Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Music of the African Diaspora)

“By combining an analysis of family dynamics, communal spaces, and intellectual practice, Ramsey offers an important framework and new direction for scholars interested in exploring contemporary black music forms and cultural practices.” ― Journal of African History

“[Guthrie’s] sophisticated understanding of current ethnological, musicological, literary and historical theories―as well as a clear and engaging writing style remarkably free of theoretical jargon―explores a central theme: the ‘subjective understanding of black music as shaped continually by community sensibilities.’” ― Publishers Weekly

“While Ramsey clearly intends Race Music for an academic audience and assumes a body of knowledge both of theory and repertoire only such a group of readers would possess, he drafts his comments in a sufficiently accessible voice so as not to intimidate a less well equipped reader. Part of that accessibility results from the adoption of a kind of call-and-response pattern of his own between the abstractions of scholarly discourse and the concrete illustrations embodied by his “ethno-memoir” and the conversations conducted with his relatives. Therefore, interested readers who wish an instructive and entertaining introduction to the possibilities of popular music studies would benefit from perusing Ramsey’s work. It embodies both the virtues and the rewards of the “new musicology,” specifically the rearticulation of social experience in the form of musical expression.” ― American Quarterly

“[An] interesting contribution to the ongoing debate on the origins and the specificities of African-American music. . . [that] brings new data and reflections on the interactions between musical creativity and sociopolitical context, as well as on the role of ideology in musical categorization. . . . insist[ing] on the diversity of African-American music . . . [as well as] demonstrating that it has never been stable and homogeneous.” ― Journal of the American Musicological Society

“Race Music is a powerful study—sweeping and yet scrupulous—of how black communities have transcended time, change, and genre by passing down musical knowledge and tradition between generations that have created a succession of globally influential musics. Equally appropriate for both music and cultural studies collections, this masterwork belongs on the shelves of every academic library.” ― Library Journal

“Ramsey clearly writes from a deep understanding of the roots of this music; it is comforting to read a critic who isn’t afraid to live the subject he breaks down . . . for an understanding of race music and the science of its creation, this book could not come with higher marks.” ― Rain Taxi Review of Books

“To an outsider it is an eye opener to read just how varied the musical scene was in the 1960s in the black experience, just in religious context alone . . . . The idea that it all stems from the blues from the southern states and that the newly migrated black population in places like Chicago simply carried on that tradition—could it be that Afro American music is just a hybrid of all it encounters? These issues and many others are debated in this serious, informative yet very readable volume.” ― Beat Scene

“A very interesting treatment of African-American music of the last half of the 20th century.” ― Charleston Post & Courier

“Race Music . . . provides a framework for rethinking the facets of African-American music and the ethnocentric energy that birthed it.” ― Black Beat

“Witty, powerful, smart, opinionated, beautifully written, groundbreaking, and bold. Scholars will read Race Music and debate it for years to come.” Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Race Music is slammin’! Ramsey brilliantly interweaves oral history with his own scholarly readings of jazz, gospel, popular music, and film soundtracks with pathbreaking results. Race Music revolutionizes the way we receive and critique African American popular culture and provides a new context for our understanding of black music and cultural memory. A must read—intelligent, engaging and powerful.” Rae Linda Brown, author of The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, 1887-1953

“One of the most engaging, thought provoking and original treatments of black music that I have read. Ramsey seamlessly combines ethnographic research, musicological theory, historical investigation, and personal narrative in a work that is at once rigorous and poetic. Spanning blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and hip-hop, Race Music offers us the scholarly monograph as jam session-a first-rate intellectual essay whose rhythms, tones, and melodious voice are as captivating as the music Ramsey brilliantly explains and masterfully performs.” Michael Eric Dyson, author of Open Mike and Holler If You Hear Me