Retired after 25 years and multiple commendations, former New York City Transit Authority bus driver Barry Baldwin now has the time to delve into his favorite pastimes. These include a wide range of music interests, particularly in jazz, blues, rock, pop, and rhythm and blues. For New York’s Barry Baldwin and other fans, R&B remains a vibrant form of musical expression, and one of the signature genres in the history of American music.
Musicologists typically trace the origin of rhythm and blues to the jump blues popular at the close of the 1940s, and ultimately to early African American spirituals. R&B, with its blues chords and drumming backbeat, changed its parent genre by putting greater emphasis on the lyrics and less on the instrumentation. R&B itself would morph into soul music, and into early rock and roll.
In the 1950s, R&B produced a host of notable individual singers, like Etta James, Fats Domino, and Ray Charles, and groups like the Drifters, the Platters, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. Today, numerous well-known artists incorporate elements of traditional R&B into their work. These include Alicia Keys, John Legend, and Erykah Badu.
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