Rhythm and Blues is Rock Music
By the mid-1950s, popular R&B song lyrics "rock" and "roll" had evolved into an interchangeable name for rhythm and blues music itself. Used as a name to replace Rhythm and Blues, Rock and Roll had been expropriated and promoted sucessfully for half a decade by a white rhythm and blues disc jockey, Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio. That is why forty years later, in 1995, the international Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came to be built in Cleveland, Ohio. It is really a monument to rhythm and blues.
It surprises many to learn that rhythm and blues and rock music are one and the same cultural expression.
Rhythm and blues, a gold mine for hip hop, is still the music that makes people rock and roll. In fact the name "rock and roll" was taken from rhythm and blues (R&B) song lyrics and titles. Negroes in the Americas, freed from enslavement, created and nurtured the good rocking music from African ceremony, work teams, spiritual comfort, party, dance, and sexual expressions; during their long struggle to regain recognition as human beings.
Once called race music or blues and rhythm, R&B music was adopted and mastered by many from other cultures and internationally. Many songwriters, producers, artists, entrepreneurs and musicians, etc., made outstanding contributions to the art form regardless of their race or background. Dr. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 address to black radio broadcasters, accurately observed that the so-called "The British Invasion" was actually the boomerang of R&B culture returning home to America. Dr. King even professed that [rhythm and blues music] had "surpassed the cultural conquest of classical Greece." Unfortunately, white supremacy forces within the American entertainment industry began excising rock music out of R&B culture in 1957. They wrote and gave rock music a separate and untrue white American history. In England, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other rockers were classified as rhythm and blues performers, but upon arrival in America they were categorized as rock and roll. Unquestionably, rhythm and blues is one of the greatest gifts ever given to the world. Rhythm and Blues University has chronicled R&B's cultural history and America's false divisional process.