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

Paradigm is powerful. In his masterful work, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Karl Hagstrom Miller illuminates and challenges dehumanizing assumptions within earlier folklore paradigms. Century-old ideas about American folklore, he argues, helped transform the ground-level realities and historical experience of the South—where musicians and audiences alike embraced a variety of musical styles from blues to Broadway—into rigid racial musical categories. These socially constructed symbolic categories, Miller asserts, do not “reflect how generations of southern people had understood and enjoyed music” (p. 2). As he argues in the introduction, “people’s music worlds were less defined by who they were—in terms of racial, class, or regional identity—than by what music they had the opportunity to hear” (p. 7). To support his thesis, Miller wisely focuses on repertoire, rather than performance style, to elucidate conversations across racial and regional boundaries among musicians and audiences. His focus on repertoire allows him to discuss implications associated in ways of segregating sound. For example, Robert Johnson, in addition to his canon of self-penned blues songs, also performed ballads and pop songs, including songs written by white lyricists. But we have segregated sound, and we don’t remember Johnson the pop singer. He fits our paradigms about blues music, and he has become the doomed, bedeviled bluesman.

To richly examine the changes that radically reconfigured how the music of the South was promoted and consumed, Miller eschews the longitudinal study of other scholars. Instead, he gives readers a more narrowly focused, yet panoramic explication of the time period when these socio-cultural and technological changes occurred from the 1880s to the 1920s. The emergence of Jim Crow laws, the creation of the American Folklore Society, the mass production and distribution of sheet music, and Edison’s invention of the phonograph all played roles in the creation of a musical color line.

Each chapter is organized thematically by topics relevant to the historical and theoretical problems within the historiography on southern and American music. In chapter 1, “Tin Pan Alley on Tour,” Miller debunks the myth of the culturally isolated South. Railroad expansion, traveling theater companies, and mass distribution of sheet music had the effect of delivering northern music, specifically the popular music of the day—sentimental ballads and coon songs—to southern audiences. Southern audiences were not isolated and neither were musicians, the topic of chapter 2. Contrary to romantic images of the primitive, working-class folk musician, whose talent is supposedly rooted in biology and material circumstance, southern musicians were, in reality, working professionals. Their talent was a result of hard work and dedication to craft, and their success as performers resulted from developing expansive repertoires to satisfy diverse audiences. In this chapter, Miller begins to explore the dialectic between the civilized and primitive, artifice and the authentic, a dynamic that weaves itself throughout the entire volume. In the next chapter, “Isolating Folk, Isolating Songs,” Miller examines how the founding of the American Folklore Society in 1888, coupled with nineteenth-century theories of human evolution, helped transform the southern musician into the “folk” and cast the South as a region of uncontaminated cultural enclaves. Chapter 3 is a must-read for all folklore students seeking to understand the debates that marked the origins of the discipline’s professional organization. The arguments between communalists and degenerationists as well as the rhetorical construction of isolation as dominant ideological paradigm are especially important to consider within this intellectual history.

Chapter 4 explores the oft-neglected counter-narrative of southerners traveling to the North in search of new careers and audiences. Ironically, as Miller astutely argues, these musicians soon realized that success was often bound up in conforming to southern racial stereotypes. This chapter also provides an insightful and nuanced critique of coon songs, and illuminates the elastic...