I understand the insistence that we read this book; of course because it was an assigned reading but also because it seems to be at the heart of one of the major themes of this class. Miller’s book gives in depths look at the tangled mess that is race and music. He explores the commercialization of music and the different values placed on commercial and non-commercial music. Specifically what genres were marketed towards and produced by southerners and how that became even more complicated when race was included in the equation.

If I have learned one thing from this class, it is how complicated and gray the intersection of music is. Something that seems to have further grayed that area is the introduction of folklore and folk music. It affected both black and white southerners. Lomax, who we actually discussed in class, was one of the first to start chronicling the folk sounds of rural America. Roosevelt actually praised John Lomax for his collection of cowboy songs, basically saying, that they nourished the soul in a way that music from urbanized areas couldn’t (85). Many others shared that sentiment and producers began marketing southern music in that manner. Miller examines the question of whether or not “chroniclers of southern music dismissed commercial pop as immaterial to southern culture”(7). Regardless of why pop music wasn’t recorded as being a part of southerner’s musical repertoires, it had an effect on the stereotypes that were formed. Black musicians were expected “to embody minstrel stereotypes constrained by folkloric values” and were not allowed to record any type of music that did not align with that image; they were constrained, primarily, to blues (227). White southern musicians also faced restrictions, “they had to paint the pop tunes they loved with a patina of down-home credibility.”(227) That in no way is meant to imply that the two were equal, just that both faced challenges brought on by commercialism, the reaction against commercialism, and stereotypes.

I think a quote from the afterword really sums up what I took away from this book well: “[Scholars] have grappled with the irreducible dichotomies of the musical color line: the split between black and white expression, on the one hand, and between folklore and commercial culture on the other.”(278)

After reading this book I feel like I know more about the topics discussed but I don’t know if I feel like I have any answers.