In Segregating
Sound, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues that the categories that we have
inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation
to the ways that southerners long played and heard music. Focusing on
the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller
chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles
in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to
particular racial and ethnic identities. The blues were African
American. Rural white southerners played country music. By the 1920s,
these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the
catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the
phonograph industry. Such links among race, region, and music were
new. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues,
ballads, ragtime, and string band music, but also nationally popular
sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and
Broadway hits.
In a cultural
history filled with musicians, listeners, scholars, and business
people, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry
helped to create a “musical color line,” a cultural parallel to
the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South.
Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern
and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new
markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who
attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of
human civilization. Contending that people’s musical worlds were
defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard,
Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, music, and
the market.