Book Review
Nov. 25th, 2020 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariRace Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop
by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
This wide-ranging book discusses black music of the 20th century from the post-war period to the 1990s and how it created meaning in the lives and communities of African-Americans. It was fascinating and a joy to read. I very much appreciated the way Ramsey included his own experiences and family history both in the Great Migration and as creators and consumers of the music he covers. Relentless objectivity is not always an advantage in scholarly work, and more fully understanding an author's subjective relationship with their topic can make their analyses and theories more grounded for the reader. In this case, it also gives the prose a kind of exuberance that is regrettably unusual in academic books.
Ramsey gives us a lot to chew on here, and ties it together with a couple of threads that run through the book. One is the blues as the foundation of most of the musical styles and genres he discusses. The other is the way African-American music created and reinforced identity and community for African-American. These threads effectively tie together oral histories of the Great Migration, 1990s films depicting black urban life, and music's role in the black church.
by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
This wide-ranging book discusses black music of the 20th century from the post-war period to the 1990s and how it created meaning in the lives and communities of African-Americans. It was fascinating and a joy to read. I very much appreciated the way Ramsey included his own experiences and family history both in the Great Migration and as creators and consumers of the music he covers. Relentless objectivity is not always an advantage in scholarly work, and more fully understanding an author's subjective relationship with their topic can make their analyses and theories more grounded for the reader. In this case, it also gives the prose a kind of exuberance that is regrettably unusual in academic books.
Ramsey gives us a lot to chew on here, and ties it together with a couple of threads that run through the book. One is the blues as the foundation of most of the musical styles and genres he discusses. The other is the way African-American music created and reinforced identity and community for African-American. These threads effectively tie together oral histories of the Great Migration, 1990s films depicting black urban life, and music's role in the black church.
