Rolling Stone 25 Best Music Books of 2024
University of California Press
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Animated Discussion of Blacksound
About the Book
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.
PROSE Awards (Music & Performing Arts) 2025, Association of American Publishers
PROSE Award for Excellence in Humanities 2025, Association of American Publishers
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2024, Choice
MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024, Museum of African American History
(see accompanying video for animated discussion)
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
About the Author
Matthew D. Morrison, Ph.D., a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist and Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Professor Morrison holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College. His research focuses on the relationship between identity, performance, property, copyright law, and inequities within the history and performance of music, with a focus on the history of American popular music and its global impact and circulation.
His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, American Music, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog. Professor Morrison has been awarded several fellowships from Institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies (Susan McClary and Robert Walser Endowed Fellow), Harvard University (Hutchins Center Fellow), the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Center for Popular Music Studies/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His research has been highlighted in media outlets such as The New Yorker, as well as featured in NPR’s Throughline. Morrison serves as a consultant, advisor, and collaborator with organizations in and beyond the arts, such as The Schubert Club, “The Sound Track of America” opening concert series at the SHED, NYC, The Glimmerglass Festival Opera, as well as Theory, Warner Music Group, and SONY music.
Professor Morrison's book, Blacksound: Making Race in Popular Music in the United States, is published by The University of California Press (2024), and it has been awarded the Prose award for excellence in the Humanities by the Association of American Publishers, recognized by Rolling Stone as one of the "Best Books in Music of 2024," selected as the "Outstanding Academic Title in Music" by Choice Reviews of the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award (2024). In addition to his work as a musicologist and within Black Studies, Professor Morrison is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work engages with Sound Studies, Performance Studies, Race and Intellectual Property Studies, and Queer Studies.
Event photos from Blacksound book release at Theory HQ (Metpacking District, NYC)
