What were race records?
The US record industry’s name, from the early 1920s into the 1940s, for 78s by Black musicians sold as a separate catalog to African American buyers — a Jim Crow marketing category, not a genre. ’s “Crazy Blues” (1920) is what convinced the labels the market was real.
“Race records” was the American record business’s own label for a segregated product line: blues, jazz, gospel, and popular sides by Black artists, issued in their own numbered series and advertised to Black customers — white listeners bought them too. In the Black press of the time, “the race” often meant “our people” — a self-name, not an insult — but on a record sleeve it still marked a Jim Crow shelf: Black music sold apart from the mainstream pop list. Before 1920, major labels rarely recorded Black singers for a Black audience. The runaway sales of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” on OKeh showed there was a public to sell to; OKeh, then Paramount, Columbia, and others opened dedicated series. Billboard kept a Race Records chart into the 1940s and renamed it Rhythm & Blues in 1949. The category is how a great deal of early blues, jazz, and gospel got onto disc — and why those records sat in a market of their own.