African American Musicians Research Articles

Writing Rights: Copyright’s Visual Bias and African American Music

Copyright was first applied to words and was initially visual in orientation. Since the earliest copyright laws, copyright subject matter has progressively expanded from granting rights to protect written expression to other artistic arenas. Copyright law has, however, consistently undervalued the art of performance while favoring the written expression of music, which has had a profound impact on African American based musical forms, now a dominant basis for popular music. This paper examines the privilege of sight in copyright and the numerous ways in which copyright law systematically disfavors performance and suggests two possible explanations. First, copyright law seems to exhibit a visual bias toward perceptible music notation such as written sheet music, which superficially resembles books, maps, and charts, the first objects of U.S. copyright protection. Second, the successful movement beginning in the nineteenth century to ‘sacralize’ older music forms and freeze in place canonical classical works has contributed to visual-textual bias and reinforced an existing privilege of sight. Sacralization involved the identification of original written texts that could serve as ‘authentic’ works, a process that came at the expense of alternative performance practices. Visual bias and sacralization have disadvantaged creative practices based in performance, particularly in light of fixation requirement under current U.S. copyright law. This emphasis on writings has disfavored some plaintiffs who have sought greater protection for their own performance practice, while at the same time disfavored some defendants whose creative, non-notated performance practice should allow a greater scope for their borrowing. Copyright’s visual-textual bias thus diminishes important contributions of performers of music and hinders recognition of the full spectrum of activities that may be embedded in sound recordings. This article suggests that courts in interpreting infringement in music cases must look beyond the visual and take better account of how music is actually perceived, applying insights of neuroscience research on music cognition. Contexts of creation should play a greater role in copyright infringement determinations, which should take a more holistic approach to music and other arts that incorporates both visual and nonvisual elements and greater understanding of varied assumptions about musical perception for copyright determinations.

Hip Hop Samples Jazz: Dynamics of Cultural Memo y and Musical Tradition in the African American 1990s

Sampling is the extraction and collaging of snatches of pre-existing musical recordings, and since hip hop’s beginnings in the late-1970s the technique has been central to that style’s methodology and identity. Early scholarly work on hip hop – published in the mid-1990s by American writers like Tricia Rose, William Eric Perkins and Kyra D. Gaunt – tended to consider sampling as a historically significant practice, one through which the music’s producers constructed memorials to, and continued the traditions of, earlier African American music. But more recently this view has been challenged: in his book Making Beats (2004) Joseph Schloss contends that creative pragmatics, and the search for raw materials, have always been more important to producers than any cultural-historical concerns. In this talk I’ll explore these issues by way of an examination of hip hop in the early-1990s, and specifically the uses that many groups – most notably Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest – were then beginning to make of jazz recordings from decades past. Making reference to contemporary interview material, I aim to establish how, between the opposition of tradition and pragmatism, hip hop artists variously, and often simultaneously, described and enacted both continuations of and wariness towards an African American musical heritage.

The Typhoid Marys of the Left: Gender, Race, and the Broadcast Blacklist

Scholarly accounts of gender, race, and television in the 1950s have mainly focused on the ideological content of programming that ultimately made it onto the air. This research has played an important role in reckoning with the political and cultural legacies of 1950s television. But the focus on ideology and content has prevented us from fully understanding the repressive nature of anti-communist thought and action, both in terms of the powerful ways in which the broadcast blacklist made the production of progressive themes and images impossible, and in terms of how the fear that followed from the blacklist repressed the memory that such alternatives had ever existed. Counter to the images of white suburban women we have inherited from the 1950s, the first two casualties of the broadcast blacklist were professional women who were politically active—white actor Jean Muir and African American musician Hazel Scott—whose involvement in civil rights was deemed evidence of their communist sympathies. This essay builds on earlier research on gender and 1950s television not by analyzing the absence of strong women, people of color, immigrants, and working-class families from the televisual landscape, but by looking at the elimination of the very cultural workers writing, agitating, and fighting to broadcast these representations.

Between African-American and European: Kenny Clarke's musical migrations

Constrained by racism and increasing white ownership of the music industry in the United States, African-American jazz drummer Kenny Clarke exited the New York jazz scene for Paris in 1956. Clarke's migration not only represented social freedom but also creative freedom. Through his mentorship of French artists and his work to universalize jazz beyond the authority of just African-American musicians, Clarke signified blackness and Europeaness. In the process of his migration, musicianship and mentorship, Clarke used jazz to meld African-American culture with the music, culture and socio-political concerns of European musicians and fans. This paper argues that even though he was not born in Europe or colonized by European countries, Kenny Clarke and other exiled African-American artists offer an alternative narrative to the negotiation between being black and European.

The influence of the nation of Islam on African American singers

ABSTRACT This article explores the responses of African American musicians to the strictures placed on the production and circulation of information following the war on terror post 9/11. This date marks the intensification of the challenging of ‘war on terror’ ideology by black artists. 9/11 also ushered in a new morality in terms of which artists and democratic voices are subjected to extreme control by the government. Most black popular musicians, though American by citizenship, do not feel included in the American nation. There are noticeable and differentiable tendencies among musicians who adopt strategies of resistance to the American state, which the artists view as practising terrorism on its own people. The lyrics of Public Enemy and Talib Kweli are most trenchant in their critiques of American domestic and foreign policy in the period both before and after 9/11. A textual analysis of the music can help uncover the extent of social ideology in the music, which not only proclaims itself a crusade against American ‘war on terror’ ideology, but sometimes openly identifies its inspiration as deriving from Islam. While selected lyrics demonstrate a quest for the liberation of black Americans from the perceived injustices perpetrated by America on its black people and the Arabs in general, the singers articulate their visions from the contradictory ideological ground of being American, victim, and visionary artist for a better society.

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

Encyclopedia of African American music

African Americans' historical roots are encapsulated in the lyrics, melodies, and rhythms of their music. In the 18th and 19th centuries, African slaves, longing for emancipation, expressed their hopes and dreams through spirituals. Inspired by African civilization and culture, as well as religion, art, literature, and social issues, this influential, joyous, tragic, uplifting, challenging, and enduring music evolved into many diverse genres, including jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, swing, and hip hop. Providing a lyrical history of our nation, this groundbreaking encyclopedia, the first of its kind, showcases all facets of African American music including folk, religious, concert and popular styles. Over 500 in-depth entries by more than 100 scholars on a vast range of topics such as genres, styles, individuals, groups, and collectives as well as historical topics such as music of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and numerous others. Offering balanced representation of key individuals, groups, and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and other perspectives not usually approached, this indispensable reference illuminates the profound role that African American music has played in American cultural history. Editors Price, Kernodle, and Maxile provide balanced representation of various individuals, groups and ensembles associated with diverse religious beliefs, political affiliations, and perspectives. Also highlighted are the major record labels, institutions of higher learning, and various cultural venues that have had a tremendous impact on the development and preservation of African American music. Among the featured: Motown Records, Black Swan Records, Fisk University, Gospel Music Workshop of America, The Cotton Club, Center for Black Music Research, and more. With a broad scope, substantial entries, current coverage, and special attention to historical, political, and social contexts, this encyclopedia is designed specifically for high school and undergraduate students. Academic and public libraries will treasure this resource as an incomparable guide to our nation's African American heritage.

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music (review)

Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music (review)

Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook (review)

Reviewed by: Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook David Krasner Marva Griffin Carter. Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 184 pp. $27.95. Will Marion Cook (née William Mercer, 1869–1944) was a musician and composer best known for his work in black musicals. A student of the violin at the Oberlin Conservatory, tutored by Heinrich Jocobson at the Berlin Hochschule for Musik, and a protégé of Antonin Dvořák and John White at the National Conservatory of Music, Cook was eminently prepared for a career as a concert performer and opera composer. Because he was African American, however, the scant opportunities available at the time were in musical theatre. His talents were hardly wasted, though, as he composed some of the most enduring songs and lyrics for black and white musicals. Writing music with the great poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as lyricist, and teaming up with the superb musical performers Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, George Walker, and Bert Williams, Cook arranged orchestration and wrote lyrics and songs for the best musicals of his generation. Influenced by Tin Pan Alley songs and show tunes, Cook made an essential contribution to popular music in American consciousness. Marva Griffin Carter’s book shines a long overdue light on the career of this great composer. Cook worked in several media: art songs, love songs, and spirituals, and as Carter notes, his musical styles included “a diverse range of pseudo-Africanisms, a nostalgic plantation song, tender ballads, waltzes, recitatives and operatic ensembles” (67). He was also masterful at writing the popular “coon song,” the derogatory tunes by white writers that were turned into generally positive representations once written by African Americans. Cook’s most famous song, “Swing Along,” written for Williams and Walker, is a powerful work reflecting the conditions of African Americans moving (“swinging along”) amidst a thicket of racism. During his most productive decade, 1898–1908, he composed outstanding music for shows such as Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), In Dahomey (1903), and The Southerner (1904). In his later years Cook produced choral works, especially his Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Cook’s genius was owing to what Carter calls “his use of highly syncopated, chromatic melodies and extended song forms” (118). Despite his talent, he was a recalcitrant figure in show business. Carter notes that George Walker once said of him: “If Will Marion Cook was a white man I reckon he would pass as eccentric, [End Page 285] but, being as he’s a negro, he’s sure enough plum crazy” (91). Carter quotes Cook admitting that his failure to acquire success “was not because of color; rather, because of uncontrolled passions, too violent a resentment against real of fancied wrongs; too large and too visible a chip on each shoulder and to be sure I missed nothing, another chip on my woolly head” (110). Nevertheless, Cook had numerous admirers. His wife Abbie Mitchell, despite divorcing him, remained supportive of his musical career. He also had a tremendous influence on many important African American musicians, mentoring Eubie Blake, James Reese Europe, and Duke Ellington, among others. The book is essentially an unreconstructed reprint of the author’s 1988 dissertation and the shortcoming of such republication is glaring. There are little to no references to the dozens of works on African American musical theatre that have emerged during the past two decades. The author seems unaware, for example, of several new biographies of Cook’s collaborator, Bert Williams, only referencing the outdated biographies by Mabel Rowland (1923) and Ann Charters (1970). Additionally, many accounts of Cook’s experiences noted in this book are stated with insufficient examination. The author says, for instance, that Cook “could not have chosen a more gifted mentor than Bob Cole to teach him the tricks of the theatrical trade” (37), then says that there was “discord between Cole and Cook” (57) that ended their relationship. But no explanation as to the substance of the discord is provided. The author says that “Cook was widely known as an advocate of Republican principles and an outspoken anti-New Dealer” (109), but then says that Cook...

Syncopated Hits: The Clef Club Negro Baseball Team in Jazz-Age Paris

In February and March 1940, New York Amsterdam News ran a five-part story, 12,000 Nights of Entertainment, on exciting rise and fall of Louis Mitchell's career as a jazz musician and club owner in Paris. To illustrate third installment of story, newspaper published a 1924 photograph of eleven African American ballplayers, one of whom was Mitchell, all resplendent in their new spring uniforms. (1) The team's young mascot, Jackie, sat in front of players sporting a uniform and holding some equipment. Two overlapping Cs were prominent on upper left side of uniforms, signifying team's name: Clef Club, named for James Reese Europe's New York music space and booking agency for African American musicians. But this ball team did not play in New York--or in United States for that matter; rather, it was an all--African American team that played in Paris in 1924 and 1925. Its players, with notable exception of Rayford Logan, who would become a prominent civil rights activist and professor at Howard University, were musicians who worked jazz clubs of Montmartre. (2) A great many African Americans served in France during World War I. The American military was segregated and largely distrusted black soldiers. The French, by contrast, warmly received these soldiers, displaying little to no racism, even when black soldiers socialized with French women. (3) Moreover, when James Reese Europe joined New York 369th Infantry Regiment, more affectionately called Harlem Hellfighters, he was specifically tasked with forming hottest band possible, and he did. Although 369th fought bravely and was rightfully decorated by France for their valor, their greater cultural impact was introducing jazz music to French during war. (4) After war, French celebrated life, and jazz became soundtrack to les annies folles, crazy years, roaring twenties. Given harsh racial climate in United States after war and opportunities for work and racial equality in France, a number of African Americans traveled to France during 1920S. In Paris Noir, Tyler Stovall argues, the African American community in Paris symbolizes potential of African American life in general once it is fully liberated from shackles of racism. (5) Many African Americans flourished in Paris, and we rightly celebrate their cultural contributions to music, art, literature, and social thought. (6) The Clef Club baseball team and Paris Baseball League, also known as Paris International League, ostensibly left racism off field, thus foreshadowing potential African Americans would have in post--World War II amateur and professional sports--and in America. In early summer 1914, Louis Mitchell arrived in London to play drums with his Southern Symphony Quintette in a Piccadilly restaurant. He immediately made a splash, but gig lasted only a few weeks--when World War broke out, Mitchell and his band evacuated home to New York. But Mitchell did not stay stateside long; he was back in London in spring 1915 playing drums at Ciro's, a celebrated club. (7) Soon Mitchell was touring Britain with his band, Seven Spades, just as Americans began flowing into Europe to join war effort. Of course where Americans went, baseball followed--as did American racism. Recreational baseball leagues were quickly established, such as Military Hospital Baseball League, which sponsored a game between America and Canada on October 31, 1917, in Belfast. Mitchell, an avid ballplayer, tried to play with American team, only to be refused by a southerner who exclaimed, I won't play with that nigger. (8) Indeed he didn't--for a while. On game day, Mitchell sat in stands, merely a spectator, but in seventh inning American pitcher was injured. The manager had to choose either to forfeit game or, ad hoc, to integrate team; he wasted no time putting Mitchell on mound. …

The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980–84

An influential private party for white gay men that opened in downtown New York in 1980 and closed in 1988, the Saint was a prolific employer of high-profile DJs, yet their work has gone largely unanalysed. This article describes and contextualises the aesthetic of these DJs, paying particular attention to the way they initially embraced music recorded by African American musicians, yet shifted to a notably “whiter” sound across 1982 and 1983, during which time new wave and Hi-NRG recordings were heard much more regularly at the spot. The piece argues that this shift took place as a result of a number of factors, including the introduction of a consumer ethos at the venue, the deepening influence of identity politics and the encroaching impact of AIDS, which decimated the venue’s membership. These developments led Saint DJs to place an ever-greater emphasis on the creation of a smooth and seamless aesthetic that enhanced the crowd’s embrace of a synchronized dancing style. DJs working in electronic dance music scenes would go on to adopt important elements of this approach.

The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Culture of Blindness. Terry Rowden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 184 pages. $65.00 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Journal Article The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Culture of Blindness. Terry Rowden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 184 pages. $65.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. Get access The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Culture of Blindness. Terry Rowden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 184 pages. $65.00 cloth; $22.95 paper. L. H. Stallings L. H. Stallings Indiana University, Bloomington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 35, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 197–199, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/35.4.197 Published: 01 December 2010

Yves Laberge on Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (Neil A. Wynn, ed.)

Yves Laberge on Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe (Neil A. Wynn, ed.)

The songs of blind folk: African American musicians and the cultures of blindness

This book tells how America has constructed the figure of the visually impaired black performer over the last 150 years. It features Ray Charles, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Stevie Wonder. What explains the apparent link between blindness and musical talent in black performers? Artists like Blind Arthur Blake, Sonny Terry, Arizona Dranes, and Art Tatum have appeared throughout the history of popular music in America - the list of visually impaired black musicians is long. In The Songs of Blind Folk, Terry Rowden examines the ways that blindness, like blackness, shaped both the music these artists produced and the way the nation received it. Beginning with an investigation of the controversial 19th-century prodigy Blind Tom Bethune and concluding with an analysis of Stevie Wonder's contemporary success, Rowden shows how the lives and careers of visually impaired black musicians have mirrored America's changing conception of race.

On Ownership and Value: Response

Ronald Radano has written an elegant and intellectually ambitious meditation on racial authenticity and the history of black music. As always, his erudite prose frames a classic theme in the study of African-American music in an arresting manner that forces us to think deeply about the question. In this brief response, I would like to present the most intriguing aspects of Radano's argument as well as offer a critique that suggests another avenue for thinking through the same issue. I have known the author for many years now and am pleased that he asked me to write this response, especially since he knows that my way of looking at things is quite different. I am intrigued by the way that Radano frames the problem of authenticity and black music by suggesting that it is an outcome of a paradoxical relationship between and property in the history of African-American music. He points out that although the musical talents of the enslaved were among the things that the slavemaster owned and could earn money with, the power of black music was such that it could not be contained by the property system, and indeed exposed the limits of white supremacy, by giving material form to what lay beyond their grasp (that is white people's grasp). Central to Radano's argument is a critique of African-American musical and moral authenticity in defining what is such a huge part of the sound of the nation. This sense of cultural pride, forged in response to the structural conditions of slavery and later a racially hierarchic musical marketplace, as he also points out, has paradoxically become a point of conflicted unity and deep desire in American society. If, as Radano has argued, the power of black music has always exceeded the containment of the property system, it is also true that African-American artists have never been paid in proportion to their influence on American popular music. This is due in part to the racially hierarchic nature of the music industry that throughout the twentieth century seemed to require well-positioned and often well-intentioned non-African Americans to advocate for African-American artists (all the while taking their cuts), and in part the condition of being a minority. I often point out to my students that although the percentage of African Americans in the U.S. population has ranged between 10 and 13 percent, their contribution to mainstream popular musical aesthetics has been substantially greater, one could argue in the range of 60 to 75 percent. If the economic system were fair, in other words, African-American musicians should have been paid in proportion to their aesthetic contribution. In the legendarily exploitive economic contexts of the early and mid-twentieth centuries, this was never true. I am not as troubled as Radano by the discourse of racial authenticity which frequently emerges in our debates over the of the nation, because (as I have argued more fully in Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa) it historically has been one of the few discursive weapons available to African Americans to protest the inequalities of the economic outcome, as well as to advocate for self-determination. Moreover, the invocation of racial authenticity--at least in the history of jazz--has most typically occurred in response to either unreflective white liberal behavior or overtly racist behavior. It has been situational, in other words: sometimes the ethnic walls are up and sometimes they are not. That discussions about this complicated history should often evoke ambivalent responses is hardly surprising. What seems most of interest is what circumstances make the walls go up and down. Historically among the biggest triggers for the raising of racial walls has been white insistence that the music be viewed as colorblind, despite the fact that African Americans have played such a prominent role in musical development. …

African and African-American Musicians Seeking Progress at A Century of Progress

Research Article| October 01 2009 African and African-American Musicians Seeking Progress at A Century of Progress Marian M. Ohman Marian M. Ohman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) (2009) 102 (3-4): 368–401. https://doi.org/10.2307/25701241 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Marian M. Ohman; African and African-American Musicians Seeking Progress at A Century of Progress. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) 1 January 2009; 102 (3-4): 368–401. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25701241 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2010 The Illinois State Historical Society2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture Betty Houchin Winfield Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. By Bruce Lenthall. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. 2007. Radio's America offers a critical media analysis about the loss of individual expression, resulting in homogenization of public messages. By blurring the lines between the individual and mass culture, Bruce Lenthall argues, radio's power diminishes individual autonomy within that mass communication system. Lenthall contends that broadcasting structure does not allow for competing stations or diverse voices (33). As a critical broadcast history of one decade, the research context within the big picture of radio history is missing. Broadcast historians Christopher Sterling, et al. (Stay Tuned 2002) contend that by the 1930s, radio programming was half national and half local (180) and that by 1938, an FCC report found that 50 to 70 percent of programming came from networks, with 52 percent of it music. Lenthall focuses only on the narrative elite programming. While he gives an admirable synthesis of the negative responses to racial stereotyping in "Amos 'n' Andy" and the lack of network access for talented Langston Hughes, Lenthall ignores the network African American musicians: Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Paul Robeson, etc. Radio's America misses how local radio programming served American communities, college campuses, and farms with local events, regional music, sports, morning wake-ups, religious services, and crop reports. Nor is the programming of the joint station and newspaper local ownership discussed. Rather, Lenthall follows the capitalist critique of James Rorty and Ruth Brindze, that the near monopoly of the networks served the interests of corporate capitalism. The author expounds on the creative dramas of Orson Wells and Archibald MacLeish, but more as aberrations, and sticks to the premise that advertising limits artistic speech (205) by network obsession with listener numbers. With easy redistribution of identical cultural forms, radio reached a largely undifferentiated audience as one. The majority preferences impacted the individual, whether politically or sociologically, as Alexis de Tocqueville found earlier. Lenthall refers to Roosevelt's two broadcast goals. FDR did indeed initially use radio as a way to distribute information, reassure, and give hope to the nation crippled by the economy. Yet, without evidence Lenthall also writes that Roosevelt's "belief" (87) was that radio could enable him "to enhance his political power." By World War II, FDR's [End Page 138] administration relied on radio more in paradoxical ways: simultaneously empowering and manipulative. Lenhall states that 1930s radio changed America to a narrow, mass consumer culture that also limited liberal democracy in contemporary life. Rather, radio was just one of the twentieth century mass media forms; earlier, mass magazines filled with national advertising also built a consumer culture. Specific chapters cover public intellectuals' responses to radio, audiences' personal reactions to particular programs, and participatory radio democracy by Roosevelt and other broadcast champions. Most useful are chapter summations of early radio research and major radio writers' artistic efforts. The extensive primary research is impressive. Yet, without context and placement the author goes too far: the "interconnected and vast society of the twentieth century made older notions of participatory and local democracy seem nonsensical" (7). This belies Robert Putnam's social capital findings of twentieth-century community civic engagement (Bowling Alone 2000) and the higher voter turnout statistics in the 1936 and 1940 elections. Betty Houchin Winfield University of Missouri, Columbia Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Music and the 'any-space-whatever': Translating existential chaos into artistic composition

This paper looks at the importance of rhythmic creativity for the African-American musician as a means of counteracting the inherent “non-space” of diasporic existence. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as from the fields of cultural studies and diaspora theory, this paper examines the immanent existential and territorial concerns of the “minor” subject, as might be witnessed in the music of James Brown. Rather than attribute Brown’s African-American identity as the defining characteristic of his musical style, as many previous academic accounts have done, I will instead look at his work as the product of a lack of an identity, and how this idea might be understood in relation to Augé’s “non-places”, the idiosyncratic interpretation of Augé by Deleuze in his Cinema books, and the possible correspondence of this concept of the “non-place”/”any-space-whatever” with the rhizomorphic, post-national. The Black Atlantic subject described by Paul Gilroy. Rather than simply attribute Brown’s music as a reiteration of African diasporic musical legacy, the paper instead attempts to define Brown’s funk as the work of a becoming-subject, where the creativity of the minority in these “any-space-whatevers” is due to being thrown into the creative chaos of an intolerable position.

Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and

Book Review| April 01 2009 Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922; Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany by Rainer E. Lotz; Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. xviii, 510 pp.Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. viii, 461 pp.Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919, by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. x, 634 pp.Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922. St. Joseph, IL: Archeophone Records, 2005. 2 compact discs.Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany, by Rainer E. Lotz. Bonn: Birgit Lotz, 1997. 398 pp.; compact disc.Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn. American Made Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xii, 289 pp. Thomas L. Riis Thomas L. Riis THOMAS L. RIIS has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder as the Joseph Negler Professor of Music since 2002 and as Director of the American Music Research Center since 1992. His most recent book, published as part of the Yale Broadway Masters series, is entitled Frank Loesser. He served as a senior scholar, with a Fulbright Fellowship, at the University of Lüneburg (Germany) in 2005–6. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2009) 62 (1): 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.252 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas L. Riis; Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922; Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany by Rainer E. Lotz; Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2009; 62 (1): 252–260. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.252 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2009 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved.2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe

Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe