Bleaching Our Roots: Race and Culture in American Popular Music is a fascinating multi-media read with important film clips of performers who represent the history. Bleaching Our Roots is a welcome addition to the history of American popular music that will an important resource for courses on American music.
—William Ferris, author, film-maker, founder and director of the Center for Southern Folklore in Mississippi and Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities; co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
It kicks off with a bang. The information is really strong, really useful. I appreciated the dedication to covering the connections with the Latin heritage, and the Swing era. I really liked the interactivity of the substitutions. Thorough research.
—Michelle Shocked
Really like the spirit, openness, language. All to the good. All direct.
-Charles Keil, author, Music Grooves, Urban Blues
Engagingly written. I learned lots. Some listeners to US popular music know of its tragic long roots in the appropriation of Black songs by white performers in blackface disguise. More know something of the African American roots of rock and roll. But few will be prepared for the contributions of this ambitious and remarkable study, which considers the mixing of cultures, and the role of Black creativity, in everything from bluegrass to barbershop quartets, from crooning to country, from Elvis to Doris Day.”
—David Roediger, author, How Race Survived Us History
An extremely successful, popularly written, prodigiously researched, very smart and very funny work of music, cultural, and social criticism. I learned a great deal from it. Equally sensitive to the intricacies of racial-cultural interaction and the exploitative racial results of American music’s commercial marketing…it is rare to find both of these stressed (as both must be) in a single work. The tenacity of investigation of America’s “mulatto” music (as critic Albert Murray calls American culture generally) is heartening, and it leads to fresh insights (country-inflected Black singers and Black-inflected country singers, say) and fresh areas. To my ears you don’t miss a beat in recounting the complexities of stylistic formation in a whole variety of musics, nor do you muffle at all the at once mind-bogglingly intermingled and socially segregated strains of American song. This, along with the work’s accessibility, is a real achievement, and ought to help find it the audience it deserves. A meticulous, morally astringent, and compelling narrative.
— Eric Lott, author, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class