Miller — Segregating Sound

Author: Karl Hagstrom Miller
Title: Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
Year: 2010
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow is a book by the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller, published by Duke University Press in February 2010. It argues that the categories later applied to Southern music misrepresent what Southerners actually played and heard, and that between the 1880s and the 1920s, through a process Miller calls segregating sound, the region’s shared music was sorted by race into separate genres, the blues to Black Southerners and country to rural white ones. Its evidence is the shared repertoire of Black and white Southerners, which reached from the blues to Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, together with the work of folklorists and phonograph companies, whose “race” and “hillbilly” catalogs in his account enforced a musical color line. Reviewers praised it. Grace Elizabeth Hale, in Southern Spaces, credited Miller with opening the subject of popular music in the South to serious history, and Glenn T. Eskew, in the Journal of American History, read it as a challenge to the field’s received account.

Miller, then an assistant professor of history and music at the University of Texas at Austin, published the book with Duke University Press in February 2010, in its Refiguring American Music series.¹ He writes that the book “explores the transformation in the meaning and symbolic power of southern music between the 1880s and the 1920s.” Through “a process I call segregating sound,” he writes, a variety of people, “scholars and artists, industrialists and consumers,” “came to compartmentalize southern music according to race,” and a “fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice” was “reduced to a series of distinct genres associated with particular racial and ethnic identities. Music developed a color line.”²

In Duke’s description, the book argues that the categories handed down for Southern music, blues for African Americans and country for rural white Southerners, misrepresent what Southerners played and heard. Musicians of both races, it says, played the same wide range of music, from string-band tunes and ragtime to minstrel songs and sentimental ballads, and folklorists and the record business helped give Jim Crow its counterpart in music, a “musical color line.”¹

The book has eight chapters. It begins with Southern musicians taking up commercial music, in “Tin Pan Alley on Tour,” and moves through the folklorists’ recasting of Southern music as folklore and the record industry’s creation of separate markets. Its seventh chapter, “Black Folk and Hillbilly Pop,” is on how the industry enforced the musical color line, and its last, “The Ascension of the Folkloric Paradigm,” on the recasting of pop tunes as folk songs.¹ In the seventh chapter Miller writes that “race records that revealed their commonalities with hillbilly music were the exceptions that proved the rule of the musical color line,” and that phonograph companies “largely did what they could to enforce categorical and marketing distinctions” between the two.²

Reviewers praised the book. Grace Elizabeth Hale, reviewing it in Southern Spaces in July 2010, called it a “brilliant new book” and wrote that Miller is “the first scholar to take the overwhelming presence of popular music in the South seriously.”³ Among the favorable excerpts Duke selects for its page, Glenn T. Eskew, in the Journal of American History, wrote that it offers a new way of thinking about folk, blues, hillbilly and other musics and “brings into question decades of scholarship,” and Michael Pickering, in the European Journal of Communication, called it “revisionist cultural history of the first order.”¹

Key contributions

• “Segregating sound”: the process, between the 1880s and the 1920s, by which the music Southerners of both races shared was split into genres tied to race.
• The music Black and white Southerners played in common, before the industry divided it.
• Folklorists and the phonograph industry, with its “race” and “hillbilly” catalogs, as having helped build and enforce a musical color line.

See also

• Creating Country Music — Richard A. Peterson’s 1997 study of how country music’s authenticity was fabricated
• Country Soul — Charles L. Hughes’s 2015 history of race in the studios of country and soul
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music