Race Records, but Not the Olympic Ones

Music genres can be distressingly ideological bastards–indices of larger societal structures and predjudices–as often as they’re purely musical categories: Now’s as good a time as any to point out how Jerry Wexler occasioned a semantic shift from the former to the latter:

“We used to close the book on a Friday and come back to work on a Tuesday,” Mr. Wexler recalled in an interview last fall with the Web site PopEntertainment.com. “One Friday the editor got us together and said, ‘Listen, let’s change this from Race Records.’ A lot of people were beginning to find it inappropriate. ‘Come back with some ideas on Tuesday.’

“There were four guys on the staff,” he continued. “One guy said this and one guy said that, and I said, ‘Rhythm and blues,’ and they said: ‘Oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that.’ In the next issue, that section came out as Rhythm and Blues instead of Race.”