Blacksound - by Matthew D Morrison

About the Book

"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 took shape during slavery out of 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 the making of 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-and for whom-in revisiting the long history of American popular music"--

Book Synopsis

"No book from this past year better explains American popular music than professor Matthew Morrison's Blacksound."--A Rolling Stone​ Best Music Book of 2024

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.

From the Back Cover

"Matthew Morrison has written a modern classic that elegantly and meticulously illustrates how the rise of the music industry is inseparable from structures of racism and copyright. His concept of Blacksound will resonate with audiences across a wide range of disciplines for decades to come."--Anjali Vats, author of The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans

"Morrison's brilliantly unique, wide-ranging, and rigorously researched book brings to light how, as Europeans and Americans of many ethnicities deployed sonic blackface as part of an ongoing identity and citizenship project, the US entertainment industry's construction of Blacksound became fundamental to popular music around the world."--George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music

"Blacksound is a profound original study of the foundations of Black performance in the Americas. It is at once ethnomusicology, cultural history, and critical race theory, built on rigorous archival research and sophisticated engagement with a vast body of scholarly research. An engrossing and expansive text, Blacksound will be an indispensable addition to the study of race and African American culture."--Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Review Quotes

"Morrison argues that today's popular music industry was built on the exploitation of slave song and blackface minstrelsy, resulting in an amalgamation of Black and other racialized (including white) musics that he theorizes as 'Blacksound.' Over five chapters, Morrison uses Blacksound to analyze sonic identity, performance, and property within a cultural and legal system under white control. . . . Essential reading."-- "CHOICE"

About the Author

Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.