In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

Celeste Day Moore is Assistant Professor of History at Hamilton College.

Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Making Soundwaves  1
1. Jazz en Liberté: The US Military and the Soundscapes of Liberation  17
2. Writing Black, Talking Back: Jazz and the Value of African American Identity  43
3. Spinning Race: The French Record Industry and the Production of African American Music  71
4. Speaking in Tongues: The Negro Spiritual and the Circuits of Black Internationalism  103
5. The Voice of America: Radio, Race, and the Sounds of the Cold War  133
6. Liberation Revisited: African American Music and the Postcolonial Landscape  161
Epilogue: Sounding like a Revolution  195
Notes  201
Sources  251
Index  283