Question 1

What does “race records” mean?

Accepted Answer

The record industry''s category, from the early 1920s to 1949, for records made by Black performers and sold to Black buyers.

Question 2

Where does “race records” come from?

Accepted Answer

The category was invented at Okeh Records in New York in the early 1920s and is credited to Ralph S. Peer, the label's recording director, who wanted a name for an audience the company had just discovered it had. That discovery was Mamie Smith. On 10 August 1920 Perry Bradford pushed Okeh to record Smith singing his Crazy Blues with a Black band, the Jazz Hounds; the disc sold on the order of seventy thousand copies in its first month, largely to Black buyers, and demonstrated a market the industry had assumed did not exist. Okeh built its race records series on that success and advertised it in Black-owned papers. The direction of the naming matters: race was in that period an ordinary and often proud word in Black usage — race man, race pride, the race press — and the industry took a word of Black self-description and repurposed it as a shelving label for segregated commerce. Billboard carried a Race Records chart until June 1949, when at the urging of its writer Jerry Wexler the magazine renamed it Rhythm & Blues Records, which is where R&B enters the trade vocabulary. Two corrections to the usual account: Mamie Smith's record was not the first blues ever recorded, but the first blues record by a Black woman to sell to Black buyers in volume; and the category was a commercial and racial classification imposed by white-owned labels, not a genre the musicians defined.