Indeed, he was a twentieth-century musical version of the cannon fire that exploded in the eighteenth-century Minnesota soundscape. Every year of his son’s maturation, John’s chances of being the Fabulous Prince Rogers became less attainable. Jazz’s popularity in the early 1960s was threatened by rhythm and blues and soul music despite the brilliant innovation of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and others. This sobering reality forced John to find peace with the twilight of his creative career and with his banal job at Honeywell. The new sound that deposed John and elevated Prince emerged alongside the civil rights movement.
This second Reconstruction was sparked by the abduction, torture, and murder of a young Black Chicagoan, Emmett Till, after he allegedly whistled at a white woman in a store in the summer of 1955 while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. The Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott erupted the same year after Rosa Parks refused to comply with segregation laws and give up her seat to a white man. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an Atlanta-born minister, emerged as the movement’s spokesman.
Rhythm and blues, a danceable, vocally driven music, and funk, a vampy sound that put its accent on the first beat of a musical measure, became the soundtracks of this movement and filled the ears of kids like Prince. But these new sounds didn’t emerge in a vacuum; they developed from roots in decades-old music.
Rhythm and blues (R&B) came to Minneapolis in the late 1950s, finding space along the Near North Side’s Plymouth Avenue. Many musical and social antecedents are responsible for its birth. Sonically, the genre is indebted to blues and gospel music, but echoes of other kinds of Black music—like work songs, string and jug band music, Black vaudeville, boogie-woogie, and even minstrelsy—can be heard in it.
Rhythm and blues is Black music created in Black Southern communities during the 1940s. Its roots reach back to the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920, when white record companies discovered there was an audience for Black music after her single sold 750,000 units. Some of the early innovators of R&B were Nat “King” Cole, who found a sweet spot between R&B and jazz; bandleader Johnny Otis, who was responsible for establishing the tenor saxophone as part of rhythm and blues bands; and Dinah Washington, who blended the blues and jazz. We might also add the likes of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, the Drifters, John Lee Hooker, the Cadillacs, the Five Keys, the Flamingos, and many regional groups as artists who influenced the development of R&B.