3 Decades Of R&B, Vol. 1

Rhythm and blues evolved throughout the last century to its current form. Emerging from the juke joints and the dancehalls of America, acts began to be recorded and have their renown spread beyond the local area. In this compilation are twenty tracks which can be classed as Rhythm and Blues (R&B), as far from its current chart pop form as possible.

Pioneers of the genre are among the tracks, including guitarist and bluesman Bo Diddley, whose eponymous track joins ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ by the Flamingos as among those which stand up half a century after their initial recording. It has been covered by Doris Day, Cliff Richard and Lionel Hampton, whose own ‘Hey! Ba-ba-re-bop’ also features here with its call-and-response catcalls reminding one of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, who would both be heavily influenced by the R&B sounds they heard in their youth.

An R&B song that would have a life thanks to Dave Edmunds’ successful cover, Smiley Lewis’ ‘I Hear You Knocking’ has that feisty spirit of many R&B records of the time, Smiley shooing a girl away who keeps knocking at his door (today she’d be bombarding him with instant messages!). A similar song that has a singer claim “Bye bye baby!” is Lloyd Price’s ‘Lawdy Miss Claudy’, given a white-boy makeover by Elvis Presley. Fellas seem to stand up for themselves in masculine R&B…

As for the R&B girls, Carla Thomas’ ‘Gee Whiz’ is a sweet song about a girl enraptured with the sight of a boy (“I love that fella so…”), and you can draw a direct line to Sixties girl groups like The Ronnettes and The Shirelles with that same emotion of yearning (“I could say ‘I love you’ but all I can say is ‘Gee Whiz!'”). Faye Adams (‘Shake a Hand’) is one of the girls who may well have accosted Lloyd or Smiley, and with a voice like hers it would be hard to avoid her advances, and the sassy Mable Scott sings an ‘Elevator Boogie’ with an addictive shuffle that “travels down to your shoes”.

It’s impossible not to move to the grooves of songs like these, and the R&B period of the mid-20th Century was a glorious period for black music coming out of America. Hear lots in compilations from Nostalgia Music today!