CBH Talk | Blackface Minstrelsy and the Racial Foundation of American Musical Culture

In his new book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, musicologist Matthew Morrison unpacks the political legacy of blackface minstrelsy, showing not only how blackness was commodified by white people as popular entertainment during the nineteenth century, but how that commodification profoundly shaped American popular music, culture and identity even as those Black artists were denied the benefits of ownership over their creative work. Morrison’s concept of “Blacksound” gives shape to a fundamental historical through line. “Blacksound” explains how songs originating with Black performers were spread by white performances, then co-opted, copyrighted, published as sheet music by white power brokers, and embedded in our popular culture. Join him, led in conversation by CBH Chief Historian Dominique Jean-Louis, as he shares music and images that trace the impact of blackface minstrelsy on American music and entertainment, and demonstrates how Blacksound lives deep in our national, cultural DNA today. 

Participants

Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College. He was a Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2021-2022), where he held residencies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His published work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog. Matthew has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Center for Popular Music Studies/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also served as a consultant and facilitator with arts organizations on programming and issues related to equity and justice, such as The Schubert Club and “The Sound Track of America” opening concert series at the SHED, NYC, along with Quincy Jones, Steve McQueen, and Maureen Mahon. From 2017-2018, Matthew collaborated on planning and moderating the multi-city touring forum with the Glimmerglass Festival Opera to discuss the role of art in stimulating public discussion about equity, diversity and inclusion in opera, as well as operas commissioned by the Breaking Glass project.

Dominique Jean-Louis, Ph.D is the Chief Historian of the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library. Previously, she held the position of Associate Curator of History Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow (2018), Our Composite Nation: Frederick Douglass' America (2022), and is the co-curator of Black Dolls (2022). She is a former Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Museum Education at the Museum of the City of New York, where she also contributed to the flagship exhibition New York at Its Core (2016). She received her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University, and her Ph.D in US History from New York University, with her doctoral research focusing on race, education, and immigration in post-Civil Rights Era Brooklyn. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on Blackness in America, schools and education, and New York City history.