How Race Records Shook the World of Popular Music

The effect R&B had on British youth culture and its musical development

James Jordan’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Godmother of Rock and Roll Can Inspire Your Writing, caused me to reflect how the influence of Black R&B inspired not just me, but a whole generation of young kids growing up in Great Britain and Europe in the 1950s.

Its effect unleashed a string of budding guitarists in the UK, like Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, and Eric Clapton, leading to a British musical invasion of America in the early 1960s taking the music back home to its roots.

I saw Sister Rosetta Tharpe on TV in England in the early 1960s and she blew everybody away with a kind of Gospel R&B not seen or heard before in the UK. It was a revelation.

Recently watching YouTube footage of her performing on a rain-soaked railway station platform in Chorlton, Manchester, I realised I’d never seen a woman play guitar that well.

Here was a woman old enough to be my Grandmother, giving a solid-bodied electric guitar such a beating. And sing? What a voice! I was hooked and so was the audience, made up of what looks like young British fans. She had them in the palm of her hand, and she knew it.

Living in a major sea port, I was fortunate to have a much older cousin, a merchant seaman who in the 1950s sailed back and forth to the United States bringing home R&B records. He called these ‘race records’, a term I’d never heard, explaining these recordings were made by Black musicians for Black audiences.

It was the first time I encountered a cultural divide, a kind of a separation and, of all things, it was centred around a 45 rpm record. Surely, music was music whoever played it and freely accessible to all people?

My cousin had quite a collection of 1940s records, blues, jazz and gospel all by Black artists, but my favourite, was a 1947 record by Roy Brown, ‘Good Rocking Tonight’, a side later covered by Elvis (1954) and Buddy Holly (1955). To me, this record was the start of my rock and roll schooling.

Bruce Springsteen later wrote the lyric we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school. I can relate to that as these records played a part in my education. They opened a door into a world I knew nothing about at that time, a world I was eager to learn from.

According to my cousin, white-owned radio stations in many areas of the USA didn’t play Black R&B records in the 1950s. Yet in England around the same time, although rock and roll hardly got air time, for many years the BBC radio had played American Jazz and Big Band, mainly Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole, to an almost 100% white listening audience.

We had Black GIs living in our towns and villages towards the end of World War II in 1944, training and preparing to take the fight to the Germans in Europe. For a time they became part of the social fabric of our society up and down the country. They brought their music with them, attended dances, met English girls and romances blossomed. They were bright, helpful, unassuming and generous to British kids, offering their chocolate and chewing gum and, as our grandparents said, ‘mucked in’, a British term meaning sharing tasks on an equal basis.

Some were experts on the ‘black market’, magically producing eggs, meat, butter and more importantly for the ladies, nylons, the sort of items British mums just couldn’t get a ready enough supply legally with their ration books, which were still in use when I was born, eventually withdrawn in 1954.

Some of these soldiers stayed on after the war, married local girls, had kids. I went to school with a couple. They were our friends. We played soccer, basketball, rounders (no baseball then in English schools), hung out and got on fine.

In school History lessons in the early 1960s for the first time we learned about segregation and the civil rights movement in the USA, where black and white were separated. It all seemed odd to us. My father worked in a hospital alongside doctors and nurses from Nigeria, the Caribbean and India. They worked together, ate together in the hospital cafeteria, and they and their families enjoyed the leisure facilities of the hospital’s social club.

Britain had its folk music, trad-jazz, and skiffle, a sort of semi-acoustic early version of rockabilly, and my older relatives were all drawn to American country music. Country was okay, a kind of white man’s blues, simplistic, less rhythm driven, yet covering the same downbeat topics as the Blues but it lacked the rawness and edge R&B offered.

A positive and influencing outcome of ‘race records’ was that white rock and rollers like Elvis, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly borrowed from Black R&B, putting their take on it, so it would reach a new young white audience craving something different.

In America alarmed parents considered this new form of music ‘dangerous’ fearing their kids were being sexualised by the “jungle rhythms” of the Bo Diddley beat. There’d been riots in theatres, vitriolic church sermons, and public displays of breaking of records, none of which happened in Britain.

Most commentators at the time thought rock and roll was just a trend, wouldn’t last and would eventually fade. But it didn’t, because the new “teenagers”, with money in their pockets, bought into it across the United States, Britain and Europe.

Buddy Holly was correct when he said ‘Without Elvis, none of us could have made it’, but without the fuel of Black Rhythm and Blues and Gospel music none of it would have been possible.

The final word has go to Fats Domino, who summed it up best. When asked in 1957 how rock and roll got started, he said, “Well, what they call rock and roll now is Rhythm and Blues, and I’ve been playing it for fifteen years in New Orleans.”

If you liked this story, you may like: