MUSI 005F. Black Popular Music: From "Race Music" to the Mainstream (SC)

2013. Although African American music has contained an undercurrent of resistance and transcendence from its beginnings, most associate these ideals with the manner in which black song traditions were used during the Civil Rights Movement, c1954–76. Freedom songs, or civil rights songs, were drawn from different genres and were used in myriad ways as movement activities diversified and spread.

2019. Despite rhythm and blues culture’s undeniable role in molding, reflecting, and reshaping black cultural production, consciousness, and politics, it has yet to receive the serious scholarly examination it deserves. Destructive Desires corrects this omission by analyzing how post-Civil Rights era rhythm and blues culture articulates competing and conflicting political, social, familial, and economic desires within and for African American communities. As an important form of black cultural production, rhythm and blues music helps us to understand black political and cultural desires and longings in light of neo-liberalism’s increased codification in America’s racial politics and policies since the 1970s. Robert J. Patterson provides a thorough analysis of four artists—Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Adina Howard, Whitney Houston, and Toni Braxton—to examine black cultural longings by demonstrating how our reading of specific moments in their lives, careers, and performances serve as metacommentaries for broader issues in black culture and politics.

2018. Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," J. Cole's "Be Free," D'Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game's "Don't Shoot," Janelle Monae's "Hell You Talmbout," Usher's "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In this collection of critical studies, contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among scholars, students, and the communities we study. From nuanced snapshots of how African American musical genres have flourished in different cities and the role of these genres in local activism, to explorations of musical pedagogy on the American college campus, readers will be challenged to think of how activism and social justice work might appear in American higher education and in academic research. Black Lives Matter and Music provokes us to examine how we teach, how we conduct research, and ultimately, how we should think about the ways that black struggle, liberation, and identity have evolved in the United States and around the world.

2018. The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life up through the present day. In this rich, poignant, and readable work, Imani Perry tells the story of the Black National Anthem as it traveled from South to North, from civil rights to black power, and from countless family reunions to Carnegie Hall and the Oval Office. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Perry uses "Lift Every Voice and Sing" as a window on the powerful ways African Americans have used music and culture to organize, mourn, challenge, and celebrate for more than a century.

2011. Author Denise Sullivan explores the bond between music and social change and traces the evolution of protest music over the past five decades. The marriage of music and social change didn't originate with the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but never before had the relationship between the two been so dynamic. Black music altered the road to liberation for minorities, sparking creativity and resulting in a genre-encompassing poetry, jazz, folk, and rock along with a new brand of prideful and political soul and funk. Through extensive research and exclusive interviews with musician-activists such as Yoko Ono, Richie Havens, Janis Ian, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, this chronicle details the struggle that went into the creation of liberation music. A bittersweet narrative covering more than 50 years of fighting oppression through song, Keep On Pushing defines the soundtrack to revolution and the price paid to create it.

2002. Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.

Part of a Swarthmore project, these songs were chosen for their popularity, for their lyrics, and for the fact that Swarthmore alumni remembered them specifically. Encapsulated in these songs is a glimpse of music from the late 1960s and, more importantly, a sense of how Black Swarthmore students related to it. Below you will find genre-influencing, career-shaping singles and albums. Hits like Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and The Supreme’s “You Keep Me Hanging On” are mixed with the timely, poetic, graphic depiction of a Southern lynching in Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” as well as James Brown’s empowering "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)". Students sang spirituals such as “Oh, Freedom” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” together; some of the same students danced together to The Impressions’ “I’ve Been Trying”.