blues Chart
1949 RCA introduces 45rpm vinyl
1950 Introduction of 45rpm Jukebox
1950 Sun Records
1952 Black radio reaches white teenagers
1954 Mambo craze in America
1954 Dec Alan Freed’s Rock’n’Roll Show
1955 Growth of civil rights movement
1958 1st stereo record release
1963 Martin Luther King March on Washington
1963 Billboard suspends R&B chart
1964 Civil Rights Act
The History Of Rhythm And Blues
The History of Rhythm and Blues comes in four box sets, each comprising four CDs, with every track and artist annotated in detail in the richly informative, splendidly illustrated booklets that come with each set. This is a labour of love, and a work of genuine scholarship, but it is also hugely entertaining. I have been listening to almost nothing else for the past fortnight but still feel I am only scratching the surface of a wonderfully rich treasure trove. Throughout, famous names and familiar songs are mixed with the rare and unexpected, but what makes these sets so special is that they aren’t a dry and dusty exercise in musical archaeology.
Charles Spencer – The Spectator
The History Of Rhythm And Blues
Rhythm and Blues has become one of the most identifiable art-forms of the C20th, with an enormous influence on the development of both the sound and attitude of modern music. But it wasn’t always that way. The History of Rhythm and Blues series of box sets investigates the accidental synthesis of jazz, gospel, blues, ragtime, Latin, country and pop into a definable form of black music, which in turn would influence pretty well all popular music from the 1950s to the present.
The hardships of segregation caused by the Jim Crow laws caused a cultural revolution within Afro-American society. New forms of music arose: spirituals, ragtime, barrelhouse, jazz and the blues. From its humble rural beginnings in the early 1900s as a method of self-expression in the southern states, the blues gradually became a form of public entertainment in juke joints and dance halls picking up new rhythms along the way.
Between 1910 and 1970, nearly five million African Americans left the South for northern cities, looking for higher wages, better homes and political rights. The route they took was determined largely by the price of the cheapest rail ticket. It was the move to the city, which brought the increase in popularity for the blues, and it was the technologies of sound recording, the radio and the jukebox that helped to define its structure. A new form of commercial dance music was born – Rhythm and Blues.
The History of Rhythm and Blues series of box sets will appeal to anyone interested in the evolution of the blues, or simply curious as to how the sounds of today continue to be shaped and forged by this music from the early C20th.
Ring Shouts and Hollers
Ragtime and Cakewalk
New Orleans Bands
Folk Blues
Delta Blues
Texas Blues
Boogie Woogie Piano
Guitar evangelists
Urban songsters
Jug Bands
Gospel Quartets
Black Harmony Groups
Harlem Jive
Swing Jazz
Country Blues
Urban Blues
Swing Boogie
Blues Shouters
California Club Blues
Hillbilly Boogie
Jump Blues
Gospel/Secular Vocals
Jubilee/Secular Groups
Honking Saxophone
Downhome Blues
New Orleans Piano
Rockabilly
Doo-Wop
R&B Vocal Groups
Rock’n’roll
Electric Chicago Blues
Memphis Blues
Uptown R&B
Motown & Stax
Rockin’ Instrumentals
British R&B & Blues
Modern Blues