Skip to main content
University of California Press

About the Book

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.

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.

From Our Blog

UC Press August Award Winners

UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our August 2024 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Read More

Q&A with Matthew Morrison, author of Blacksound

Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy (the first original form of American popular music) 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 o
Read More

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Author’s Note 
Acknowledgments 

Introduction: The Origins of Blacksound 

PART I. RACIAL IDENTITY AND POPULAR MUSIC IN EARLY BLACKFACE 
1. Slavery and Blackface in the Making of Blacksound 
2. William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and Antebellum Blacksound 
3. Stephen Foster and the Composition of Americana 

PART II. THE BIRTH OF THE POPULAR MUSIC INDUSTRY
4. The House That Blackface Built: M. Witmark & Sons and the Birth of Tin Pan Alley 
5. Intellectual (Performance) Property: Ragtime Goes Pop 
Conclusion: Blacksound and the Legacies of Blackface 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 
 

Reviews

"Matthew Morrison has written a modern classic that elegantly and meticulously illustrates how the rise of the music industry is inseparable from structures of racism and copyright. His concept of Blacksound will resonate with audiences across a wide range of disciplines for decades to come."—Anjali Vats, author of The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans

"Morrison's brilliantly unique, wide-ranging, and rigorously researched book brings to light how, as Europeans and Americans of many ethnicities deployed sonic blackface as part of an ongoing identity and citizenship project, the US entertainment industry's construction of Blacksound became fundamental to popular music around the world."—George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music    

"Blacksound is a profound original study of the foundations of Black performance in the Americas. It is at once ethnomusicology, cultural history, and critical race theory, built on rigorous archival research and sophisticated engagement with a vast body of scholarly research. An engrossing and expansive text, Blacksound will be an indispensable addition to the study of race and African American culture."—Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Awards

  • MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024 2024, Museum of African American History

Media

Author Matthew Morrison explains the concept behind his book Blacksound