I'll say...in one of the first copies of Billboard that I remember reading, instead of R&B or Soul for one of the Top 40 lists...incredibly they called that column: "Negro Music". Since virtually all of the acts/artists on that list were Black, it made me wonder if they (the Publisher) presumed that that music was only of interest to a Black or African American audience. If so, I thought that was rather odd as much of it spoke to me just the same as mainstream Top 40 did, along with my other various musical interests. To quote the late, great Wes Montgomery "There are only two kinds of music: Good, and Bad!"
When I first became a go-fer at WJMO and its sister FM in Cleveland in 1959, people were still calling the programming "race music" but the format was starting to be called "Negro" rather than "race".
This is a fascinating topic, where music culture dovetails with American culture. "Race records" were very much a thing during the days when performance of musical groups were segregated by race. The stages at entertainment venues were segregated, so that Black musicians and Caucasian musicians could not appear on the same stage at the same time. That was amazing. But that all started to change in the mid-1950's. The audiences for rock music started to cross over back and forth between what was then "race music" and early rock.
The catalysts for this change were early rockers from the mid-south, who signed with Sam Phillips at Sun Records and started to sing music that appealed to both Black and Caucasian audiences. Elvis was certainly a prime example, when he sang blues such as "That's All Right Mama", or "My Baby Left Me", etc. These are traditional Mississippi Delta blues songs. Remember Carl Perkins? He grew up in a family of sharecroppers and learned songs from the Black sharecroppers with whom he worked in the fields. They taught him to play guitar in the early rock style. These are songs like "Matchbox Holdin' My Clothes", etc.
It was just an epochal time in American music, and it drove the cultural and social changes of the day.
This brings up the topic of Caucasian artists stealing music styles ( and royalties) from Black performers who were very talented, but who could not get air play, profitable record contracts, or bookings at more upscale clubs where they would be paid equally with Caucasian musicians. However, the music itself was the catalyst for some major social change.
Here's Elvis, about 1954, who kills, "That's All Right Mama." The man could sing the blues.
