New Orleans is identified most vividly in the public mind with jazz, but its rhythm and blues tradition is no less distinctive, and has resulted in a unique and important body of work.

As rhythm and blues began to develop in the 1940s as a distinct American musical form, New Orleans musicians were listening to the records of musicians like Louis Jordan, but putting them into their own contexts. The style flowered in the rock 'n' roll era of the 1950s and into the soul era of the 1960s. The city's music scene then went through a period of commercial stagnation, overlooked for most of the 1970s, but skillful local promotion and the continuing vitality of New Orleans musicians restored it to prominence, if not to the top of the charts, by the end of the twentieth century.

By the...