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.

It’s funny that when we learn about the civil rights movement and Jim Crow era in high school we never really delve into the absolute cruelty and inhumanity of it all. It’s very glossed over and that’s almost equally disturbing. We as a society, and specifically we as white people I think, like to try and forget the things we did or the things our relatives did.
Given the extent of segregation in the south as well as the spectacle lynching’s it’s no surprise that black Americans began migrating north in large numbers. The north may not have been particularly welcoming but I imagine that it would have been hard to find a place worse than the south at that time. The more integrated environment surely had a hand in integrating the production of music, even if it wasn’t publicly integrated.
The urbanization of the black experience coincided with the origination of folklore and folk music in the United States. Folklorists Lomax and Work traveled around the country searching for, what they believed to be, the genuine sound of un-commercialized America. During their search the found Muddy Waters, an African-American sharecropper and musician. Lomax described Waters sound as “unwashed and uncleaned” and thought of him as the voice of the African American folk movement. In actuality Waters had been exposed to pop culture and played a myriad of music including pop hits. The idea of an untouched, pure rural sound was fantasy.

Muddy Waters eventually moved to Chicago and continued playing music. Over time his sound did change. This change is apparent in the difference between “I be’s troubled” and “I can’t be satisfied”. At their roots the two songs are the same however they sound worlds apart. “I be’s troubled” was recorded first and embodied the “unwashed” sound that Lomax talked about; even the name, “I be’s troubled”, spoke of a more rural uneducated sound. “I can’t be satisfied” has a much cleaner more put together sound. It appealed to a more urban crowd. Waters built his career in Chicago by repackaging southern nostalgia for recently migrated black Americans. “I can’t be satisfied” is a perfect example of that