The profound shift from soul and R&B into funk during the ’70s saw many bands take up the mantle of James Brown’s innovations of the late ’60s. In the early part of the decade, African-American bands ...

Few musicologists have taken a genre’s pulse as literally as Richard J. Ripani, who has counted the number of beats per minute in a half-century of rhythm-and-blues hits, from the Johnny Otis ...

Among musical styles, few are as laden with convention and cliché as the blues. Every aspect, from the chord progression to the lyrics, is intentionally derivative. That's why you know blues when you ...