What Is R&B? From Rhythm and Blues to Today, With the Chords, Grooves and Vocal Style to Play and Sing It

Open Billboard magazine for June 18, 1949, and the chart of the best-selling records by Black artists is headed "Best-Selling Retail Race Records." Turn to the next issue, dated June 25, and the same list now reads "Rhythm & Blues Records." That change of name is where "R&B" begins as a chart label, and the name has kept moving ever since.

This guide follows it from the 1940s to today with dates taken from Billboard's own pages, then puts the style under your hands. You will play and sing four ingredients: call and response, church harmony and rich chords, the groove, and the voice. Every example below was written for this article or comes from a public-domain hymn, and each one links to a free worksheet that teaches the theory underneath.

The four ingredients this article teaches, in the order you will play them.

What "R&B" has meant: a name that kept changing

R&B has always been a marketing name as much as a musical one, and Billboard's chart for Black popular music shows the changes best. By October 1942 the magazine printed a "Harlem Hit Parade," a list of the most popular records in Harlem based on sales at six local shops. Later in the 1940s its charts used the industry's word "race." Writing in Billboard in 1982, Nelson George traced that term to OKeh Records, which used it to market Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" in 1920.

Jerry Wexler, who later produced Aretha Franklin at Atlantic, is credited with coining "rhythm and blues" while working as a music reporter (Britannica dates it to 1947). The chart itself switched in the June 25, 1949 issue. It kept that name for twenty years, apart from a gap: Billboard suspended the R&B singles chart from November 1963 to January 1965, and the "Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles" came back in the January 30, 1965 issue.

Then the names came quickly. "Soul" arrived on August 23, 1969. "Black" replaced it on June 26, 1982. On October 27, 1990, Billboard went back to "R&B," which its announcement called "a broad umbrella" covering rap, hip-hop and funk too. On December 11, 1999, "hip-hop" joined the banner. Today Billboard runs two weekly charts, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and, since the week of October 20, 2012, Hot R&B Songs; both blend streaming, radio and sales.

One chart, many names. Every date comes from a Billboard issue or a billboard.com chart page.

One caution before you read older books: in 1960s Britain, "R&B" also meant the blues-based rock of bands like the Who, who advertised their early shows as "Maximum R&B." In this article, R&B means the African American tradition the chart followed.

The 1940s and '50s: jump blues, new labels, and call and response

The bridge from swing bands to R&B was a small, loud combo. Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five were, by 1942, among the most popular recording acts in the country. Britannica describes their sound as "Count Basie-style riffs with a buoyant, boogie-based shuffle," and hits such as "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" inspired a wave of "jump blues" bands.

Louis Jordan in New York, about July 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb, public domain, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

Independent labels recorded the new music. Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson founded Atlantic Records in New York in 1947, and Ruth Brown's two dozen hits earned it the nickname "the house that Ruth built." King Records in Cincinnati, run by Syd Nathan, found James Brown and Hank Ballard; Chess in Chicago signed Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Etta James; Specialty and Modern recorded in Los Angeles.

Most of this music swung. The musicologist Alexander Stewart notes that the earliest rock 'n' roll songs were still mostly in shuffle rhythm: each beat split into a long note and a short one, as Swing Eighths explains, or written as three eighths per beat in 12/8 (Time Signatures II: Compound Time calls 12/8 "the slow roll of blues and doo-wop"). If you want the doo-wop chords in 12/8, our article on common chord progressions engraves them.

The habit that runs through all of it is call and response: one voice or section makes a statement, another answers. In a jump band the horns often "call" with a short riff and the singer replies. Here is an original four-bar example over the opening chords of a blues in C (The 12-Bar Blues has the full form).

An original call and response: the horns play bars 1–2, then the singer answers in bars 3–4 with a line that keeps the call's B♭ and C and adds A and E♭ from the F7 chord. Swing every pair of eighths, long-short.

Play the call with your right hand, then sing the response, or play it with your left hand an octave lower. Notice that the answer starts on beat 2, after a rest: the rest is where the call "hands over." That is the question-and-answer shape Phrasing teaches with Ode to Joy, and the G on the "and" of 3 in the call, landing between your foot taps, is the off-beat feel Syncopation teaches.

From church to soul: gospel's harmony and the singers who brought it

Britannica defines soul as "a return to African American music's roots—gospel and blues," marked by "church-rooted call-and-response, and extravagant melisma." Ray Charles stands at the turn. By 1954, at Atlantic, he had found "a successful combination of blues and gospel influences," and Britannica calls him the first to secularize pure gospel songs. His "What'd I Say (Part I & II)" was No. 1 on Billboard's R&B chart in the week of August 3, 1959.

Sam Cooke made the same crossing from the other side. He sang with the Soul Stirrers, a leading gospel group, and turned to pop in 1957, breaking a long-standing taboo. Britannica puts the two men side by side: Charles "represented raw soul," Cooke "symbolized sweet soul."

Aretha Franklin in a publicity portrait used in an Atlantic Records ad in Billboard, February 17, 1968. Image: public domain (published without a copyright notice), via Wikimedia Commons.

Aretha Franklin grew up as a Baptist minister's daughter and recorded a gospel album at 14. After six years at Columbia she moved to Atlantic, where, in Britannica's words, she "returned to her gospel-blues roots." Her version of Otis Redding's "Respect" reached No. 1 on the R&B chart in the week of May 20, 1967, and topped the Hot 100 two weeks later. In 1972 she recorded Amazing Grace, a live gospel album made with a choir in a Los Angeles church.

That hymn is a good place to hear the most basic church sound in R&B harmony: the "amen." Cadences calls the plagal cadence, IV to I, "the gentle 'A-men' sung at the end of hymns." In C major that is F to C. Below, the last line of "Amazing Grace" ends the way the hymn is written, with G7 to C. After it come two amens you can add.

Top: the last line of "Amazing Grace" (bars 12–15 of the worksheet's lead sheet, with left-hand chords added; tune NEW BRITAIN, 1831, public domain). Bottom: two amen endings added for this article, IV–I and IV–iv–I.

The second amen borrows F minor from C minor for one beat. The only change is A falling to A♭, so the top voice sings A, A♭, G. Borrowed chords calls this "a darker amen cadence." Play both endings slowly and sing the top line on "A-men." The first sounds warm; the second leans harder before it lands. Open Music Theory notes that IV–I more often prolongs the tonic than closes a phrase, which is exactly how an added amen feels: the hymn has already ended, and the amen settles it.

Three record companies shaped the soul sound in the 1960s and '70s. In Memphis, Stax recorded Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Isaac Hayes. In Detroit, Berry Gordy founded Motown in 1959; its museum describes Motown songs as merging "the call-and-response patterns of black gospel music" with jazz syncopation. In Philadelphia, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, working at Philadelphia International Records, "virtually reinvented the genre," Britannica says, with the O'Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.

The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis. Photo: Victor Chapa, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Funk: everything on "the one"

In the late 1960s James Brown's band changed where the weight of the bar falls. Britannica's entry on funk puts it precisely: the funk beat "put a strong pulse on the first note of the musical measure ('on the one'), whereas traditional rhythm and blues emphasized the backbeat (the second and fourth beats of the measure)." Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" reached No. 1 on the R&B chart in the week of August 14, 1965. Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic and, later, Prince built on the same foundation.

James Brown in concert at the Musikhalle in Hamburg, February 1973. Photo: Heinrich Klaffs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The rhythm changed underneath, too. Stewart traces a move in New Orleans R&B from the shuffle's triplet feel to even eighth notes, a shift that "supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms" in R&B and funk. The grid below shows one bar of each feel in sixteen cells.

Backbeat versus "the one." Both patterns are generic illustrations made for this article, not any drummer's beat.

Count the funk bar out loud as "1 e & a, 2 e & a" (The Sixteenth Note teaches the syllables). In the backbeat, the loudest sounds are on 2 and 4. In the funk row, the accent sits on 1 and everything after it dances around the sixteenths before coming home to the next 1. Our article on rhythm and meter explains how accents and syncopation pull against the beat you feel.

An original funk riff for bass or left hand: a low E accented on 1, staccato notes on several e's, &'s and a's, and silence on beat 4 of bar 2 so the next 1 hits hard.

Learn it at 60 on a metronome (Tempo & the Metronome), saying the counts printed under the notes. The dotted eighth and sixteenth at the start of bar 2 is the "skip" from The Dotted Eighth + Sixteenth. Keep the staccato notes really short: in funk, the rests are part of the groove. The notes come from the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D), so all of them sit well over Em7, a minor 7th chord (A is its 11th).

R&B since the 1980s: ballads, new jack swing, hip-hop soul

After disco faded, Black radio developed a smooth late-night format called quiet storm, named after a Smokey Robinson hit, where singers such as Anita Baker and Luther Vandross looked back to the R&B ballad. In the late 1980s, producers Teddy Riley and Babyface and singers Keith Sweat and Bobby Brown mixed R&B vocals with hip-hop rhythms; the style was called new jack swing.

Billboard's 1990 "R&B" umbrella already covered rap and hip-hop, and in 1999 it put "hip-hop" in the chart names, citing "the undeniable relationship between the R&B and hip-hop genres." Mary J. Blige, inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2024, is described there as the "Queen of Hip-Hop Soul," fusing "gospel-inspired vocals with hip-hop swagger." The Hall's page on Lauryn Hill, a 2026 nominee, calls her a pioneer of melodic rap and neo-soul.

The voices of this era stretched notes the way gospel singers do. Whitney Houston, whose mother Cissy Houston sang backup for Aretha Franklin with the Sweet Inspirations, "began singing in church as a child." Her "I Will Always Love You" held No. 1 on the Hot 100 from November 28, 1992, through February 27, 1993, fourteen weeks. Mariah Carey's "Vision of Love" reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 in the week of August 4, 1990. They are two famous examples of the melismatic singing you will try in the voice section below.

The harmony: 7ths, then 9ths, 11ths and 13ths

Much of R&B's warmth comes from chords with more than three or four notes. Start from the 7th chords: The major 7th (Cmaj7, C–E–G–B), the minor 7th (Dm7, D–F–A–C) and the dominant 7th (G7, G–B–D–F). Keep stacking 3rds above the 7th and you reach the 9th, the 11th and the 13th. These upper notes are called extensions.

Open Music Theory gives two rules for reading them. First, an extension in a chord symbol implies the ones below it: on paper, a G13 includes the 7th, the 9th and the 11th. Second, 9ths and 13ths are major and 11ths perfect unless the symbol says otherwise. The 9th is the same letter as the 2nd, the 11th as the 4th, the 13th as the 6th, but an octave higher.

Extensions stacked in 3rds. The G13 skips C, the 11th: a natural 11th clashes with the chord's 3rd, B.

Why leave out the 11th of G13? The 11th, C, sits a half step above the 3rd, B, and the two grind against each other. Open Music Theory's chapter on jazz voicings notes that chord tones are usually omitted "to avoid excessive dissonance with other important chord members," and its chapter on extended dominants in classical music says that "the 11th and the 3rd should not sound together," because there the 11th takes the 3rd's place. G13sus4, below, solves the clash the other way: it keeps C and leaves out B. The Chord symbols chart stops at 7ths and 6ths, so 9ths, 11ths and 13ths are new territory; the counting method is the same.

You won't play a six-note tower in one hand. Pianists drop the 5th, give the root to the left hand (or the bass player) and keep the 3rd, the 7th and one extension on top. Open Music Theory adds that the 13th should sit above the 7th, "otherwise, it will sound like the sixth." Our common chord progressions article shows the ii–V–I with plain 7ths; here are the same three chords with a 9th or a 13th added.

Dm9–G13–Cmaj9 in C. Right hand 3–7–9, then 7–3–13, then 3–7–9; left hand roots. The top note E holds, then falls to D.

Look at how little the right hand moves. F stays put from Dm9 into G13, where it becomes the 7th. C slips down to B. E holds. On Cmaj9, F falls a half step to E and the top E steps down to D, while B stays put as the new chord's 7th. These are the guide tones from Shell Voicings and The ii–V–I in Every Key with a color note on top. Once it feels natural in C, try it in F (Gm9–C13–Fmaj9).

A suspended chord adds another flavor. In Suspended chords, the 4th replaces the 3rd and then falls to it. On a dominant 13th chord the same move sounds like this:

G13sus4 → G13 → Cmaj9. Only one note moves at first: C falls to B. Then F, A and E step down to E, G and D while B holds.

Now put the chords in motion. The comp below is for a slow ballad in 4/4: the left hand holds the root, the right hand plays the chord on beats 1 and 3 and three even chords on beats 2 and 4. Those groups are triplets, three notes in the time of two (Triplets teaches the count "tri-pl-et").

An original ballad comp, Cmaj9–Am9–Dm9–G13. Play the triplets softly, with the top note of each chord a little louder.

The progression walks C–A–D–G in the bass: down a 3rd to A, up a 4th to D, then down a 5th to G. Am9 sits on the 6th degree of C, and Secondary dominants shows how A7 instead of Am9 would point even harder at Dm ("five of two"). For the touch, use Voicing and Balance: let the top of each chord sing over the inner notes. If you need a simpler left hand, the 1–5–8–5 ballad pattern from Accompaniment patterns works under the same chords.

The voice: melisma, runs and phrasing

Britannica defines melismatic singing as "several distinct pitches for the vocalization of a single syllable." In a hymn, most syllables get one note. In soul and R&B, a singer may spread one word over four, eight or more notes, which is the "extravagant melisma" of the soul entry.

You can learn this on a melody you already know. Here are the first four bars of "Amazing Grace" as written in Reading a lead sheet, and under them an original decorated version. The hymn already has a tiny melisma: "-ing" stretches over two notes.

"Amazing Grace," bars 1–4 (public domain): plain, then decorated for this article. Every note of the plain melody still lands on its original beat.

Each decoration is a technique with a name. The turn on "maz-" circles the note: above, the note, below, the note (Ornaments). On "grace," the melody dips to a neighbor tone, D, and climbs back, then leaps to G. Before "sweet," a quick grace note scoops up into the C (Grace Notes). On "sound," D is a passing tone between E and C. Non-chord tones explains both kinds of visitor. Sing the plain version first, then the decorated one on "ah," and check that the long notes still fall where they did.

A run is a fast melisma, often a descending one. The safest notes are the five of the major pentatonic scale, which has no half steps (The Pentatonic & Blues Scales). Over a C chord, use C, D, E, G and A.

An original run on the C major pentatonic, landing on E, the 3rd of the chord. The second version scoops into the E from E♭, a blue note.

Learn it slowly. The run is only eight notes; what makes it hard is the speed. Set the metronome to 60 and sing one note per click, then two, then four. Use "ah" or "oh," keep your jaw loose, and stop if your throat hurts. A voice teacher can check how you are producing the sound.

The same eight notes at the same click: quarter notes, then eighths, then sixteenths.

Pianists use the same run as a fill: play it in the right hand in the gap after a sung phrase, and you have call and response again. Two rules keep runs musical. Land every run on a chord tone, and save them for held notes and phrase endings, never for a lyric the listener needs to understand.

The last skill is phrasing, where you place a line against the beat. R&B singers often start a phrase a little early or let it trail behind the band. Here is one short line three ways.

One line, three placements: on the beat, anticipated by an eighth and laid back by an eighth.

The early version pushes the line: each note arrives an eighth before its beat, the off-beat feel Syncopation teaches. The late version starts each note on the "and" and cuts the last one short. Real "behind the beat" singing is finer than notation can show, often much less than an eighth, so treat these as exercises. Tap your foot on every beat and sing each version until the foot stays steady while the voice moves.

Putting it together: a 10-minute R&B practice plan

Spend two minutes on each step, with a metronome.

1. The amen endings: F–C and F–Fm–C in C, then in G (C–G and C–Cm–G).
2. Dm9–G13–Cmaj9 in C, eyes closed, until only the moving fingers move.
3. The funk riff at 60, counting out loud, with a hard accent on every 1.
4. The pentatonic run on "ah": quarter notes, eighths, sixteenths.
5. The call and response: play the call, sing the answer, then swap.

Five steps, two minutes each. Raise the metronome by 4 to 8 clicks only when a step feels easy.

Free worksheets that go with this article

• The 12-Bar Blues — the three-chord form behind jump blues and early R&B.
• Swing Eighths — written even, played long–short, with a pentatonic riff to swing.
• Time Signatures II: Compound Time — 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 and 6/4, felt in big beats.
• Phrasing — question-and-answer phrases on Ode to Joy.
• Syncopation — notes on the "and" while your foot keeps the beat.
• Cadences — authentic, plagal (the amen) and half cadences.
• Borrowed chords — F minor in C major, the darker amen.
• The major 7th, the minor 7th and the dominant 7th — the three 7th chords that extensions build on.
• Chord symbols — every common symbol built on C, and the five most common chords on all 12 roots.
• Shell Voicings — root plus 3rd or 7th, and the ii–V–I in shells.
• The ii–V–I in Every Key — guide tones and a looped voicing in every key.
• Suspended chords — sus2, sus4 and G7sus4 → G7 → C.
• Secondary dominants — A7 to Dm, D7 to G, E7 to Am.
• Accompaniment patterns — four left-hand grooves, including the 1–5–8–5 ballad pattern.
• Voicing and Balance — melody loud, accompaniment soft, with one hand or two.
• Triplets — three even notes in one beat.
• The Sixteenth Note and The Dotted Eighth + Sixteenth — the subdivisions of funk.
• Tempo & the Metronome — how to raise the click in small steps.
• Reading a lead sheet — "Amazing Grace" in C with chord symbols.
• Non-chord tones, Grace Notes and Ornaments — the decorations inside a melisma.
• The Pentatonic & Blues Scales — the five-note scale for runs, and the blue notes.

Where to go from here

R&B is eighty years of music under one changing name, but the four ingredients stay recognizable: a phrase and its answer, church harmony, a groove that leans on 2 and 4 or slams on the one, and a voice that bends a syllable into a line. Pick one song you love, listen for each ingredient, and borrow one move at a time; how to play by ear has exercises for working out its notes and chords. More free sheets are in the worksheet library.

If you want feedback, a Tissimo voice teacher can listen to your runs and phrasing in a live lesson, and a piano teacher can check your 9th and 13th voicings and your funk timing.

Sources

• Billboard, June 25, 1949 (first "Rhythm & Blues Records" charts) — World Radio History
• Nelson George, "Black Music Charts: What's In A Name?", Billboard, June 26, 1982 — World Radio History
• Billboard, October 27, 1990 ("R&B" adopted for two charts) — World Radio History
• Billboard, December 11, 1999 ("hip-hop" added) — World Radio History
• Soul music — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Funk — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Rhythm and blues — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The Legacy — Motown Museum
• Alexander Stewart, "'Funky Drummer': New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music," Popular Music 19/3 (2000) — Cambridge University Press
• Chord Symbols — Open Music Theory
• Jazz Voicings — Open Music Theory
• Altered and Extended Dominant Chords — Open Music Theory