Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow

Abstract

[...]robert Johnson, in addition to his canon of self-penned blues songs, also performed ballads and pop songs, including songs written by white lyricists. but we have segregated sound, and we don't remember Johnson the pop singer. he fits our paradigms about blues music, and he has become the doomed, bedeviled bluesman. to richly examine the changes that radically reconfigured how the music of the South was promoted and consumed, miller eschews the longitudinal study of other scholars. instead, he gives readers a more narrowly focused, yet pan- oramic explication of the time period when these socio-cultural and technological changes occurred from the 1880s to the 1920s. the emergence of Jim crow laws, the creation of the American Folklore Society, the mass produc- tion and distribution of sheet music, and edi- son's invention of the phonograph all played roles in the creation of a musical color line. each chapter is organized thematically by topics relevant to the historical and theoretical problems within the historiography on south- ern and American music. in chapter 1, "tin Pan Alley on tour," miller debunks the myth of the culturally isolated South. railroad ex- pansion, traveling theater companies, and mass distribution of sheet music had the effect of delivering northern music, specifically the popular music of the day-sentimental ballads and coon songs-to southern audiences.