Rhythm'n'Blues Music History

The blues was mutating according to the changing social and artistic landscape. The 32 beats of white pop music, the dramatic emphasis of gospel singers, the heavy rhythm of jump blues, the tight brassy riffs of swing orchestras, the witty attitude of minstrel shows, all had a role in making blues music more malleable and entertaining. Transplanted in the dancehalls, the juke joints and the vaudeville theaters, blues music became energetic and exuberant. Form (arrangement, rhythm and vocal style) began to prevail over content (message and emotion). While the lyrics were still repeating the traditional themes of segregation, the music was largely abandoning its original traits.
 A new style was born in New York thanks to saxophonist, vocalist and bandleader Louis Jordan, who became one of the best-selling artists of his time. Jordan (who had inherited a band in 1938) shrank down the size of swing's orchestras, emphasized the dance rhythm (the "shuffle"), sharpened the sax and trumpet counterpoint, and sang the hardship of black life in a detached (almost ironic) tone. His Tympany Five, that ranged from five to nine members, penned At The Swing Cats Ball (1939), Fore Day Blues (1939) and Somebody Done Hoodooed the Hoodoo Man (1940) before becoming hit makers with Outskirts Of Town (1941), Five Guys Named Joe (1942), Is You Is (1944), Caldonia (1945), Stone Cold Dead In The Market (1945), a duet with jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, Choo Choo Ch'Boogie (1946), the multi-million seller that changed the history of black music, Beans and Cornbread (1947). These songs defined "jump Blues", the uptempo, jazz-tinged style of blues that ruled the race charts after the war. Jordan was the link between blues, jazz and rock music. Few people noticed it, but Carl Hogan played a powerful guitar riff on Jordan's Ain't That Just Like a Woman (1945) that, ten years later, would make Chuck Berry's fortune.
Another intermediary between the swing orchestra and the jump-blues combo was Erskine Hawkins, who straddled the border between jazz and blues in Tuxedo Junction (1939), After Hours (1941), Tippin' In (1945).
New Orleans' barrelhouse piano blues survived in the early cuts of pianist Jack Dupree, Dupree Shake Dance (1941) and the drug song Junker Blues (1941).
Surprisingly, World War II fostered a boom of "race" music that enabled a more effective distribution of black music. It was during the war, in 1941, that a radio station in Arkansas (KFFA) hired Sonny Boy Williamson to advertise groceries, the first case of mass exposure by blues singers. It was during and right after the war that the growing business of "race" music spawned several labels (all of them founded and run by white people) devoted only to black music, such as Savoy, founded in 1942 in Newark (New Jersey) by Herman Lubinsky, King, founded in 1944 in Cincinnati (Ohio) by Syd Nathan, Atlantic, founded in 1947 in New York by songwriter Ahmet Ertegun, and Aristocrat, founded in 1947 in Chicago by by two Polish Jews, Phil and Leonard Chess.