Music in Black American Life: 1945-2020 is the companion volume to the earlier Music in Black American Life: 1600-1945. Both volumes are edited by Laurie Matheson and are published by the University of Illinois Press. Matheson, of course, is the editor of Illinois’ excellent Music in American Life series. The twelve essays included in the current volume are drawn from either journals or books that are published by the University of Illinois Press. While this makes a lot of sense from a publishing perspective, it automatically limits the source material that the volume could draw upon.
There are several excellent essays in this anthology, but it is hard to imagine what the specific purpose of the book is. Scholars specializing in African American music will more than likely have read virtually all of the chapters, as they are all previously published and readily available in most university libraries. Four of the chapters were originally published in the Black Music Research Journal, while two more first appeared in American Music. The other six essays are chapters from such well-known books as Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound and Wayne Goins’s Blues All Day Long: The Jimmy Rodgers Story. The only essay in Music in Black American Life: 1945-2020 that I hadn’t previously read was Loren Kajikawa’s “’Young, Scrappy, and Hungry’: Hamilton, Hip Hop and Race,” published in American Music in 2018.
It is possible that the book was conceived as a reader for upper level undergraduate or master’s courses in African American music. If that is the case, it unfortunately misses its mark. While there is one essay on post-war Chicago blues, four on jazz, one on Motown, one on gospel, one on freedom songs, one on women’s music festivals, and three on hip hop, there are no essays that discuss jump blues, club blues, doo wop, Black rock and roll, girl groups, southern soul, or funk. With so many important genres of post-war Black music not included, one cannot imagine course directors adopting the book wholesale. That, of course, leaves the possibility of professors using one or more of the collection’s chapters as part of their course readings but, given that every essay is readily accessible via its original publication in most university libraries, this hardly justifies the publication.
There are a number of issues with Music in Black American Life: 1945-2020 that could be categorized as editorial. While most of the articles are “academic,” such is not the case for the excerpt taken from Nelson George’s book on Motown. Neither footnotes nor a list of sources is included in George’s essay, which makes it an odd fit given that every other chapter has dozens of footnotes and references. One would have liked to have seen references added to George’s essay to afford the interested reader the opportunity to check sources for either veracity or additional research.
Other essays, such as Tammy Kernodle’s contribution, “Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender and the Politics of Validation,” refer at various points to articles that were included in the original issue of the Black Music Research Journal that the article first appeared in. As a reader it is frustrating to have an author reference related works as if they were accessible in the volume one is reading, when, in fact, they are not. This kind of thing could have been caught in the editing process with the references referred to in sentences in the body of the essay changed to footnotes. Oddly enough, the Kernodle essay is the only article in the book for which the year of original publication is not provided.
A different issue occurs in Cheryl Keyes’s “The Development of the Rap Music Tradition.” In this case sources are cited within the body of the essay but in a manner that precludes the interested reader from being able to follow up on them. An example occurs on page 223 where Keyes uses a quote referring to Horace Silvers’s “Opus de Funk.” A source is included in brackets which reads “Shaw 1986: 257.” Her book, from which this chapter is excerpted, includes a bibliography so that the interested reader could look up who “Shaw” is and search out the original 1986 source. Unfortunately, no one thought of that when including the article in this anthology and no bibliography has been appended to the chapter. This is sloppy and, while I am sure it was not intended as such, ultimately shows disrespect for purchasers of this volume.
There also doesn’t appear to have been any attempt to correct any errors that might have occurred in the original publications. For example, in Keyes’s article the Incredible Bongo Band is referred to as a Jamaican disco group. It has long been known that the Incredible Bongo Band was a Los Angeles-based studio project consisting of A-list American session musicians. I am sure that Keyes is well aware of that, and so have to assume that she wasn’t given the chance to correct this for the current publication. This is obviously unfortunate.
While the above issues are annoying, there are a number of very fine essays included in the book that are certainly worth reading. Sherrie Tucker’s article, “Nobody’s Sweethearts: Gender, Race, Jazz, and the Darlings of Rhythm,” originally published in American Music in 1998, addresses a number of seminal issues in jazz historiography through both ethnographic interviews and interrogation of primary source material. Robin D. G. Kelly’s “New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde,” originally published in the Black Music Research Journal in 1999, offers keen insights into the changing reception of Thelonious Monk’s music in the early 1960s in the context of the arrival of the jazz avant-garde represented by artists such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. Kelly also makes plain the connections between Monk’s compositional vocabulary and many of the sonic and corporeal gestures of the newly arrived avant-garde. Bernice Johnson Reagon’s essay, “Let the Church Sing ‘Freedom’,” originally published in 1987 in the Black Music Research Journal, remains a seminal article on songs of the civil rights movement and should be read by any student taking a survey course on African American music.
In summation, while there are a number of worthy essays included in Music in Black American Life: 1945-2020, given that all the articles are readily available elsewhere, it is hard to see the book as a necessary purchase by scholars or institutions.
--------
[Review length: 1074 words • Review posted on March 11, 2024]