Blacksound

This week’s review introduces the concept of Blacksound to examine how the American popular music industry "was built on the exploitation of songs of enslaved people and blackface minstrelsy.”

Posted on February 3, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States

Morrison, Matthew D. California, 2024
328p bibl index, 9780520390577 $85.00, 9780520390591 $29.95, 9780520390607

In this original monograph, Morrison (NYU) argues that today’s popular music industry was built on the exploitation of songs of enslaved people and blackface minstrelsy, resulting in an amalgamation of Black and other racialized (including white) musics that he theorizes as “Blacksound.” Over five chapters, Morrison uses Blacksound to analyze sonic identity, performance, and property within a cultural and legal system under white control. For example, William Henry Lane (”Master Juba”), a Black antebellum minstrel whose virtuosic dancing defied description, was an early Black performer robbed of his “intellectual performance property,” since incipient US copyright law protected only notated music (and later, recordings). Through blackface, whites typically denigrated and stereotyped Black performers by their (unwritten) movements and improvisations, only to embody those same performative acts for their own profit. Morrison also devotes chapters to Stephen Foster’s “Americana” and the under-studied publishing house M. Witmark & Sons (“the house that blackface built”). The final chapter, on the evolution of ragtime from a local Black music to the aesthetic basis of mainstream popular music, traces how Tin Pan Alley commodified Blacksound, allowing non-Black performers to profit without the burden of Black skin. This book is essential reading, marred only by frequent and lengthy footnotes.

Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.
Reviewer: S. Graham, Babson College
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Performing Arts – Music
Choice Issue: Oct 2024

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• Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé
• The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies
• Antagonistic Cooperation: Jazz, Collage, Fiction, and the Shaping of African American Culture

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