Brian Roberts begins Blackface Nation with this truly winning admission: “This project started a long time ago, so long ago that many of the people I have to thank are retired. By retired, I mean dead.” Roberts throws 1999 into the mix as a key date in the book’s genesis. As a scholar who came of professional age in that decade I can attest to how well Blackface Nation evokes a period of remarkable ferment in the study of the knotty titular entertainment form. Others who were trained in the United States in that era will find plenty of reassuring signposts: oh, hey, Eric Lott and David Roediger, figured you’d be here! And how nice to see you again, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White! This is not to say that Blackface Nation has nothing to add to the scholarly conversation, but its greatest contribution is as a sort of sober synthesis of what an earlier generation of interdisciplinary scholars (following Vernon Parrington) might have referred to as “main currents in minstrelsy thought.”As such there is an almost ritualistic vibe to Blackface Nation, a palpable sense that certain theoretical formulations will have to be trotted out and particular anecdotes invoked as Roberts makes his way over the landscape of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. (His subtitle to the contrary, Roberts’ interests are firmly rooted in the pre-Civil War era.) The book acts as a sort of gloss on some of the dominant historical and theoretical approaches to minstrelsy of the past 25 years or so—to such a degree that Roberts does not always seem compelled to cite the academic genealogies that underpin his work. Blackface Nation acts, at once, as an introduction to a complex scholarly field and as a somewhat unselfconscious expression of some of its most crucial pieces of conventional wisdom: when Roberts explores blackface as a “sign of consumption” early in the book his footnote brings us to Thomas Frank but not to David Roediger’s crucial contribution on minstrelsy as a sign of capitalist accumulation. The tacit acknowledgment of Blackface Nation—somewhat worrying to any of us who could imagine bringing its usefully accessible prose into the undergraduate classroom—is that readers will have memorized the catechism of most of the key texts on minstrelsy, even if Constance Rourke and Howard Sacks and Judith Sacks are nowhere to be found.Roberts’s overall stance vis-à-vis the most relevant historiography is a bit puzzling. Early in Blackface Nation Roberts claims that “recent historians have turned away from the genre’s racial messages and toward its working-class origins. Focusing for the most part on early blackface, these historians have returned to the idea that blackface performers stole or borrowed black song for their acts.” It is hard to imagine whom Roberts is signaling with this reductive summary of a generation of work—this argument appears in a paragraph with no citations. I learned much from Roberts’s insistence that we pay attention to how central middle-class Americans were to the production, circulation, and reception of blackface performance but still cannot fathom why his insights on minstrelsy’s place in the market revolution of the nineteenth century is offered as superseding, rather than augmenting, the work of David Roediger, W.T. Lhamon, and whatever other strawmen are putatively being KO’ed here. (I also am surprised that while Roberts is willing to carry a heavy historiographical burden in Blackface Nation, he does not take much note of recent works in the field by Louis Chude-Sokei, Kyla Wazana Tompkins and others.)The overly broad introductory gambit is meant, of course, to get us ready for Roberts’s important consideration of the cultural meanings of the Hutchinson Family Singers, avatars of musical reform movements that included abolitionism, temperance, vegetarianism, and women’s rights. Roberts is certainly correct to argue that this singing family has been underused as a lens through which to study the racialized realities of mid-nineteenth century American social life. I am a bit confused, though, by his eccentric marginalization of a number of works on the family (including Scott Gac’s important book) as “musicology” that I would call “cultural history.”For readers of JPMS who are intimately familiar with names such as Charles Hamm, Gilbert Chase, Richard Crawford, and Russell and David Sanjek, the discovery in Blackface Nation that abolition and blackface were “twinned” will not seem too surprising. It is still important and interesting to be reminded that the Hutchinsons’ signature antislavery song, “Get Off the Track,” was based on the blackface smash “Old Dan Tucker”, but it strikes me as analytically suspect then to ask, “Did audiences note the irony of a blackface tune in the abolition cause?” The obvious and unhelpful answer is that some probably did but only by committing a conscious act of defamiliarization. Careful scholars of minstrelsy, of American popular music, and of cultural history in the United States have for a very long time noticed that nineteenth-century American life was marked by a remarkable amount of what we variously call theft, impersonation, ventriloquism, racial collaboration, cultural imperialism, and so on. The Hutchinson Family’s use of “Dan Tucker” is interesting to be sure, but mostly as an example of a conventional cultural tendency. The musical borrowing the Hutchinson Family engaged in was one of the defining features of American popular song in this era: literally hundreds of songs traveled from one distinct social location to another. Some thicker description of these complex dynamics would have been helpful here—perhaps including Ken Emerson’s reminder (in his book on Stephen Foster) that the blackface Christy Minstrels owed many stylistic debts to the Hutchinsons.But I should be clear that what I am presenting as shortcoming or oversight seems fairly purposeful in Roberts’ work. Blackface Nation has clear claims to make about significant cultural meanings getting “fixed” in the years stretching from the War of 1812 to the Civil War. The author is particularly interested in how printed broadsides functioned as a meeting place of oral tradition and commercial mass culture; he offers especially fascinating material on a Boston printer, Nathaniel Coverly, who found a place for himself in this emerging market. While Roberts’s sketch of Coverly has much to offer historians of business, popular music, and technology, I worry that the author overstates the significance of printing with respect to reception. Broadsides, according to Roberts, “were taming mechanisms”; they transformed “dynamic oral ballads into static text, subjecting them to the control of fixed type and stable meanings.” For many scholars of popular music, Roberts’ technological determinism will be troubling: without concrete evidence about how the broad circulation of printed texts shaped musical consumers it seems just as likely that American audiences continued to ring changes—when politically necessary, culturally useful, and just plain fun—on received texts even (or especially) in this new form.Roberts work is very useful as a consideration of an attempt by certain well-positioned cultural actors to use musical arenas as sites of social control. Blackface Nation is especially good on the tense realities structuring the performer/audience dyad in the mid-nineteenth century. Roberts’s recalibrations in Blackface Nation—especially his insistence that we take seriously the relationship of how the “frustrating dislocations” of the market revolution shaped middle-class American ideas about what uses could be made of popular song—are challenging and welcome. Blackface Nation has a heartening respect for the power of popular song, not merely as some one-dimensional “reflection” of wider social relationships, but as an active participant in shaping those lived realities. In Roberts’s able hands it becomes quite possible to see how minstrelsy became a major player in what he anachronistically but usefully calls the “culture wars”; perhaps most effective is the way Roberts plots minstrelsy as part of a larger technology of commodified and racialized surveillance. Reframing minstrelsy as a conversation various middle-class white people were having about their access to power is a welcome addition to the scholarship on minstrelsy, which has tended to focus on circumscribed venues of working-class activity. Here Roberts’s book serves to remind us of how minstrelsy’s tentacles spread into all sorts of cultural spaces that might not immediately seem marked by the rhetoric of blackface. This approach serves Roberts well when he keeps his sights fixed on his central concerns (i.e. the world of popular song), but he is rather less successful when he attempts broader-scale cultural history. It is almost impossible for me to understand, for instance, the interpretive logic of his claim that Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist journalism was “like” minstrelsy because it “provided a black voice to a white audience.”I appreciate Roberts’s effort to offer an inquiry that dismisses the usual pre-Civil War/post-Civil War framing but also must note that his brief investigation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture strikes me as a bit perfunctory (and features a few too many errors, including misspellings of the names of Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmond Fauset). I am especially chagrined to find him dismissing Joel Chandler Harris not exclusively on the grounds of the racist work he did but for being “literally a cracker bastard.” I’m not sure if Roberts appreciates how fully this unfortunate authorial move places him in the same position as the key actors of his book, jockeying for middle-class dominance through agonistic caricature.