race music

American  

noun

Older Use.

1. blues-based music or jazz by and for African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was regarded as a distinctive, separate market by the music industry; early jazz or rhythm-and-blues.

---

Etymology

Origin of race music

An Americanism dating back to 1925–30

Example Sentences

"I grew up in real poverty, working class, and mixed race; music lessons were never a thing," she says.

From BBC • Sep. 15, 2021

They called it race music, rhythm and blues music.

From Fox News • Aug. 16, 2019

Bergner explores the complications of race, music and family through dualities, explicit and implicit: black/white, poor/wealthy, low culture/high culture.

From Washington Post • Oct. 13, 2016

In tracking the life of the funk music titan for this nonfiction book, Mr. McBride found a more complex story about race, music and the South.

From New York Times • Mar. 31, 2016

Music alone lagged in the race, music, part speech, part painting, with a surging undertow of passion, music had been too long in the laboratories of the wise men.

From Melomaniacs by Huneker, James