Music in Black American Life 1945-2020
The ambitious collection of writings on African American music is grounded in scholarship that began in the ‘60s with the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements. The mission for many of its contributors, as Miami University professor Tammy L. Kernodle puts it, is to unearth and explore “ideas, facts, phenomena, and records that have been neglected, forgotten, ignored, falsified.” The essays cover Duke Ellington’s broadening of America’s symphonic aesthetic, the rising availability of Black music and its embrace by white audiences and musicians (leaving many Black originators uncompensated), the under-sung role of Black women in gospel and jazz and how Martin Luther King’s “integrationist ideology” underscored Berry Gordon’s vision for Motown. Cheryl L. Keyes’ essay on rap is enlightening for its attention on how cutbacks in public school music programs fueled the rise of hip-hop.
