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Segregating Sound
Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
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Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2010
About this book
A cultural history describing how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a "musical color line" in the South, associating certain genres with particular racial and ethnic identities.
Author / Editor information
Karl Hagstrom Miller is an Assistant Professor who teaches in the History Department and the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at the University of Texas, Austin.
Reviews
“[T]he most thorough achievement thus far in a growing body of scholarship and criticism demystifying and dissecting the roots of American music, and by extension the American music industry. . . . Miller goes several steps further than prior bodies of research, tracing back the artificial distinction to a confluence of marketing, scholarship, and music classification decisions, each driven to some degree by the prevailing racial attitudes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” - Mark Reynolds, PopMatters
"A cultural exploration and, in part, a polemic, Segregating Sound is at once a social history, musical history, business history and an intellectual history. . . . Miller is an engaging writer who regularly turns memorable phrases. Thickly researched and cogently argued, Segregating Sound makes a thought-provoking, very likely lasting contribution to how we think about and relate to American musical genres.” - Barry Mazor, American Songwriter
“[B]rilliant . . . . Miller is the first scholar to take the overwhelming presence of popular music in the South seriously and to weave the story of changing ideas about what makes music ‘authentic’ into the history of what musicians from the South were actually playing and what people were actually listening to. Segregating Sound tells the stories of the varied cast of characters who invented the category of southern music, a significant part of what is called ‘folk’ or ‘Americana’ or ‘roots’ music today and understood as part of the American musical canon.” - Grace Hale, Southern Spaces
“[A] marvelous reappraisal of early 20th century American musical culture. . . . [Miller’s] book is rich with examples of folklorists or academics heading south in search of something ‘elemental’ and pure, and editing out anything that didn't fit. And there was a lot.” - Hua Hsu, TheAtlantic.com
“Miller . . . provides a fascinating exploration of the segregation of commercial music in the US during the course of the 20th century. . . . Supported by extensive notes, this study adds considerably to the already extensive literature on the blues and country music.” - R. D. Cohen, Choice
“Ultimately Miller’s study succeeds because it questions many assumptions about folk and pop music, and about the commercial music business and the academic folklore world.” - Rory Crutchfield, Popular Music
“Segregating Sound provides a convincing and far-reaching argument that the duality within southern music developed out of three factors in the latter part of the nineteenth century: the rise of political and economic segregation, the academic professionalization of folklore, and the modernization of the music industry. . . . Segregating Sound is a valuable and interesting work that anyone working in cultural studies should consult.” - Kenneth J. Bindas, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
“In this head-banging, eye-opening study, Karl Hagstrom Miller examines with stunning clarity the historical and material grounding of the music industry’s three main revenue streams: live performance, recording, and publishing. Along the way, he demonstrates how the notion of authenticity in folklore discourse, systemic Jim Crow, and minstrelsy legacies worked together to calcify our contemporary—and quite naturalized—perceptions about music and racialized bodies.If you ever wondered where MTV, CMT, VH1, and BET got their marketing logic, look no further. In fact, you’ll never experience a Billboard chart, nor the words ‘keep it real’ in the same way after reading this book!”—Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
“In this fascinating study of the nature of music, those who study music, and the music business, Miller explains how musicologists and folklorists tried drawing hard lines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries between what they considered music of the folk (poor black and, sometimes, white, Southern musicians) and more worldly pop music. [T]he author displays an incredible depth of knowledge and presents an important history of music.”
-- Library Journal
“Scrupulously researched, engagingly written, and bursting with ideas, Segregating Sound asks readers to reengage with the origins of folk and pop music in a manner that offers a roadmap to the future, rather than simply a dismantling of the past.”
-- John Dougan Journal of Southern History
“Segregating Sound provides a convincing and far-reaching argument that the duality within southern music developed out of three factors in the latter part of the nineteenth century: the rise of political and economic segregation, the academic professionalization of folklore, and the modernization of the music industry. . . . Segregating Sound is a valuable and interesting work that anyone working in cultural studies should consult.”
-- Kenneth J. Bindas Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
“[B]rilliant . . . . Miller is the first scholar to take the overwhelming presence of popular music in the South seriously and to weave the story of changing ideas about what makes music ‘authentic’ into the history of what musicians from the South were actually playing and what people were actually listening to. Segregating Sound tells the stories of the varied cast of characters who invented the category of southern music, a significant part of what is called ‘folk’ or ‘Americana’ or ‘roots’ music today and understood as part of the American musical canon.”
-- Grace Hale Southern Spaces
“Miller . . . provides a fascinating exploration of the segregation of commercial music in the US during the course of the 20th century. . . . Supported by extensive notes, this study adds considerably to the already extensive literature on the blues and country music.”
-- R. D. Cohen Choice
“Ultimately Miller’s study succeeds because it questions many assumptions about folk and pop music, and about the commercial music business and the academic folklore world.”
-- Rory Crutchfield Popular Music
"A cultural exploration and, in part, a polemic, Segregating Sound is at once a social history, musical history, business history and an intellectual history. . . . Miller is an engaging writer who regularly turns memorable phrases. Thickly researched and cogently argued, Segregating Sound makes a thought-provoking, very likely lasting contribution to how we think about and relate to American musical genres.”
-- Barry Mazor American Songwriter
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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CONTENTS
v -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii -
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INTRODUCTION
1 -
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1. TIN PAN ALLEY ON TOUR The Southern Embrace of Commercial Music
23 -
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2. MAKING MONEY MAKING MUSIC The Education of Southern Musicians in Local Markets
51 -
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3. ISOLATING FOLK, ISOLATING SONGS Reimagining Southern Music as Folklore
85 -
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4. SOUTHERN MUSICIANS AND THE LURE OF NEW YORK CITY Representing the South from Coon Songs to the Blues
121 -
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5. TALKING MACHINE WORLD Discovering Local Music in the Global Phonograph Industry
157 -
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6. RACE RECORDS AND OLD-TIME MUSIC The Creation of Two Marketing Categories in the 1920s
187 -
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7. BLACK FOLK AND HILLBILLY POP Industry Enforcement of the Musical Color Line
215 -
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8. REIMAGINING POP TUNES AS FOLK SONGS The Ascension of the Folkloric Paradigm
241 -
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AFTERWORD ‘‘All Songs is Folk Songs’’
275 -
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NOTES
283 -
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
327 -
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INDEX
351
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 11, 2010
eBook ISBN:
9780822392705
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
384
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