Blacksound cover art

Blacksound

Making Race and Popular Music in the United States

Preview
Prime Member Exclusive

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

Blacksound

By: Matthew D. Morrison
Narrated by: Matthew D. Morrison
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £13.83

Buy Now for £13.83

A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.

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.

©2024 Matthew D. Morrison (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Americas Black & African American History & Criticism Music Social Sciences United States Thought-Provoking Entertainment
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
No reviews yet