Rhythm and Blues

Catch-all phrase denoting black pop of various eras; applies to anything from Louis Jordan, to Johnny Otis, to Motown, to funk, to whatever crap BET is foisting upon your telly. It bears watching/listening/studying, as black music has traditionally been the Olduvai Gorge of American pop, even as it's been the sonic ghetto of yanqui apartheid.

Recommended: Charlie Gillett's book The Sound of the City or any of Nelson George's writings on music.

Originally called race music, R&B is the more politically correct term (and the more accurate one, as well, since white people can make rhythm and blues just as black people can). Sub-genres of R&B are soul and funk, which are covered in other nodes.

"Rhythm and Blues" is a term for a musical style. It is sometimes called "R&B" for short. As mkb points out, the term arose because the music features a rhythm section supporting a blues-based melody. Nowadays, term has been debased so as to become almost useless by its application to a large number of very different genres which are only vaguely related.

There seem to be several categories of use.

• 1940's African-American music; all of it except Jazz and Gospel, really. The term R&B was used as an alternative to "Race Music". It included pure Blues, Boogie-woogie and ballad crooners like the Ink Spots. If it wasn't performed by whites, and you didn't know what else to call it, you called it R&B. I think this is how the term "Urban" is abused today.
• The Stax, Motown or Philly sound; Al Green, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, The Dells and the like. The term was now applied to this narrower genre.
• British Rock of the 60s; Including The Who, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks. (The Who have a boxed set called "30 Years of Maximum R&B"). There is little similarity between the rock sound of this genre and the sounds of the above genres- yet they have an identical name.
• Big Band Boogie-Woogie- like Jools Holland's Rhythm and Blues Orchestra. This seems to be an isolated one-off, with no connection to other R&B forms.
• Contemporary popular forms; Destiny's Child, Mary J. Blige et al. Aficionados of all the above forms hate this usage.

Whilst looking through the Internet for the above info, I spotted the terms "Rock R&B" and "Soul R&B" in the google cache. The site that used them no longer does. I think that these terms are more descriptive and should be preferred, especially when discussing the history of popular music.