Rhythm and Blues
The 9 Best Rhythm and Blues
Tracks of All Time
Blues played by a small band with a shuffle, a honking saxophone and somewhere to be. The post-war music that turned twelve bars into a dance floor, and the common ancestor of rock and roll, soul and Jamaican ska.
- Origin
- Los Angeles and Chicago, 1945
- Tempo
- 120–180 BPM
- Also known as
- r&b, jump blues, race records, rhythm & blues
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats / Rocket 88
1951 · Chess
Regularly called the first rock and roll record, which it is not — it is the best jump blues record, with a guitar amp that fell off a car roof and was recorded broken anyway.
Number 2: Louis Jordan / Choo Choo Ch'Boogie
1946 · Decca
Jordan's small band outsold the big bands by being funnier, tighter and cheaper to book. The template for every self-contained rhythm section that followed.
Number 3: Big Mama Thornton / Hound Dog
1952 · Peacock
Three years before Elvis, and considerably more menacing. Thornton is talking to a specific person and you would not want to be him.
Number 4: Wynonie Harris / Good Rockin' Tonight
1948 · King
A shouted invitation over a band that will not let up. The word rocking is doing exactly what everyone thinks it is doing, six years early.
Number 5: Big Joe Turner / Shake, Rattle and Roll
1954 · Atlantic
The original, before the lyric was laundered for white radio. Turner's version swings where the cover marches, which is the difference the whole decade turned on.
Number 6: Fats Domino / The Fat Man
1949 · Imperial
New Orleans piano, a rolling triplet figure and a million copies sold. Domino was doing this before the phrase rock and roll existed and simply never stopped.
Number 7: Lloyd Price / Lawdy Miss Clawdy
1952 · Specialty
Price singing, Domino on piano, and a record that crossed to white audiences without anybody planning it. The commercial accident the next decade was built on.
Also on Sung to Someone
Number 8: The Drifters / Money Honey
1953 · Atlantic
Clyde McPhatter's gospel-trained tenor applied to a song about rent. The exact point where the quartet tradition walks out of the church and into the charts.
Number 9: The Midnighters / Work with Me, Annie
1954 · Federal
Banned by broadcasters, a million-seller regardless, and answered by half a dozen other records within the year. Rhythm and blues as a running conversation nobody could police.