1930s cultural radicalism
A01=Steven P. Garabedian
African American expressive culture
African American music
African American protest music
African American vernacular traditions
alternative American histories
American leftist cultural movements
and cultural labor
Author_Steven P. Garabedian
Black musical dissent
blues fieldwork controversies
Category=AVC
Category=AVLA
Category=AVLP
Category=AVLT
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSL
Category=NH
Category=NHK
Category=QDX
Civil Righs Movement
civil rights era sound culture
class
contested authenticity in folk music
cultural appropriation debates
cultural politics of the archive
Depression-era music collectors
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
field recordings of Black folk songs
folk music
folk music scholarship
folk revival
forgotten blues collectors
grassroots documentation of resistance
hidden histories of resistance
historical erasure in music studies
independent ethnomusicology
interracial cultural exchange
Lawrence Gellert
left-wing folklore networks
music and racial justice
music as political resistance
music collecting
Negro Songs of Protest
political folk music origins
progressive music documentation
protest songs of the Jim Crow South
race
race and musicology
race and representation in American sound
radical cultural memory
radical music history
rediscovering hidden collectors
rediscovering neglected archives
rediscovery of protest song traditions
sound and social struggle
Southern Black resistance songs
Southern fieldwork archives
suppressed voices in Southern music
the folk revival's forgotten figures
the politics of sound archives
twentieth-century music politics
untrained collectors of the South
voices from the segregated South
white historiography and racial bias
white patronage in Black art
Product details
- ISBN 9781625345295
- Weight: 490g
- Dimensions: 154 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2020
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A "lean, straggly-haired New Yorker," as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors.
By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication -- an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century.
By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication -- an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century.
Steven P. Garabedian is assistant professor of history at Marist College.
