Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll
A new style came out of New Orleans after World War II. Prominent musicians such as Fats Domino helped shape what was first widely known as "rhythm and blues", which was an important ancestor of rock and roll, if not the first form of the music. In addition to the local talent, early rockers from elsewhere recorded many of their early hits in New Orleans using bands of New Orleans musicians.
In 1949 New Orleans jazz musician, and Fats Domino producer Dave Bartholomew brought the tresillo directly from Cuban music into early R&B.
New Orleans producer-bandleader Dave Bartholomew first employed this figure (as a saxophone-section riff) on his own 1949 disc "Country Boy" and subsequently helped make it the most over-used rhythmic pattern in 1950’s rock ‘n’ roll. On numerous recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard and others, Bartholomew assigned this repeating three-note pattern not just to the string bass, but also to electric guitars and even baritone sax, making for a very heavy bottom. He recalls first hearing the figure – as a bass pattern on a Cuban disc—Palmer (1995).
In a 1988 interview with Robert Palmer, Bartholomew revealed how he initially superimposed tresillo over swing rhythm.
I heard the bass playing that part on a 'rumba' record. On "Country Boy" I had my bass and drums playing a straight swing rhythm and wrote out that rumba bass part for the saxes to play on top of the swing rhythm. Later, especially after rock ‘n’ roll came along, I made the 'rumba' bass part heavier and heavier. I’d have the string bass, an electric guitar and a baritone all in unison— Palmer (1988).
Bartholomew referred to the Cuban son by the misnomer rumba, a common practice of that time. On Bartholomew's 1949 tresillo-based "Oh Cubanas" we clearly hear an attempt to blend African American and Afro-Cuban music.
Read more about this topic: Music Of New Orleans
Famous quotes containing the words rhythm, blues, rock and/or roll:
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“The blues women had a commanding presence and a refreshing robustness. They were nurturers, taking the yeast of experience, kneading it into dough, molding it and letting it grow in their minds to bring the listener bread for sustenance, shaped by their sensibilities.”
—Rosetta Reitz, U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 10, by Betsey Beaven et al. (1980)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
““Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,
“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)