Rhythm and Blues (also known as R&B, R'n'B or RnB) is the name given to a wide-ranging genre of popular music created by African Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The term was originally used by record companies to refer to recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning.

Starting in the 1960s, after this style of music contributed to the development of "rock and roll", the term "R&B" became used - particularly by white groups — to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, the term "rhythm and blues" was being used as a blanket term to describe soul and funk. Since the 1990s, the term "Contemporary R&B" is now mainly used to refer to a modern version of soul and funk-influenced pop music.

Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world. Writer/producer Robert Palmer defined rhythm & blues as "a catchall term referring to any music that was made by and for black Americans".

He has used the term "R&B" as a synonym for jump blues. However, Allmusic separates it from jump blues because of its stronger, gospel-esque backbeat. Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, writes that "rhythm and blues" was an umbrella term invented for industry convenience.

According to him, the term embraced all black music except classical music and religious music, unless a gospel song sold enough to break into the charts.

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