Section 1.7
R&B before 1945
Race records, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, jump blues.
R&B names a market first: Black makers, Black primary buyers—with wide musical range underneath. Post-1945 charts make the split obvious: pop is the big board; C&W and R&B are specialty boards. Older trade labels (Hillbilly, Race) were racist in wording; the industry used them as jukebox/retail weather reports, not fan magazines.
W.C. Handy sold blues as sheet music before WWI (*Memphis Blues*, *St. Louis Blues*). 1920s race records crown Bessie Smith—*Down Hearted Blues* (1923) moves a million, polished rather than purely “raw Delta.” Field trips then surface rural/Delta players; Robert Johnson (dead 1938) is the mythic solo guitar case—*Cross Road Blues* is the rock-history required listen (Cream/Clapton later). The crossroads-soul bargain is folklore; the guitar vocabulary is not.
1940s Jump Blues shrinks big-band brass into small combos. Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five crossover hard: *Caldonia* (1945), *Choo Choo Ch'Boogie* (1946) land on both R&B and pop charts.