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.