# RHYTHM & BLUES
*Jump Blues, the Jukebox and the Rise of the Independent Label, 1945–1955*

Volume 4 of **Origin Story**, a history of popular music, one genre at a time. Published by Greenlight Publishing. Paperback, from $11.49 a copy: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/04-rhythm-and-blues.html

| | |
|---|---|
| Period covered | 1945–1955 |
| The machine | the independent label, the jukebox |
| Chapters | 25 across five movements |
| Extent | about 120 pages |
| Song lyrics quoted | none |
| Playlist | ORIGIN STORY: Rhythm & Blues |
| Audiobook | 2h 52m |
| Ebook ISBN | 979-8-90623-881-8 |
| Audiobook ISBN | 979-8-90623-882-5 |
| Paperback ISBN | not yet issued |

## What the book is about

In 1945 the American record industry was four companies, and all four had spent the war learning to live without Black customers. Shellac was rationed, the musicians’ union had shut the studios, and the majors walked away from the music they filed under race records — at the exact moment a million wartime migrants with industrial wages were standing next to jukeboxes waiting for it.

This is the complete story of what happened next, in about three hours: the nightclub owners, record-shop men and radio-parts dealers who built a second record industry out of the gap; the six-piece jump blues band that replaced the unaffordable swing orchestra; the four hundred thousand jukeboxes whose coin counters were the era’s real chart; and the operators, one-stops, pressing plants and fifty-thousand-watt night signals that moved a record from a New Orleans back room to every tavern in America without a single network broadcast.

It takes the money seriously, because nobody else at the time did. What a flat fee bought and what a two per cent royalty actually paid. Why the safest fortunes belonged to the men who owned the machines, the paper and the presses. How the songs — the real money — were quietly gathered into in-house publishing firms under invented names. Why race records became rhythm and blues in June 1949 by an editorial decision at a trade paper, and what that rename did and did not change. And the cover economy of 1954–55, when the majors answered the music’s success by re-recording it white — legally, at two cents a copy, payable to publishers who were frequently the same men.

It ends in 1955, with the music more popular than it had ever been — renamed at the point of sale, repackaged for the teenage wallet, and sold onward under a word a Cleveland disc jockey had been using for years. Rhythm and blues did not die. It was rebranded, and volume five picks up the new brand.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the stop-time bar that makes the shout enormous, the honking tenor chorus, the parade roll under the New Orleans records, the wounded amplifier on Rocket 88.

## What this book does not do

Two things this book refuses to do, stated before you start, because one of them may annoy you.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Rhythm & Blues. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

The cost is modest in this volume and the reason is worth noticing: a great deal of this music is a saxophone, a shouted phrase and a rhythm section, and the thing to explain is the shape rather than the sentence. So what you get instead is the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where this music came from, what made it possible, which records mattered and why, who got paid, who did not, and how it ended, or rather how it was renamed, because this is the one volume in the series whose subject did not die. It was repackaged, and the repackaging is the ending.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. For this volume that warning carries extra weight: many of these records were made by small companies that kept casual ledgers or none, and the session dates, the personnel and above all the sales figures often rest on somebody’s memory or somebody’s press release. Sources are listed at the back.

## Introduction: The Abandoned Market (opening)

In 1945, the American record industry was four companies, and all four had spent the war learning to live without Black customers.

That is a blunt way to put it, so here is the mechanism. RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca and the newcomer Capitol pressed records out of shellac, a resin scraped from trees in India and Southeast Asia, and from early 1942 the war cut the supply to a fraction of what the industry wanted. A company that could press only so many discs pressed the ones with the largest and safest market, which meant mainstream pop for white audiences. The specialist catalogues (the ones the trade called race records, meaning Black music for Black listeners, and hillbilly, meaning white rural music) were trimmed first and hardest. At the same time the musicians’ union called its members out of every recording studio in the country for more than two years in a dispute over royalties, and the draft and the petrol ration were dismantling the touring big bands town by town. By the end of the war the majors had lost the habit of the Black market, lost the staff who knew it, and largely lost interest in reacquiring either.

What the majors had not noticed, or had noticed and dismissed, was that the market they were abandoning had just become richer than it had ever been. Between 1940 and 1945 well over a million Black Southerners moved north and west to war work (to the shipyards of Oakland and Long Beach, the aircraft plants of Los Angeles, the foundries of Chicago, Detroit and Gary) and they were earning industrial wages, in cash, in cities full of taverns, and every tavern had a jukebox. The demand did not shrink in the war. Only the supply did.

This book is about the people who walked into that gap. Almost none of them were musicians. They were a nightclub owner in Chicago, a record-shop owner in Cincinnati with a bad temper and his own pressing plant, a radio-parts dealer in Newark, two young men in New York spending a dentist’s ten thousand dollars, a Houston club owner with a booking agency, four brothers in Los Angeles, and an eighteen-year-old in New Orleans wiring a studio into the back room of his family’s appliance shop. Between roughly 1945 and 1950 they built, from nothing, a second American record industry, one that found its customers through jukeboxes and late-night radio rather than through network shows and department stores, and that could make money on sales the majors considered beneath noticing.

## Contents

### Movement 1: The Room
1. The Avenue
2. The Big Bands Die
3. The Other Rooms
4. Who Was Actually There

### Movement 2: The Machine
5. What the War Broke
6. The Independent Label
7. The Jukebox
8. Tape and the 45
9. Radio After Television
10. Why the Records Sound Like That

### Movement 3: The Records
11. 1945–1948. The Template
12. 1949. The Year the Category Moved
13. 1951–1953. Crossing Over
14. 1954–1955. The Handover Sounds
15. The Records the Canon Dropped

### Movement 4: The Money
16. The Flat Fee and the Two Per Cent
17. Who Owned the Songs
18. The Chart Is a Decision
19. The Operator Pays Cash
20. What a Hit Actually Earned
21. The Cover Economy

### Movement 5: The Ending
22. The Audience Changed Hands
23. The Rename
24. What the Story Leaves Out
25. Renamed, Not Buried

## Timeline

Dated entries from the back of the book. Free to quote with attribution to *RHYTHM & BLUES*, Origin Story volume 4.

**1942**
- Early in the year, war production cuts shellac; the majors trim their race catalogues. Cash Box founded for the coin-machine trade.
- 1 August, the first AFM recording ban empties every studio in the country.
- October, Billboard launches the Harlem Hit Parade.

**1943**
- Syd Nathan founds King in Cincinnati. Decca settles with the union.

**1944**
- April, the federal cabaret tax makes dance floors a taxable liability.
- Late in the year. RCA Victor and Columbia settle; the ban ends. Sister Rosetta Tharpe records Strange Things Happening Every Day.

**1945**
- The war ends. Cosimo Matassa opens J&M in New Orleans; Don Robey opens the Bronze Peacock in Houston; the Bihari brothers start Modern in Los Angeles. The Honeydripper holds number one on the race chart for eighteen weeks. Caldonia.

**1946**
- R.M. Blues establishes Art Rupe’s company. Lew Chudd founds Imperial. Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.
- December, eight of the most famous big bands in America fold within weeks.

**1947**
- Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson found Atlantic on a dentist’s ten thousand dollars. The Chess brothers buy into Aristocrat. Roy Brown records Good Rocking Tonight in New Orleans; in December, Wynonie Harris covers it for King.

**1948**
- The second AFM ban shuts the studios for the year. Harris’s Good Rocking Tonight reaches number one. Columbia introduces the LP.
- October. WDIA Memphis puts Nat D. Williams on the air; within a year the station is programmed entirely for Black listeners.

**1949**
- February. Atlantic’s re-recorded Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. RCA introduces the 45. The Huckle-Buck holds number one for fourteen weeks. Robey founds Peacock.
- 25 June, Billboard renames the race chart: Rhythm & Blues.
- 10 December. Fats Domino cuts The Fat Man at J&M.

**1950**
- January. Sam Phillips opens the Memphis Recording Service. Seeburg ships jukeboxes built for the 45. Randy Wood founds Dot. Teardrops from My Eyes holds number one for eleven weeks.

**1951**
- March, Rocket 88, the damaged amplifier and all, cut in Memphis and leased to Chess. Sixty Minute Man holds number one for fourteen weeks and crosses to the pop top twenty.
- July. Alan Freed begins playing rhythm and blues on Cleveland radio.

**1952**
- 21 March, the Moondog Coronation Ball is stopped almost as it begins.
- Sam Phillips launches Sun. Robey takes control of Duke.
- 13 August. Big Mama Thornton records Hound Dog in Los Angeles.

**1953**
- Hound Dog holds number one for seven weeks. Shake a Hand crosses to the pop lists. Vivian Carter and James Bracken found Vee-Jay.

**1954**
- The Things That I Used to Do holds number one for fourteen weeks. Shake, Rattle and Roll: Turner in the spring, the Comets (Milt Gabler producing) in the summer.
- April, the Comets record Rock Around the Clock.
- 5 July. Presley cuts That’s All Right at Sun; in September, his Good Rockin’ Tonight. Freed moves to WINS New York, loses the Moondog name in court, and renames his show rock and roll.
- 18 November. Ray Charles records I Got a Woman in Atlanta.
- 25 December. Johnny Ace dies backstage in Houston.

**1955**
- Pledging My Love holds number one for ten weeks. Maybellene (with two names on the credit that Chuck Berry spent decades removing) reaches number one on the rhythm and blues chart and the pop top five. Rock Around the Clock, attached to a film about a city classroom, holds number one on the pop chart for eight weeks. Boone covers Domino.
- 14 September, Tutti Frutti, at J&M, with the crew from The Fat Man.
- November. RCA buys Presley’s contract from Sun.

**1988**
- Following Ruth Brown’s campaign with the lawyer Howell Begle, Atlantic waives its 1950s artists’ unrecouped balances and helps fund the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, the industry’s first real accounting for the contracts described in Movement Four, thirty-three years after this book ends.

## Sources

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

A warning that applies to this volume more than most. The independent labels of this decade kept casual ledgers or none, registered copyrights under invented names, and advertised sales figures nobody audited. Session dates and personnel for many sides rest on the memories of participants interviewed decades later, on disputed discographies, or on both, and label paperwork (where it survives) frequently disagrees with the musicians’ recollections about who played, when, and for how much. This book has preferred the version its sources agree on, named the teller where an account is one person’s own telling, and said so where the record is silent. The million-seller claims are treated throughout as advertising.

General histories. Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues, the fullest survey, built substantially on Shaw’s own interviews with the label owners and artists, with the strengths and hazards of that method. Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City, the founding scholarly account of how the independents fed rock and roll, and his Making Tracks, on Atlantic. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, the sharpest argument about the business and radio side. John Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, an oral history of the independent label men that this book’s distribution, pressing-credit and jukebox detail leans on repeatedly.

Label and city studies. Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n’ Roll, for New Orleans, J&M and the Imperial operation. Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n’ Roll, for Houston, Don Robey, Evelyn Johnson and circuit economics. Louis Cantor, Wheelin’ on Beale, for WDIA. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis and Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n’ Roll, for the Memphis Recording Service, Sun, and the Presley transaction, including the careful handling of the Keisker recollection, which this book follows.

Memoirs and biographies of participants, all to be read as interested accounts: Jerry Wexler with David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues, the source of Wexler’s claim to the 1949 chart rename; Ruth Brown with Andrew Yule, Miss Rhythm, for the Atlantic years and the royalty campaign; Chuck Berry, The Autobiography; Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with David Ritz, Hound Dog, for the Thornton session and the credit dispute; Johnny Otis, Upside Your Head!, for Central Avenue and the revue; John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, on Louis Jordan; Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!, on Sister Rosetta Tharpe; John A. Jackson, Big Beat Heat, on Alan Freed, the Moondog litigation and the dances.

The trade press of the period (Billboard and Cash Box, weekly, 1942–1955) for chart positions, the June 1949 rename, the jukebox listings, the reports of white teenage buying, and the industry’s own contemporaneous descriptions of itself. The chart caveat in Movement Four applies to every chart figure in this book: these were small-sample trade surveys, not audited sales counts.

On the business mechanics. The statutory two-cent mechanical, the compulsory licence, the 1909 coin-machine exemption and the absence of federal copyright in sound recordings before 1972 are matters of statute; any standard history of American music copyright sets them out. The ASCAP–BMI history is documented in both organisations’ own accounts and in the radio-industry histories of the licensing war. Session-scale figures are from American Federation of Musicians rate histories as cited in the general sources; contract percentages, fees and deductions are the ranges those sources’ interviewees describe, and are labelled illustrative wherever this book does arithmetic with them.

Where figures are disputed, the size and even the fact of various advances; the sales of The Honeydripper, The Fat Man and The Things That I Used to Do; what Big Mama Thornton was paid for Hound Dog; the authorship shares behind several famous credits; the exact circumstances of the Rocket 88 amplifier and of Johnny Ace’s death, the text says so at the point of the claim rather than choosing quietly. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record, and in this decade they are frequently the story.

## Related volumes

- Volume 5: the same records under the new name, the 45 and the teenage wallet, and the eighteen months the renamed music took over the world
- Volume 6: the quartet training and the echo chamber, from the street corner this book heard behind the Dominoes
- Volume 7: the church’s engine in secular music’s chassis, from the Atlanta radio station where Ray Charles started it

## Questions

**What is Origin Story volume 4 about?**

Jump Blues, the Jukebox and the Rise of the Independent Label, 1945–1955. In 1945 the American record industry was four companies, and all four had spent the war learning to live without Black customers. Shellac was rationed, the musicians’ union had shut the studios, and the majors walked away from the music they filed under race records — at the exact moment a million wartime migrants with industrial wages were standing next to jukeboxes waiting for it.

**What years does RHYTHM & BLUES cover?**

1945–1955. The volume is numbered 4 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

**What made RHYTHM & BLUES possible?**

The independent label, the jukebox. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

**Are there song lyrics in it?**

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

**How long is it?**

About 28,500 words: 25 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 52m.

**What is in the back of the book?**

A dated timeline of 31 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

**Can I buy RHYTHM & BLUES in print?**

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.

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Origin Story volume 4. Buy the paperback direct: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/04-rhythm-and-blues.html