One Size Does Not Fit All: The Precarious Position of the African American Entrepreneur in Post-World War II American Popular Music

Abstract

Many narratives, some simple and some complex, can be constructed order to tell the story of the American popular music industry. Certain of these narratives reflect the multicultural synthesis that is believed some quarters to infuse and inform our national history. They conjure up the manner which the demarcations between musical structures and genres as well as ethnic and racial constituencies never seem to be irrevocably fixed. As Ralph Ellison remarked more than forty years ago, in the United States, when traditions are juxtaposed, they tend, regardless of what we do to prevent it, to merge.' These narratives furthermore support the belief that the history of the nation, like the history of its music, recapitulates the triumph of assimilation over isolation, the porousness of purportedly impenetrable barriers of gender, race, and class. Other narratives, by contrast, propose that the polysemic web of identities and forms of expression that constitutes the contested terrain of American society and civilization invariably collides with a national predisposition for social and cultural homogeneity. They infer that social as well as artistic emancipation constitutes other forms of enslavement, thereby underscor-