In the early decades of the twentieth century—the era of The New Yorker’s founding—minstrel shows cast a long shadow: white critics and audiences viewed black performers primarily as entertainers, rather than artists or musicians. Rejecting this role meant resisting a series of externally imposed categories that would continue to limit black musicians to “entertainment,” as opposed to art.” Saxophonist Sidney Bechet called jazz “a name the white people have given to the music.” For drummer Max Roach, the word called to mind “small dingy places, the worst kind of salaries and conditions that one can imagine… the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.”
Even as classifications like “jazz” and “bebop” kept black musicians and their work out of conservatories and concert halls, the same terms were exploited to boost record and ticket sales. At their outset in the 1920s and ’30s, record companies began marketing white artists on their main labels and black artists in “race catalogues” on subsidiary labels. When Duke Ellington—now recognized as one of the great composers and orchestrators of the last century—wanted to employ a symphony orchestra for the record Night Creature, executives told him he couldn’t work “out of his category.”
In 1949, Billboard editor Jerry Wexler coined the term “Rhythm & Blues” to replace “Race Music” as the descriptor for records by black artists. He went on to partner with Atlantic Records, where the rebranded “R&B” made the music more palatable to white audiences. The Grammys and Billboard still follow this racial split: “R&B” lives on, grouped today on the Billboard charts with another “race” category: hip-hop.
Today, “R&B” is no less restrictive than its more explicitly racialized forebears. Look back no further than 2019, when the artist Lil Nas X’s song “Old Town Road” hit the Billboard “Hot Country Songs” and “Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs” charts at the same time. Instead of acknowledging the emergence of what some called “country rap,” or more specifically, “country trap”—or rethinking its classification system in any way—Billboard simply removed the song from its country charts, claiming that “Old Town Road” did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” As Lil Nas X argued, “The song is country trap. It’s not one, it’s not the other. It’s both. It should be on both.”
Although “R&B” and “country” persist in mainstream culture and the still profoundly segregated music industry, academic research continues to confirm that these categories have little to do with the actual lineage of twentieth-century American music. Among scholars, the myth of a clear racial boundary between “R&B” and “country” has dissolved amid new recognition that black people and black music exerted critical influence on the origins of what we call “country.”