Blues
The blues is a vocal and instrumental music form which emerged in the African-American community of the United States. Blues evolved from West African spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants and has its earliest stylistic roots in West Africa. This musical form has been a major influence on later American and Western popular music, finding expression in ragtime, jazz, big bands, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country music, as well as conventional pop songs and even modern classical music.[citation needed] Due to its powerful influence that spawned other major musical genres originating from America, blues can be regarded as the root of pop as well as American music.
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues is a name for black popular music tradition. When speaking strictly of "rhythm 'n' blues", the term may refer to black pop-music from 1940s to 1960s that was not jazz nor blues but something more lightweight. The term "R&B" often refers to any contemporary black pop music. Early-1950s R&B music became popular with both black and white audiences, and popular records were often covered by white artists, leading to the development of rock and roll. In fact rock 'n' roll was an interchangeable term with rhythm and blues in the 1950s, and term used usually depended on racial background.
A notable subgenre of rhythm 'n' blues was doo-wop, which put emphasis on polyphonic singing. In the early 1960s rhythm 'n' blues took influences from gospel and rock and roll and thus soul music was born. In the late 1960s, funk music started to evolve out of soul; by the 1970s funk had become its own subgenre that stressed complex, "funky" rhythm patterns and monotonic compositions based on a riff or two. In the early to mid 1970s, hip hop music (also known as "rap") grew out of funk and reggae (see below). Funk and soul music evolved into contemporary R&B (no longer an initial-ism) in the 1980s, which cross-pollinated with hip-hop for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century.
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