Description
Book SynopsisCovers the various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. This title offers an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs.
Trade Review"Race Music is slammin'! Ramsey brilliantly interweaves oral history with his own scholarly readings of jazz, gospel, popular music, and film soundtracks with pathbreaking results. Race Music revolutionizes the way we receive and critique African American popular culture and provides a new context for our understanding of black music and cultural memory. A must read - intelligent, engaging and powerful." - Rae Linda Brown, author of The Heart of a Woman "This work easily makes Guthrie one of the top musicologists of his generation who writes on black music. The scope, depth, and breadth are highly impressive. His criticisms of other scholars are fair. And his treatments of black musical artists in time, in space, and in place are quite illuminating. I know no one else who has his mastery of knowledge over such a broad range of black musical works of different genres and periods." - Cornel West, Princeton University; "Witty, powerful, smart, opinionated, beautifully written, groundbreaking, and bold. Scholars will read Race Music and debate it for years to come." - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams"
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface 1. Daddy's Second Line: Toward a Cultural Poetics of Race Music 2. Disciplining Black Music: On History, Memory, and Contemporary Theories 3. "It's Just the Blues": Race, Entertainment, and the Blues Muse 4. "It Just Stays with Me All of the Time": Collective Memory, Community Theater, and the Ethnographic Truth 5. "We Called Ourselves Modern": Race Music and the Politics and Practice of Afro-Modernism at Midcentury 6. "Goin' to Chicago": Memories, Histories, and a Little Bit of Soul 7. Scoring a Black Nation: Music, Film, and Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop 8. "Santa Claus Ain't Got Nothing on This!": Hip-Hop Hybridity and the Black Church Muse Epilogue: "Do You Want It on Your Black-Eyed Peas?" Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
