Rhythm & blues emerged from the African American group within the past due Forties to develop into the driver in American well known tune over the following half-century. even supposing also known as "doo-wop," "soul," "funk," "urban contemporary," or "hip-hop," R&B is admittedly an umbrella type that incorporates all of those types and genres. it truly is actually a modern day incarnation of a musical culture that stretches again to nineteenth-century the United States, or even additional to African beginnings.

The New Blue tune: alterations in Rhythm & Blues, 1950-1999 strains the advance of R&B from 1950 to 1999 by means of heavily examining the head twenty-five songs of every decade. The tune of artists as wide-ranging as Louis Jordan; John Lee Hooker; Ray Charles; James Brown; Earth, Wind & hearth; Michael Jackson; Public Enemy; Mariah Carey; and Usher takes middle level because the writer illustrates how R&B has not just retained its conventional center variety, yet has additionally skilled a "re-Africanization" through the years.

By investigating musical parts of shape, sort, and content material in R&B―and delivering quite a few musical examples―the e-book exhibits the relationship among R&B and other kinds of yankee well known and spiritual tune, akin to spirituals, ragtime, blues, jazz, state, gospel, and rock 'n' roll. With this proof in hand, the writer hypothesizes the life of a fair better musical "super-genre" which he labels "The New Blue Music."