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.
