The idea that 'Black'='US-Black' has the same excruciatingly gormless sort of arrogance found in other instances of word magic in post war American English. I am referring here to words like 'world', as in 'The World Trade Center', 'Miss World' or 'The World Bank' — none of these three 'worlds' include the socialist 35% of the actual world's population — or 'Trans World Airways' who fly neither to Irkutsk nor Maputo. The magic 'World=USA' notion recurs frequently in US-popular song, too, as in Dancing in the Street where the 'world's' cities are enumerated as Chicago, New York, L.A., New Orleans, Philadelphia and the 'Motor City', and in that recent aid singalong where the equals signs were most embarrassingly obvious: 'USA for Africa' (the group, the effort) ' was'7 'the world', actually singing We Are The World. Using 'black' to denote people of African descent living in the USA and nowhere else seems to be yet another instance of 'World=USA'. It is as disrespectful to the cultural identity and integrity of all other Blacks (the majority) as the U.S. American meaning of 'world' is to the rest of us (also the majority). -- Philip Tagg
New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago Baltimore New JerseySoul music made it’s way north, east & west via the same train routes that carried rural Black workers from their homes in the south to the industrial north. As these "Blues people" made their way north, the music that they brought with them fused with the sophisticated urban sounds of jazz to create the sound first called "race music" and then later referred to as "rhythm & blues". As this music known as R&B began to gain acceptance among whites, it became split artificially and became known as "rock n’ roll" (for whites only) and "soul" (for Blacks only).
But black music did not stop at the shores of the USA. It spread from New York to the United Kingdom and then invaded the European continent. Of course it has eventually been exported in a watered down version back to its origins in Africa and the Carribean
'Versioning', meaning the releasing of many different versions of the same rythm or melody, is at the heart of all Afro-American and Carribean musics: jazz, blues, rap, r&b, reggae, house, and so on. With the advent of the twelve inch vinyl disc, the same principle has been extended to black American soul.