Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Matthew D. Morrison, "Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States" (U California Press, 2024)
Description: Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) 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 a...