Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism.



Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct--possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities--each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed.



Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Daddy's Second Line: Toward a Cultural Poetics of Race Music
• 2 Disciplining Black Music: On History, Memory, and Contemporary Theories
• 3 "It's Just the Blues": Race, Entertainment, and the Blues Muse
• 4 "It Just Stays with Me All of the Time": Collective Memory, Community Theater, and the Ethnographic Truth
• 5 "We Called Ourselves Modern": Race Music and the Politics and Practice of Afro-Modernism at Midcentury
• 6 "Goin' to Chicago": Memories, Histories, and a Little Bit

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Tricia Rose's groundbreaking Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America applied the instruments of poststructuralist discourse to hip-hop. Here, Ramsey (music, Univ. of Pennsylvania) extends that analysis to blues, jazz, soul music, and gospel. He begins by recounting the musical context of his own upbringing on Chicago's South Side as a template of the black American musical experience. Then, using his considerable strength as both cultural theorist and musicologist, he applies that template to the music of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Bud Powell, and other giants of jazz. Finally, continuing this analysis of music and society through the golden age of rhythm and blues (1960-80), Ramsey goes on to tackle the complex and often contradictory implications of hip-hop for (and within) black culture. Race Music is a powerful study-sweeping and yet scrupulous-of how black communities have transcended time, change, and genre by passing down musical knowledge and tradition between generations that have created a succession of globally influential musics. Equally appropriate for both music and cultural studies collections, this masterwork belongs on the shelves of every academic library.-Bill Piekarski, Lackawanna, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This is a challenging and fascinating look at various ways in which popular music from the 1940s to the 1990s represented "anchor moments in the cultural, social and political realms of twentieth-century African American history." Ramsay, an assistant professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that this "is not a comprehensive, strictly chronological study"; he also uses a wide range of source material including family narratives, recordings, live concerts and films. But his sophisticated understanding of current ethnological, musicological, literary and historical theories-as well as a clear and engaging writing style remarkably free of theoretical jargon-explores a central theme: the "subjective understanding of black music as shaped continually by community sensibilities." Through nuanced looks at such musical artists as Dinah Washington and Dizzy Gillespie, Ramsay shows not only that their work displays a wide range of expressive possibilities but also that, "taken together, they provide a realistic representation of a diverse African American culture always in the process of being made." For example, Ramsay shows how James Brown's "musical language, lyrical subject matter, public presentation, and cultural politics are saturated with the new consciousness of the late 1960s... at the crossroads between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements." While Ramsay's shift toward the end of the book from the music of the '60s to an insightful analysis of music in films like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is jarring, this is a valuable exploration of American culture. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

"New musicology" was ushered in as part of various liberation movements, certainly aided by the funded activities of the American Bicentennial, the writings of Eileen Southern, and doctoral graduates of the University of Michigan. It became acceptable for scholars to give attention not just to American music history (even that was an innovation) but to popular idioms previously considered of interest largely to the general public. A former student of Michigan's Richard Crawford, Ramsey (Univ. of Pennsylvania) is an excellent exemplar of this movement. In this highly conceptual study intended for academics, he treats the genres that emerged in African American music in the second half of the 20th century. His scope is broad. He does not shy away from gender studies, literary criticism, religion, or any other matter relevant to his holistic treatment. The eight chapters are not chronological; instead, they consider theoretical units: the fusion of Ramsey's own south-side Chicago experiences (often expressed via nostalgic funk) with scholasticism, historiography reconsidered, atavism and migration, and the physiology of music. Understandably, the "selected" bibliography is expansive. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. D.-R. de Lerma Lawrence University