Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

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University of California Press, Jun 1, 2003 - Music - 294 pages
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.
 

Contents

DADDYS SECOND LINE TOWARD A CULTURAL POETICS
1
DISCIPLINING BLACK MUSIC ON HISTORY MEMORY AND CONTEMPORARY THEORIES
17
ITS JUST THE BLUES RACE ENTERTAINMENT AND THE BLUES MUSE
44
IT JUST STAYS WITH ME ALL OF THE TIME COLLECTIVE MEMORY COMMUNITY THEATRE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TRUTH
76
WE CALLED OURSELVES MODERN RACE MUSIC AND THE POLITICS AND PRACTICE OF AFROMODERNISM AT MIDCENTURY
96
GOIN TO CHICAGO MEMORIES HISTORIES AND A LITTLE BIT OF SOUL
131
SCORING A BLACK NATION MUSIC FILM AND IDENTITY IN THE AGE IF HIPHOP
163
SANTA CLAUSE AINT GOT NOTHING ON THIS HIPHOP HYBRIDITY AND THE BLACK CHURCH MUSE
190
DO YOU WANT IT ON YOUR BLACKEYED PEAS?
217
Notes
219
Selected Bibliography
245
Acknowledgments
259
Index
263
Copyright

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Page 1 - History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds.
Page 1 - Memory is by nature multiple and yet specific collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.

About the author (2003)

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a musicologist, pianist, composer and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

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