Black Sound Studies

A Short Bibliography

This week I’m teaching Fahrenheit 451 and, weather permitting, lecturing on black music in the great state of Texas. Given the bans on DEI and attacks on Black, brown, feminist, transgender, and queer knowledge production in Texas, it feels very much like the book-burning that Ray Bradbury feared is coming to life. The protagonist of that novel abandons his career as a book burner and bands together with other rebels on the fringes of his authoritarian society, intent on keeping books alive in an anti-intellectual, TV-addled era. In that spirit, I thought I would share a working reading list in black music and sound studies, in chronological order of their publication. I have been on a tear about chronology lately, however retro that seems, because it has seemed to me that whole chunks of history are being erased or distorted. Thinking about when books appeared in print and what times they spoke to is an interesting exercise in speaking to their relevance to us today. Chronology is a way to place books in place and time, to insist that no book bans and burnings can ever erase the fact that they once were. Even though we increasingly access them now through digital facsimiles, if we lose a tangible sense of their history (how quaint, I realize, to be defending bibliography) we cede ground to those like the attorney general of Texas, who profanes the words of MLK Jr to justify his attacks on black history.

Without further ado, the list:

1. Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

2. Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

3. Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

4. Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

5. Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

6. George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm & Blues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

7. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

8. Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

9. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

10. Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

11. Monson, Ingrid T. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

12. Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

13. DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

14. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

15. Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

16. Carby, Hazel V. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. London: Verso, 1999.

17. Neal, Mark Anthony. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

18. Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

19. Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

20. Fikentscher, Kai. “You Better Work!”: Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

21. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday. New York: Free Press, 2001.

22. Forman, Murray. The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

23. Keyes, Cheryl L. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

24. Radano, Ronald. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

25. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

26. Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

27. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

28. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.

29. Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

30. White, Shane, and Graham White. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

31. Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

32. Burnim, Mellonee V., and Portia K. Maultsby, eds. African American Music: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.

33. Veal, Michael E. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.

34. Guilbault, Jocelyne. Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

35. Lewis, George E. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

36. Kelley, Robin D. G. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009.

37. Echols, Alice. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

38. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

39. Henriques, Julian. Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing. New York: Continuum, 2011.

40. Royster, Francesca T. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

41. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

42. Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

43. Okiji, Fumi. Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.

44. Brown, DeForrest, Jr. Assembling a Black Counter Culture: A Critical History of Techno. New York: Primary Information, 2019.

45. Salkind, Micah E. Do You Remember House?: Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019

46. Brown, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

47. Brooks, Daphne A. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

48. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dance Floor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.