Results by title

8 books match the query 'Musicians, Black'

Sort by

Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico

Sarah Finley

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

Thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy have long championed sound as an affective register of Black subjectivity, particularly in the African Atlantic. Prior studies in this vein focus on Anglophone or Caribbean contexts, a tendency that furthers Mexico’s marginalization within narratives of the Black and African diaspora and mutes Afro-descendant traditions that date back to the sixteenth century. Indeed, the New Spanish archive contains whispers of the region’s Black sound cultures, including monetary records for the voices of enslaved singers and representations of Black music in casta paintings. Despite such evidence, it is difficult to attend fully to these subaltern voices, for the cultural filters of the lettered elite often mute or misinterpret non-European sounds.

Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico is the first extensive study of Afro-descendant sonorities in New Spain or elsewhere in colonial Latin America. In this context, it attends to Black sounds through a framework that remixes Jacques Derrida’s reading of the ear’s anatomy with theories like Gilroy’s lower frequencies or Fred Moten’s phonic materiality. Sarah Finley’s aim is to unsettle the divide between self and other so the auditory archive might emerge as a polyphonic record that exceeds dichotomies of sounding object / listening subject. Through sampling the Afro-descendant sounds of this archive, this book recovers and rearticulates Black voices and auditory practices in New Spain.

[more]

Becoming Belafonte

Black Artist, Public Radical

By Judith E. Smith

University of Texas Press, 2014

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive study of this multitalented artist. She sets Belafonte’s compelling story within a history of American race relations, black theater and film history, McCarthy-era hysteria, and the challenges of introducing multifaceted black culture in a moment of expanding media possibilities and constrained political expression. Smith traces Belafonte’s roots in the radical politics of the 1940s, his careful negotiation of the complex challenges of the Cold War 1950s, and his full flowering as a civil rights advocate and internationally acclaimed performer in the 1960s. In Smith’s account, Belafonte emerges as a relentless activist, a questing intellectual, and a tireless organizer. From his first national successes as a singer of Calypso-inflected songs to the dedication he brought to producing challenging material on television and film regardless of its commercial potential, Belafonte stands as a singular figure in American cultural history—a performer who never shied away from the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet.

[more]

Interspecies Communication

Sound and Music beyond Humanity

Gavin Steingo

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A surprising study reveals a plethora of attempts to communicate with non-humans in the modern era.

In Interspecies Communication, music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human—cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves.

Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space—two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized “ears.” Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.

[more]

Kwaito's Promise

Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa

Gavin Steingo

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.

Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

[more]

Say No to the Devil

The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

Ian Zack

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Who was the greatest of all American guitarists? You probably didn’t name Gary Davis, but many of his musical contemporaries considered him without peer. Bob Dylan called Davis “one of the wizards of modern music.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead—who took lessons with Davis—claimed his musical ability “transcended any common notion of a bluesman.” And the folklorist Alan Lomax called him “one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music.” But you won’t find Davis alongside blues legends Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Despite almost universal renown among his contemporaries, Davis lives today not so much in his own work but through covers of his songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne, and many others, as well as in the untold number of students whose lives he influenced.

The first biography of Davis, Say No to the Devil restores “the Rev’s” remarkable story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with many of Davis’s former students, Ian Zack takes readers through Davis’s difficult beginning as the blind son of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South to his decision to become an ordained Baptist minister and his move to New York in the early 1940s, where he scraped out a living singing and preaching on street corners and in storefront churches in Harlem. There, he gained entry into a circle of musicians that included, among many others, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Dave Van Ronk. But in spite of his tremendous musical achievements, Davis never gained broad recognition from an American public that wasn’t sure what to make of his trademark blend of gospel, ragtime, street preaching, and the blues. His personal life was also fraught, troubled by struggles with alcohol, women, and deteriorating health.

Zack chronicles this remarkable figure in American music, helping us to understand how he taught and influenced a generation of musicians.

[more]

Stolen Time

Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze

Shane Vogel

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.

[more]

Transounding

Listening for Black Queer Lusophone Diasporas

Daniel da Silva

Duke University Press, 2027

In Transounding, Daniel da Silva examines the work of popular music artists from Portugal, Brazil, and Angola whose singing and performances blur boundaries of gender and genre. These artists engage in collaborations that traverse uneven transatlantic Lusophone geographies and complicate North-South and South-South axes, composing, expressing, and performing modes of musical and affective political bonds across Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures and transposing hegemonic cultural narratives into sites of Black queer and transfeminine possibility. Silva describes how transfeminine Brazilian artists complicate categories of gender and sexuality; how queer Portuguese fado performers inhabit and transform the genre's gendered conventions; and how queer, trans, and travesti Angolan and Lisbon-based Black queer artists produce resistant expressions within and against postcolonial and anti-Black contexts. Transounding traces queerness, Blackness, and diaspora across popular culture forms in the Lusophone world and explores the fundamental question of what listeners hear when transgressive voices sing.

[more]

Union Divided

Black Musicians' Fight for Labor Equality

Leta E. Miller

University of Illinois Press, 2024

An in-depth account of the Black locals within the American Federation of Musicians

In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty independent locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in an attempt to control audition criteria, set competitive wages, and secure a voice in national decision-making. Leta Miller follows the AFM’s history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving solutions to problems. Miller’s account of these efforts includes the voices of the musicians themselves and interviews with former union members who took part in the difficult integration of Black and white locals. She also analyzes the fundamental question of how musicians benefitted from membership in a labor organization.

Broad in scope and rich in detail, Union Divided illuminates the complex working world of unionized Black musicians and the AFM’s journey to racial inclusion.

[more]

Publisher Login