The History of R&B

The "Rhythm & Blues" term was created to replace the designation "race music," which until then was the standard catch-all phrase used in reference to most music made by blacks at the time.

After the "race music" term was deemed offensive, Billboard began using the Rhythm & Blues name that Wexler created.

In the 1950s, Rhythm and Blues music was associated with black youth in honky-tonks and after-hours clubs, and it was often dismissed as a lowbrow style of art compared to Jazz's more highbrow form of black expression.

By the 1970s, the term rhythm and blues expanded to become a blanket term that included both soul and funk forms of music. And today, the term can be used to loosely define most sung African-American urban music.

R&B

Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated as R&B or RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that
originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands usually consisted of piano, one or two guitars, bass, drums, saxophone, and sometimes background vocalists. R&B lyrical themes often encapsulate the African-American experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy. Lyrics focus heavily on the themes of triumphs and failures in terms of relationships, freedom, economics, aspirations.