"Blacksound": A conversation with Matthew D. Morrison
Charles talks with the author of an astonishing new book
Blacksound, the new book from scholar Matthew D. Morrison, is a revelation. Tracing the history of blackface minstrelsy and its sonic impacts on popular music, Morrison provides new ways to think about race, ownership, appropriation, and influence that continue to shape larger conversations. It’s deeply researched and beautifully written - a game-changer in all senses of the word. I’m so grateful that Dr. Morrison took the time to talk with me about just some of the things that make this book so special. Check out the book here.
CH: The idea of “Blacksound” is so rich and fascinating, offering both a necessary addition to discussions of blackface and a new way of understanding its larger consequences both artistically and commercially. Why did you come to think in terms of Blacksound, and how do you approach this concept throughout the book?
MM: Blacksound began as a formulation in my head before I knew exactly what I meant by the concept in preparing my dissertation abstract. (I'm honestly not sure I knew what the term really meant until after I completed the book). Throughout my music studies courses, I had developed an interest in the relationship between sound, performance, identity, and race. That's why "Sound in the Construction of Race" precedes the colon in my dissertation title (followed by: "from Blackface to Blacksound in 19th Century America"). So even in the dissertation, Blacksound hadn't yet really solidified itself to me as the defining concept of inquiry, although it organically developed as such. What I began to realize through deep study is that I wanted to articulate that most of American popular music could be traced back to Black musical practices (in some way – even if constructed upon imaginary performances of blackness through blackface), but I was not sure why that mattered, or what that meant for us today. I also knew that this was not a new discovery (that lots of American popular music can find its roots in Black music), and there was also something that felt incomplete about that statement to me, at least in what I was trying to get at through Blacksound. My dissertation advisor, George Lewis, told me that I had something going with the word and idea, but that it needed to be worked out. After series of the perfect storm of graduate courses with professors like Ellie Hisama, Saidiya Hartman, and Daphne Brooks, to name a few, the legacy of blackface in making American popular sound, its industry, identity, and notions of property during the antebellum era began to crystallize as the focal point of what I was hoping to articulate through Blacksound. Eventually, unpacking notions of intellectual property and music copyright began to emerge as a driving force behind the analysis of Blacksound. And while I was thinking through and about property in the dissertation – particularly in relation to sheet music, slavery, and copyright law – it took some time after the dissertation to really work through the assumed notions of (intellectual) property vis-a-vis black performance practices as a critical part of the concept.
CH: Early on, you suggest that you’re trying to move beyond appropriation as the dominant concept in how we think about white use of Black music. That’s such a bracing idea, especially given that it remains probably the primary way we culturally understand it. What do we gain by moving beyond appropriation? How do the stories in the book help us do that?
MM: I think appropriation is just the first stop when we make these arguments (about appropriation in an American pop music context). I've written a few pieces that try to unpack what we mean by the term "appropriation," often equating the word with "exploitation." And while there is not a clear separation of the two terms under postcolonial structures of white supremacist power and domination, to appropriate means to take up something from another, and if we want to discuss the power dynamics within that exchange, then we should do that in specific. Appropriation, in my reading, allows us to stop at that fact and not move much beyond it. It's an oversimplification of what is happening and of what's at stake, although I understand why we make this claim – there is so much theft of creative and intellectual practices of marginalized people since the founding of this nation that continues to take place today. And it is very difficult to combat.
When we stop at appropriation, we also risk ossifying blackness (and other racialized constructions of identity) into specific expectations of “authentic” Black sounds (here, two words: any sounds produced by Black people) and performances that are most often derived from stereotypes. And as we know, stereotypes are often based upon some aspect of reality (e.g., Black people eat watermelon, so do other people, but when Black people eat watermelon, it is perceived as something degenerative under anti-black views of blackness defined by a white supremacist lens, and that very stereotype was actually rehearsed in blackface). Whatever reality that existed before the performance was skewed through a white supremacist lens in blackface. I try to unpack (through sound) the making of authentic notions of blackness, whiteness, Asianness, etc., in the book, by interrogating the multiple ways that popular performance (and how it becomes racialized under racist systems) factors into our understanding of how people exist in everyday life–and and not stopping at "this is appropriation and that's bad." This endpoint is often a way to avoid addressing what is at stake.
CH: You have a very interesting chapter about Stephen Foster and the development of “Americana” as both concept and cultural category in the minstrel era. It’s not the only one, by any means, but the contemporary genre category of “Americana” seems to be something you’re responding to in thinking about the idea and its relationship to blackface/”blacksound.” Am I interpreting that right? If so, what lessons can we learn from this story in terms of Americana as it’s invoked today in relation to “roots” music and especially Black-centered traditions?
MM: This is a really great question, Charles, and given your areas of research, one that I'm glad you asked. Throughout the book, I attempt to demonstrate the origins of some terms, practices, and concepts that don't fully materialize until after the nineteenth century (which is the focus of the book), and "Americana" is one of them. It's used within the music industry to signify a particular genre that doesn't actually have a singular sound, but shares attributes of having somewhat of a rustic, string-based, not-quite country, not quite blues, not quite folk, not quite gospel, but a mixture (at various levels) of these and more sounds. But "Americana" more generally also conjures up what is considered to be quintessentially American–typically invoking a nostalgic, nationalistic, monolithic presentation of (a certain kind of) whiteness. The title might also be taken up (in music) by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other marginalized artists who are shut out of the country music industry due to its racist basis. I wanted to show the relationship between this nationalistic construction of Americana in a cultural sense, and the seeds of that construction that took place through blackface, particularly through Stephen Foster's pen. The texture of blackface is quite similar to the texture of string band music, because the white music industrialists sought to make use of and stereotype the instruments attributed to African Americans on plantations (e.g., the banjo, tambourine, bones, and fiddle), as their own Irish, English, and Scottish folk music practices were shaping and being shaped by these musical developments. Through blackface troupes's performances of Stephen Foster's wildly successful blackface tunes during the antebellum era, the sound of manifest destiny, American nationalism and anti-abolitionism, Democratic politics (the party of Andrew Jackson in the 19th century), and much more, was rehearsed through songs like "Oh, Susanna," and "Camptown Races." These are some of the earliest and most popular suggestions of Americana culture in an antebellum context ("Oh, Susanna” became especially popular among the 49ers during the California Gold Rush, westward expansion, the growth of American slavery and its economy, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples). I delve much deeper into these connections, including how the music factors into consideration, in Chapter 3 of the book.
CH: Although Blacksound describes an earlier era, one way that you demonstrate its urgent relevance is in your discussion of copyright laws and intellectual property. The literal ownership of music as economic capital is so clearly central to how you’re thinking about the use of Blacksound by white musicians, publishers, et cetera. What does this era teach us about our contemporary debates over IP and copyright?
MM: In my discussion of IP and copyright law, I aim to demonstrate that sound has never been a real part of how music property is awarded or litigated in court, and that has roots in colonialism and racism. That takes a lot to explain, and I'll take this opportunity to say that one should read the book to get a real sense (particularly the discussion in the conclusion of the "Blurred Lines" case). But the short of it is that to claim ownership over music in American property laws, one must claim ownership over an object. Sound itself is not an object that fits into the current legal paradigm outside of a container (e.g., sheet music, record, mp3), which is based upon what is written/legible/readable – the foundation of property law in the colonial era. Copyright law was established to protect objects like books and maps, and the first type of music property (under the law) was sheet music, and subsequent mechanical reproduction technologies (from the pianola to records) are largely judged based upon their container, and not the sounds themselves. Because sheet music (copyrightable since 1831) emerged alongside the development of blackface, and blackface tunes were at the center of sheet music production, and blackface performance absorbed the real and imagined sounds of Black people into their practices, and Black people were themselves largely deemed property under slavery, and their sounds were in turn scripted into a "legible" form of protection through sheet music–mostly by the white male musicians and industrialists with the means to do so–the relationship between what we deem as "public domain" versus "intellectual property" has both colonial and racist histories. But we often interpret that legacy as fact in our general understanding of copyright and IP. Even today, the sounds on a record themselves aren't really protected by the law (unless those sounds have been also protected through the legibility of sheet music), and so when arguments are made in court about theft or appropriation of sounds, it's mostly to convince the judge and/or the jury that there has been infringement upon the physical record itself, the protected lyrics, or upon the sounds that are written down on protected sheet music, along with the record. It is very difficult (and often not protected under copyright law) to prove that a particular groove, sound, or feeling was stolen in a work – and those ephemeral aesthetics are at the core of Black music practice that has been pilfered since Black people were stolen from Africa during slavery.
CH: You write so evocatively about the music itself, which is hard in any circumstance but seems especially tricky when many of these songs exist only as sheet music or notations on a page. As both a musician and writer, how do you approach the particular challenge of writing words about sounds?
MM: By focusing on unpacking sound and performance in the nineteenth century, I'm immediately met with the challenge of a lack of physical sound recordings. But through my training in Black feminist studies, particularly in relation to the archive, I've learned how to listen for the ephemeral sounds and performances of all kinds of people – but especially Black – whose voices can be heard behind and amidst their erasure or silencing through the archives preserved under the violent structures of colonialism and white supremacy (e.g., legal documents, descriptions of performances, sheet music, autobiographies and slave narratives, etc.). My training in music and sound studies also asks that I challenge the notion of "fidelity" in recorded sound, in the first place, to replicate what was actually taking place in real time during that performance or recording – and so I'm able to think more creatively when analyzing performances for which minimal records exist. And my training as a performing musician (violinist and ensemble singer) gives me insight into the embodied process of music making that also must be considered when attempting to reconstruct performances of the past. I tend to lean into what is not actually heard, even on recordings, when analyzing a performance or music. I remain aware of the ways in which shifting technologies inform our listening and recording practices, and how such shifts shape our current taste towards such high definition, immersive experiences of sound that are intended to replicate some aspect of live performances, but are really designed to convince us that the only thing taking place in that performance are the sounds that the listener are aware they are hearing – not the entire constellation of events and people (from performers to audiences to engineers) that comprise of the performance from the start.
CH: You begin the book with a striking discussion of Mama Lou, a popular Black performer in St. Louis who popularized several famous songs of the early 1900s but did not benefit from their popularity even as white men profited. Re-centering the story of this critical era around her – or Old Corn Meal, William Henry Lane, and the other Black creators in your book – is so important, and you do it beautifully. As people writing, thinking, music-making, and listening in 2024, what do we owe Mama Lou? How can we better honor her work, and the work of the others you write about?
MM: Well, what we owe Mama Lou is the same thing that we owe Black Americans in this country – reparations. Reparations from centuries of slavery, racist segregationist policies like "Jim Crow," and reparations for the trillion-dollar music industry that has been built off of the absorption and theft of Black musical sounds and performance practices into commercial entertainment since slavery. To better honor Mama Lou – a popular entertainer of the ragtime era in the late-19th century (who gave us hits like "Ta Ra Ra Boom de Aye" that would go on to make millions of dollars for white music executives and entertain the masses) – we have to revisit our listening practices, creative practices, and consumption practices, particularly depending on our position of power within society. What I offer in Blacksound is a record of the multiple ways in which power has been used to erase and marginalize Black and other non-white people through cultural, political, and musical practices, while building an entire economy around the exploitation of their being. And what I hope is that this knowledge will encourage people to do the difficult work of deconstructing these systems, while giving up and redistributing power and wealth, with a better understanding of how the system was built (and they would have to care in the first place. I'm not attempting to proselytize or convince anyone of anything. I'm stating matters of historical fact with an analysis around its impact on power structures and people, and one has to care about equity and justice if one wants to do the difficult work of figuring out how they can better honor and elevate the personal structural conditions of Black and marginalized people. I don't think that is for me to decide.
CH: What’s something you’ve read recently – music-related or otherwise – that’s really exciting you or speaking to you in some way?
MM: I'm going to be completely honest, Charles. My book just came out in March of this year, that was barely three months ago. I've been heavily organizing on and off my own campus against coordinated efforts with law enforcement across higher education to silence students protesting the genocide and oppression of Palestinians. The last few weeks, I was just awarded tenure, and this interview is one one of the last of 25 book-related events I've had in the last 3 months. In these intense moments, my reading habits are similar to my listening ones – I don't listen to a lot of new music when there's so much going on in my brain and body, it's a bit too much for me to handle. And I usually have 2-3 books around me that I'm reading at once. But now that I'm finding a bit of space to breathe and silence my mind, I started reading W. E. B. Du Bois's short sci-fi work, The Comet (1920), and I have Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1994) in that rotation as well. So, I guess I'm currently drawing personal inspiration (or respite) from Black sci-fi that addresses the conditions of the world.
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