Aural History: The Inextricable Ties Between Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll
Popular music’s defined categories are not simply Black and white.
Written by Carys Anderson
Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston. Photo Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.
“The blues had an illegitimate baby and we named it rock and roll,” Little Richard once said. As one of the first rock and roll artists, he would know — rock music is simply rhythm and blues sped up. “Rocket 88,” the 1951 single written by Ike Turner and sung by Jackie Brenston, is considered the first rock song, and remnants of the blues’ slow swing are still present. Joe Turner’s 1954 song “Shake, Rattle and Roll” has the same groove and the same euphemistic language that associated rock and roll with sex in the first place. Bill Haley and His Comets made a hit out of the song that same year, offering a faster cover with cleaner lyrics — and sung by a white person. Thus began the tradition of white artists repurposing the grooves of Black artists to sell to a greater audience. Sam Phillips signed Elvis to Sun Records for this very reason.
Rock and roll as we know it may have been borne from The King, but Little Richard and Chuck Berry were some of the first artists to play music notably different than R&B. Richard’s raspy squeal and Berry’s guitar-playing have been imitated countless times over. The British Invasion introduced The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and ushered in a new era of rock music usually more sophisticated than the motifs of teenage love and car that took over 1950s music. But these artists were still heavily influenced by Black Americans. “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry,’” John Lennon once said.
British young men’s fascination with the music of Black Americans has long been a Pandora’s Box of curiosity. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards bonded by spinning records by Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry, and enlisted Black women like Merry Clayton as backup singers to lend the “soulful” sound they so desperately wanted in their music but couldn’t create themselves. While these artists have long credited their inspirations, Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, have faced many a lawsuit for brazenly lifting ideas from underappreciated Black artists.
Chuck Berry and Mick Jagger. Photo courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
As rock became “white,” it splintered off into a range of subgenres, along the way losing sight and sound of its R&B roots. The bare-bones fury and instrumentation of punk rock is perhaps the epitome of the two genres’ tendencies to separate themselves — in the same era, said white rock fans vocally despised disco, the newest “Black” genre at the time. This animosity culminated in the Disco Demolition Night of 1979, in which rock fans stormed Chicago’s Comiskey Park field to burn disco records.
Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance-y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing — other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. And who else to produce Villains than Mark Ronson, the man behind the grooves of Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” and Amy Winehouse’s album Back to Black? Similarly, Billie Joe Armstrong has promoted Green Day’s upcoming album Father of All Motherf------ as inspired by rapper Kendrick Lamar and Motown, a record label known for promoting Black artists. His falsetto and handclaps on the album’s early offerings “Father of All…” and “Fire, Ready, Aim” seem to be proof of his current listening trends.
At the same time, inspiration flows both ways. Lil Nas X has become an admired example of breaking through genre boundaries in 2019 — not just for combining rap and country, but rap and rock as well. His song “Panini” interpolates the vocal melody of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” (apparently accidentally — that melody is now ubiquitous). The songs share a vocal melody in their choruses. Beyonce’s inclusion of artists like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Jack White come to mind as well, from her take on the former’s song “Maps” in “Hold Up” to her seething collaboration with the latter in “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” The latter track also samples Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” — itself originally the work of blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. Full circle!
The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of America’s most marginalized and most talented. As the industry reaches an era of fluidity once again, remembering popular music’s roots makes for a more enriching and accurate listening experience.
This article was added to Aural History after its publication, upon the creation of the Aural History series.