Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow by Karl Hagstrom Miller (review)

“African American musicians left a remarkable and rich musical legacy on race records, but their recorded blues did not begin to chronicle the diverse and complex body of music with which they had forged their earlier careers as live musicians. White southern artists faced a different challenge. They had to paint the pop tunes they loved with a patina of down-home credibility” (227).

Isolation, naturalness, authenticity: in this thorough study, Miller argues that these ideas, among others, were used to narrate and to set into fact a false image of the musical lives of Southerners in the US at the turn of the 20^th century. Situating his work firmly within the bounds of popular music in that epoch, Miller delivers a challenging exploration of the intertwined histories of non-commercial and commercialized musical cultures, showing that “southern musicians performed a staggering variety of music in the early twentieth century” (1). With pointed questions—did “chroniclers of southern music dismiss commercial pop as immaterial to southern culture”(7); did folklorists and the academy establish a musical color line in the beginning of the 20^th century; did the commercial recording industry enforce marketing techniques to control what types of music musicians played and what types audiences heard; did these pressures come together in the early 20^th century to redefine musical tastes as we know and experience them today?—Miller examines the forces that influenced the identities and perceptions of these musicians and their audiences, including the politics of segregation and emerging academic folklore as well as the commercial imperatives of the music industry. Accentuating comparisons of similarity rather than difference, Miller draws on the perspectives and repertoires of working musicians, narratives of record label agents and the catalogs they represented, and the discourse of nascent folklorists.

Proceeding from the premise that “people’s music worlds were less defined by who they were than by what music they had the opportunity to hear” (7), Miller puts the shared music of white and black Americans at the center of this study, using as his focus the shifting struggles over drawing a color line through this shared space, even if he falls short of deconstructing the “black” and “white” classifications themselves. His early chapters explore the southern embrace of commercial music, especially Tin Pan Alley’s long reach into the South between 1890 and 1910; its relationship to touring shows, sheet music, and the sale of pianos for use in the home; and its effect on listeners, musicians, and popular culture. Miller levies critiques on the influences of the folkloric paradigm on ideas of race and music, accusing scholars and collectors of re-imagining cultures of isolation in a never-was-truly-isolated southern US. “Folk music is a framework placed on an existing, complex musical culture, a model that did little to describe the musical complexity on the ground” (8).

Later chapters illustrate Miller’s evidence and explore the rise of Race and Old Time records.

Throughout this study, borrowing from Steven Feld’s notion of listening as a “feelingful activity,” Miller complicates musical meaning, allowing multiple interpretations, multiple identities to exist in any performance, allowing individuals to embrace and use music often assumed to be outside of their core culture.

This is a provocative study, sure to incite further commentary on the topic.