Abstract
A deliberate ambiguity in my title compresses what I want to say here about black music biography. The title may be read as saying that continues to inhabit biographies of black musicians, but it may also be read as an imperative with prejudice a verb and lives, as the plural of life, its object. On that reading, the title exhorts biographers to produce biographies informed by prejudice. I intend both readings. Unexamined prejudices inform the biographies of black American musicians, and prejudices, as our only opening to experience, not only do inform biographies, but must. Consider a representative passage from Laurraine Goreau's 1975 biography of Mahalia Jackson, Just Mahalia, Baby. Young Mahalia has just lost a favorite cousin to wanderlust; she has been forced to leave school without completing the fourth grade, and she must stay home to do housework for the aunt with whom she lives. Goreau writes:
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