A01=Matthew D. Morrison
antebellum period
appropriation
Author_Matthew D. Morrison
blackface in music
Category=AV
Category=AVA
Category=AVC
Category=AVM
civil war
copyright law
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
intellectual property
jazz
jim crow
Mama Lou
performance
racial authenticity
racial justice
ragtime
slavery
stephen foster
Tin Pan Alley
William Henry Master Juba Lane
Product details
- ISBN 9780520390577
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Mar 2024
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"No book from this past year better explains American popular music than professor Matthew Morrison’s Blacksound."—A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of 2024
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
