Foundations of American Popular Music

We often think that we know popular music as avid consumers and listeners, but do we really understand its complex history and layers of impact on society and its people within the United States? Commercial popular music begins with the birth of the Democratic Party in the 1820s, slavery, and the exponential growth of the nation's population and cities throughout the century. While the textile, railroad, coal, and steel industries are often discussed, the making of popular music is less understood as one of the country's major industries to emerge during the nineteenth century. This course will take a historical and theoretical approach to unpack the making of the music industry through the first original form of commercial popular entertainment to emerge in the U.S.: Blackface Minstrelsy. Together, we will read Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the U.S. and engage with supplementary course materials (e.g., sheet music, live performance, historical documentations of performance, early sound recordings, key musicians and composers, early music industrialists, recording technologies, AI, etc.), as we consider blackface as a technology (of the self) through which the popular music industry is established and persists into today. We will explore how the aesthetic, structural, and cultural foundations of blackface and the American popular music industry shape the cultural landscape of this nation in our exploration of how politics, property, music, and identity are made through the complex legacy of genre-making in the commercialization of popular music. In addition to writing and reading, students will also be encouraged to engage in creative (and collaborative) research projects at the end of the course.