Author: Karl Hagstrom Miller
Title: Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow
Year: 2010
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)
A revisionist history of American music’s racial categories that argues the distinction between “Black music” and “white music” was an industrial invention not heard in the music. Miller draws on extensive archival research — recording ledgers, concert programs, newspaper advertisements, musicians’ own accounts — from the American South between the 1880s and the 1920s to show that Black and white musicians shared far more repertoire and performance contexts than the genre system acknowledges. The musical color line was drawn by the recording industry’s commercial needs, the folklorists’ ideological investments, and Jim Crow’s social infrastructure, working in concert; on the ground, the music had not divided itself.
The mechanism Miller found in the 1920s did not end with the archive he studied; it set the terms for everything the MAP covers. Because the industry had sorted a shared repertoire into “race” and “pop” markets with separate charts and separate radio, a Black R&B record in the 1950s could sell hugely to one audience and stay invisible to the other — which is what made the cover-version economy structurally necessary, and what Elvis Presley, a white Southerner singing music the categories called Black, briefly scrambled. Miller’s deeper point is that the line was commercial before it was musical, so when rock & roll fused the catalogs the industry redrew it rather than let it dissolve. The MAP treats his book as the origin story for The color line in pop: a boundary that every later crossover exposed as artificial and that survived every exposure.
Key contributions
- Demonstrates that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century musicians in the South — Black and white — regularly performed the same songs at the same events, undermining the notion that “folk” traditions were racially pure or distinct. The “musical color line” was drawn after the fact by collectors and record labels, not by the musicians themselves.
- Shows how Ralph Peer and other early field recording engineers sorted musicians into racial market categories (“race records,” “hillbilly”) that retroactively reorganized a fluid musical landscape. The categories were commercial before they were musicological, and they became self-fulfilling as A&R decisions, radio formatting, and retail organization reinforced them.
- Traces the role of academic folklorists — including John Lomax and Howard Odum — in constructing the idea of racially separate musical traditions, arguing that their collection methods and theoretical assumptions produced the “authentic” folk cultures they claimed to discover.
- Connects the segregation of sound to the broader legal and social infrastructure of Jim Crow, showing that the musical color line was part of a comprehensive system of racial classification that organized American culture from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth.
See also
- Blues — Miller’s thesis at work in postwar pop: in 1949 Billboard renamed “Race Records” to “Rhythm & Blues,” and later decades hardened that taxonomic relabeling into a stylistic distinction — even though the records on both sides of the chart line cross-pollinated constantly. It is the same mechanism Miller documents at the race-records / hillbilly boundary, run forward into the 1950s.
- The color line in pop — Miller’s central argument anchors this note’s “Inventing the categories” section
- Rock & roll — The genre that most visibly destabilized the categories Miller describes, though the categories survived the destabilization
- Doo-wop — a genre whose multiracial street-corner origins in Northeastern cities expose the artificiality of the categories Miller documents; the segregated marketing apparatus still sorted the records into “race” charts even when the vocal groups on them were mixed
- Soul — the genre that inherited the categorical logic Miller’s book traces to its industrial origins: marketed as Black music, played on Black radio, yet audibly descended from gospel and rhythm & blues traditions whose “Blackness” was itself a commercial taxonomy
- Country Soul — the sort, forty years on, as a working life: Hughes follows the musicians laboring inside the categories Miller shows being drawn, in studios that made both genres at once
- Creating Country Music — the hillbilly bin’s interior history: Peterson shows the “authentic” country image being manufactured inside the white category Miller shows being fenced off
- Country — the hillbilly half of the founding sort, finally told forward: the family whose century at the gate runs Miller’s argument from 1923 to Cowboy Carter
