Blacksound Making Race and Popular Music in the United States Matthew Morrison in Conversation with Joshua Myers

About the book:

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial  foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the  turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D.  Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular  music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United  States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea  is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the  material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that  have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks  the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual  property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into  commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual  property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new  concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically  at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long  history of American popular music.

About the author: 

Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a  musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis  Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the  Arts.