Race records is a term for 78-rpm phonograph records marketed to African Americans between the 1920s and 1940s. They primarily contained race music, comprising various African-American musical genres, blues, jazz, and gospel music, rhythm and blues and also comedy. These records were, at the time, the majority of commercial recordings of African American artists in the U.S., and few African American artists were marketed to white audiences. Race records were marketed by Okeh Records, Emerson Records, Vocalion Records, Victor Talking Machine Company, Paramount Records, and several other companies. From 1945 to 1949 American music industry magazine The Billboard published a Race Records music chart, a precursor to the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart of today.

Before the rise of the record industry in America, the cost of phonographs prevented most African Americans from listening to recorded music. At the turn of the twentieth century, the cost of listening to music went down, providing a majority of Americans with the ability to afford records. The primary purpose of records was to increase sales of record players, which were most commonly distributed in furniture stores. The stores white and black people shopped at were separate due to segregation, and the type of music available to white and black people differed.

Mainstream records during the 1890s and the first two decades of the 1900s were mainly made by and targeted towards white, middle class, and urban Americans. There were some exceptions, including George W. Johnson, a whistler who is widely believed to be the first black artist ever to record commercially, in 1890. Broadway stars Bert Williams and George Walker recorded for Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901, followed by black artists employed by other companies. Yet, the African American artists that major record companies hired before the 1920s were not properly compensated or acknowledged. This was because contracts were given to black artists on the basis of a single record, so their future opportunities were not guaranteed.

African-American culture greatly influenced the popular media that white Americans consumed in the 1900s. Still, there were not any primarily black genres of music sold in early records. Perry Bradford, a famous black composer, sparked a transition that displayed the potential for African American artists. Bradford persuaded the white executive of Okeh Records, Fred Hager, to record Mamie Smith, a black artist who did not fit the mold of popular white music. In 1920, Smith created her "Crazy Blues"/"It's Right Here for You" recording, which sold 75,000 copies to a majority-black audience in the first month. Okeh did not anticipate these sales and attempted to recreate their success by recruiting more black blues singers. Other big companies sought to profit from this new trend of race records. Columbia Records was the first to follow Okeh into the race records industry in 1921, while Paramount Records began selling race records in 1922 and Vocalion entered in the mid-1920s.

The term "race records" was coined in 1922 by Okeh Records. Such records were labeled "race records" in reference to their marketing to African Americans, but white Americans gradually began to purchase such records as well. In the 16 October 1920 issue of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, an advertisement for Okeh Records identified Mamie Smith as "Our Race Artist". Most of the major recording companies issued "race" series of records from the mid-1920s to the 1940s.

In hindsight, the term race record may seem derogatory; in the early 20th century, however, the African-American press routinely used the term the Race to refer to African Americans as a whole and race man or race woman to refer to an African-American individual who showed pride in and support for African-American people and culture.

Billboard began publishing charts of hit songs in 1940. Two years later, the company's list of songs popular among African Americans was created: Harlem Hit Parade. It listed the “most popular records in Harlem" and began to replace the term "race music" in the industry. The Harlem concept was replaced by R&B chart listings in June 1949.

The term "rhythm and blues" fully replaced the term "race music".