Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. By Matthew D.Morrison, Oakland, CA : University of California Press, 2025. 304 pp. $29.95. (pbk). ISBN: 978‐0‐52‐039059‐1

As a key form of popular culture, music has always shaped society. The book Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States explores this history, focusing on a concept called “Blacksound.” The author Morrison defines this as the legacy of blackface minstrelsy, which he argues became the foundation for American popular culture and the music industry. The book reframes blackface not as a historical footnote, but as the force that forged the core rules of American music, such as its culture, business, and racial dynamics. By doing this, the book challenges us to rethink how we view issues of appropriation, authenticity, and race within American popular culture. Morrison's work builds on and extends a growing body of scholarship that interrogates the racialized foundations of American popular culture. Scholars such as Eric Lott (Love and Theft), Saidiya Hartman (Scenes of Subjection), and Daphne Brooks (Bodies in Dissent) have previously explored blackface minstrelsy as a site of racial fantasy, appropriation, and commodification. Morrison synthesizes these insights with musicological analysis and legal history to argue that blackface was not merely a visual spectacle but a sonic regime, what he calls “Blacksound,” that shaped how American music was made, marketed and monetized. The work is in dialogue with more recent studies such as Guthrie Ramsey's Who Hears Here? and Roshanak Kheshti's Modernity's Ear, which examine the racial politics of sound and listening. Morrison's contribution lies in his detailed excavation of how black performance aesthetics were codified, commodified and ultimately detached from black bodies through legal and cultural mechanisms. The book is split into two parts. In the first part, “Racial Identity and Popular Music in Early Blackface” looks at the origins of blackface minstrelsy and how it helped shape racial identity and musical style. Morrison examines famous figures like T.D. Rice and Stephen Foster, but with a new perspective that shows how their music was made to sound “Black.” For example, his analysis of Rice's “Jump Jim Crow” explains how its tune, which came from white folk music, was turned into a “Black” sound simply through performance and how audiences received it. This breakdown of “sonic blackness” is a key part of the book, revealing how whiteness was built not just in contrast to Blackness, but by copying and consuming Black sound. This process was foundational to the development of American popular culture. In the second part, “The Birth of the Popular Music Industry” explains how Black performance was turned into a product after the Civil War through Tin Pan Alley, ragtime and early recordings. Morrison uses old documents like sheet music and legal records to show how Black performers were essential to the growth of popular culture, even while being denied credit and pay. For example, he tells the story of Mama Lou, a performer whose songs were stolen and copyrighted by white musicians. This illustrates his idea of “intellectual performance property,” the unprotected creative labor of Black artists that was treated as free for the taking. This idea challenges the legal and cultural systems that have historically treated Black performance as public property. Morrison's analysis of copyright law is one of the book's most important contributions. He shows how copyright law was racially biased from the start, favoring written sheet music over live or oral performances. This legal loophole made it easy for white publishers and performers to systematically steal Black musical styles. By examining key copyright laws, Morrison reveals how they helped cement racial inequality in the music industry, a legacy that still affects popular culture today. Throughout the book, Morrison is careful not to overstate the power Black performers had in these unfair systems. While he highlights moments of creativity and resistance, he never loses sight of the larger racial capitalist structures that limited their lives and work. This balanced approach makes his analysis more powerful than earlier studies that sometimes romanticized minstrelsy. Instead, Morrison shows how Black performers were trapped in a “feedback loop,” where their innovations were celebrated, copied, and then sold for profit by others. The book's strength comes from its interdisciplinary approach. Morrison smoothly combines music analysis, history, legal studies, and performance theory. He reads sheet music not just for its notes, but for its cultural and racial meaning. This method offers a new way to understand how sound itself can be a racial text. For scholars, the book is an essential resource that provides a new framework for understanding how race is built through sound. The concept of “Blacksound” is likely to inspire more research, especially into how these racial dynamics play out in modern music genres like hip-hop and pop culture. Morrison's work also has important implications for legal studies, particularly concerning intellectual property and cultural appropriation. He shows how law and culture work together to create racial inequality, providing a model for scholarship that is both academically rigorous and socially relevant. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States changes our understanding of American music history. Morrison's concept of “Blacksound” shows that race and music did not just influence each other; they created each other over centuries of racial injustice. By focusing on Black creativity and its erasure, the book fixes old biases in music history and provides a new way to analyze race, sound and power in popular culture. For scholars, it is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary research. For everyone else, it is a powerful reminder that the music we love is deeply connected to the fight for racial justice. Morrison proves that to understand the history of American popular culture, we must see the theft at its core. This knowledge is the first step toward creating a more just future for all creative work within popular culture. The author has nothing to report. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.