When: 1943 Super Genre: R&B Description: “(Jump) Blues dramatically changed when the band stopped being an anonymous whole but received a face: the frontman, the singer/songwriter. The moment black musicians stepped forward with their own music, driven by a powerful and driven backbeat, it quickly was discarded as something vile, not meant for “decent, white people”. The previous term for R&B, “Race Music”, already made that very clear. Race Music was a Billboard category reserved for Blues music, as Jazz and Gospel also featured white musicians. Such outspoken racism was put to a halt in 1948, with the replacement of the term by “Rhythm and Blues”, abbreviated as R&B. Thus at first R&B was seen as synonymous with Blues, but it quickly developed into a separate style. True R&B (from the forties, as the term received a new meaning at the end of the century) had very few instruments, similar to Gospel. Melodies became shorter and more repetitive like riffs, and a stea...