The color line in pop

The color line in pop is the division of American popular music into categories by race: in the record catalogs and charts, in the studios and in how critics have told the story. The debate asks who drew the line, how it was kept and what it cost. Karl Hagstrom Miller (2010) argues that scholars and artists, industrialists and consumers came to sort Southern music by race between the 1880s and the 1920s, and David Brackett (2016) follows popular music categories through the twentieth century, arguing that they were made without anyone consciously imposing them. Eric Lott (1993) reads blackface minstrelsy as desire as well as derision, and Michael T. Bertrand (2000) answers Lott’s extension of that reading to Elvis Presley. Michael Coyle (2002) traces the cover records of the 1950s. Nelson George (1988) and Brian Ward (1998) disagree about Alan Freed, the major labels and what Black listeners heard in white pop, and George reads the crossover of the late 1970s as the death of rhythm and blues. Maureen Mahon (2004) and Charles L. Hughes (2015) find the line inside the industry and the studio. Daphne Brooks (2021) and Jack Hamilton (2016) examine the stories told about the music and who tells them.

How music was sorted by race

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues in Segregating Sound, scholars and artists, industrialists and consumers came to sort Southern music by race, through what he calls segregating sound: “Music developed a color line.” By the 1920s folk song collections and the industry’s “race” and “hillbilly” catalogs presented music as tied to race and region: “Such simple links among race, region, and music were new.”¹ Miller opens the book on the record scout Ralph Peer, who in the 1920s “could not believe the number of white southern singers who dug commercial popular music” and who recalled turning away those who sang him a song that was popular on record: “So I never bothered with them. They never got a chance.”² At Okeh, Peer recalled, he gave the race list its own number series on the model of the foreign-language catalogs. “I saw that this was really a business like our foreign record business,” he said, and when hillbilly music came along, he gave it a separate series “almost immediately.”³

David Brackett’s Categorizing Sound follows popular music categories through the twentieth century. The links between categories of music and groups of people, which he calls “homological identifications,” formed first, he writes, in a category of “foreign music” marketed mainly to European immigrants and were then applied to “race” and “old-time” music. His argument is “that particular articulations of music and people are not natural or inevitable,” and that “categories respond to emerging concepts about sounds and social groups, and generate effects that enter into musical practice,” a feedback loop, “a circular process that blurs the lines between the ideas of power imposed from above and the grassroots creation of musical meaning.” If popular music categories are made “without the conscious imposition of an agent’s will,” a point he develops in the book’s first chapter, then, Brackett suggests, in what may be “a utopian gesture towards the future,” “these categories may be unmade as well.”⁴

Minstrelsy and white desire

Blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott argues in Love and Theft, was “underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear.” The minstrel show, he writes, “continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class,” driven by a desire that coupled “a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision” toward Black people and their cultural practices.⁵ In the essay “White Like Me,” also of 1993, Lott carried the argument into the postwar decades: the postwar discourse of the Beat writers, “Elvis Presley’s early career” and others was, he wrote, “not a postdating or mere continuation of antebellum racial cross-dressing but its genealogical legacy.”⁶

Michael T. Bertrand, in Race, Rock, and Elvis, calls Lott’s view a “limited paradigm” that finds “no discernible difference” between the Beats and Presley. Given such a paradigm, Bertrand writes, it is no wonder that one scholar, treating Presley, the Beats and the White Negro, the hipster of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay, “as if they were interchangeable,” could ask what it was about whiteness “that made them want to be black.” The scholar was Kobena Mercer. Bertrand calls it “an important question” that “demands qualification”: it “tacitly assumes that ‘whiteness’ is synonymous with homogeneity” and ignores differences of class, region and experience among white people. Presley and Pat Boone, Bertrand writes, both white Southerners of about the same age, “differed immensely in their approach to” rhythm and blues.⁷

Covers and hijacked hits

In his 2002 essay “Hijacked Hits and Antic Authenticity,” Michael Coyle traces the practice of releasing competing versions of a hit, the hijacking of hits, back to the sheet-music era, when it was “good business” to have as many performers as possible plugging a song. The cover record proper, in his account, developed only when “race” records began to have mass appeal on “white” pop charts. “The hijacking of hits” is in his view “a misleading phrase,” since recording a new version of someone else’s hit was legal, though by the late 1950s there were lawsuits over the copying of specific arrangements. In the first fifteen years after the Second World War, the hijacking of hits, “as pop historians have often noted,” became “one of the favored means for white capital to exploit black talent.”⁸ The targets of white copies were sometimes white, Coyle writes, and those of Black artists sometimes Black, but “we would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of a black performer proving able to hijack the success of a white original.”⁹

Two covers show the practice Coyle describes. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1955) reached No. 2 on the R&B chart and No. 17 on the pop chart, and Pat Boone’s cover outsold it, reaching No. 12 on the pop chart.¹⁰ Etta James’s “The Wallflower” (1955) spent four non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues listings, and Georgia Gibbs’s cover, “Dance with Me Henry”, topped the pop chart for three weeks.¹¹

Freed, the labels and Black listeners

Nelson George writes in The Death of Rhythm and Blues that by calling the music he played “rock & roll,” the disc jockey Alan Freed “tried, with some initial success, to disguise the blackness of the music.” The name did not fool everybody, George writes, “but it definitely dulled the racial identification.” White covers of Black records, he writes, shaped white teenagers’ attitude toward the music, but the name “was in itself powerful enough to create a sensibility of its own.” To Freed, George writes, rock and roll “purely and simply meant money,” though, “as the 1978 film American Hot Wax suggests,” Freed “even eventually came to believe that rock & roll meant more than a way to line his pockets.”¹²

If the renaming “was a deliberate attempt to obscure the black origins of r&b and its derivatives,” Brian Ward argues in Just My Soul Responding, it “was singularly unsuccessful”: “In fact, it hardly fooled anybody.” Opposition to the new music, he argues, depended on public awareness of its racial origins, and much of its appeal to young whites lay in its association with Black culture.¹³ Ward also disputes George’s statement that “all the new artists” of postwar rhythm and blues signed to independent labels: “George’s ‘all’ is simply incorrect,” he writes, and most commentators “have ignored, or grossly underestimated,” how much rhythm and blues the major labels recorded.¹⁴ He argues that George obscures the real significance of the biracial pop era, a time of mass Black consumption of white pop, by holding that while Black teenagers might listen to white pop, “their heads were in different places.”¹⁵ Reviewing Ward’s book in 1998, Robert Christgau called it “an uncommonly comprehensive introduction” to the formative decades of Black rock and roll. He also wrote that Ward attacks commentators of little standing or “snipes at the decontextualized ideas of more skillful writers,” and he placed the book alongside, but by no means above, books including George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Ward’s theorizing about “mass black consciousness,” Christgau concluded, if “tendentious by definition,” “remains credible.”¹⁶

Crossover

Crossover, Black artists’ records selling to the white pop audience, is the subject of Nelson George’s chapter on 1975 to 1979, “Crossover: The Death of Rhythm & Blues.” In the late 1970s, he writes, rhythm and blues, “as a metaphor and a music,” “looked like a terminal case,” the world that had supported it gone, and the connections between Black Americans of all classes were loosening as “various forms of material success (or the illusion of such success) seduced many into the crossover mentality.”¹⁷ Reviewing the book in The Christian Science Monitor in 1988, Thomas D’Evelyn summed up George’s story: Black music “suffered the fate of any art that seeks to accommodate power and money.”¹⁸

Segregation inside the industry

Inside the record business, Maureen Mahon writes in Right to Rock, “Segregation already in place for reasons of social tradition was transferred to segregation for economic expediency.” Following the recommendation of a Harvard Business School study it had commissioned, she writes, CBS started a Black music division in 1972 to target Black audiences.¹⁹ Mahon’s book is a study of the Black Rock Coalition. Matt Stahl, reviewing it for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), wrote that Mahon, an African American rock fan, began her research as an insider and was soon invited by the coalition’s New York group to be its secretary. He found what he perceived as “larger framing problems,” among them her “adoption of the [coalition’s] discourse of rights,” but closed by crediting the book with a “very useful wealth of ethnographic detail.”²⁰

Charles L. Hughes, in Country Soul, a study of the integrated studios of the South, finds that “it was far easier to transcend the ‘musical color line’ if you were white.”²¹ Hughes disputes the memory of those studios as places of racial harmony. Erik Loomis, reviewing the book in 2015, found that Hughes “pushes back against this narrative convincingly” and that he dates the narrative to Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music (1986).²²

Who tells the story

Reviewing Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution in The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai wrote that Brooks argues “taste-making” “has often served to enshrine a musical canon that skews white and male,” while Brooks also “emphasizes the importance of canon-building and does some taste-making of her own.” The old guard, Szalai wrote, summarizing Brooks, “might have deigned to make room for ‘Satchmo, Monk, Miles and Trane,’” “but it still seems hesitant to ‘imagine a pop (culture) life with Black women at its full-stop center.‘”²³ Jack Hamilton asks in Just around Midnight how rock and roll, “a genre rooted in African American traditions,” came to be understood “as the natural province of whites” during the 1960s, and answers that “rock and roll became white in large part because of stories people told themselves about it.”²⁴ David McCarthy, reviewing the book in 2018, argued that Hamilton’s methods push aside interpretive issues, “particularly those concerning the question of how rock became white.”²⁵

Further reading

• Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (2019): 781–823 — on Blacksound, the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance, which Morrison places at the origin of American popular music

See also

• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• Pop as craft — the debate over whether made-to-order pop is art
• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial division of labor in pop
• The songwriter-performer divide — the debate over who is the author of a record
• The transatlantic feedback loop — the debate over British and American exchange in pop