At last the music has a name! Billboard staff writer and future Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler renamed the Harlem Hit Parade the Rhythm & Blues Chart in 1949. This new name was infinitely better suited to describe the new rhythmic style of records being released by those record companies specialising in black music, and it has been in use now for well over fifty years. Race and then sepia had previously been the rather insensitive terms applied by the record industry to all forms of music produced by black artists for a black audience, which at the time encompassed blues, jazz, sacred and novelty music. As well as being a more accurate way of describing the nature of the new music, rhythm and blues had the added benefit of shedding the racial connotations of the earlier generic descriptions. Critic Roy Bainton of Blues Matters on the first two volumes of this series ‘You might think that when you’ve been around for a long time and love music as much as we all do at Blues Matters, that we might become a little blasé receiving CDs to review. You’d be wrong…This is a staggering project, a sheer delight…You can stick a pin in anywhere and come up with a gem of a recording. What these records will present to even the most avid R&B aficionado is a revelation… lifting the lid on a buried treasure chest of arcane recordings, all in a style decades ahead of their time… Every one of these tracks is utterly satisfying. If you’re a true R&B fan, you will not experience a finer collection this year or any other. Exhilarating, educational, historical, but above all, extremely musical, a complete evening’s unforgettable R&B entertainment on 8 packed disks. Think you know your blues history? Think again. As this has taught me, you’re never too old to learn.’
