A sound history : Lawrence Gellert, Black musical protest, and white denial

Resource Information

The work A sound history : Lawrence Gellert, Black musical protest, and white denial represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bowdoin College Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

A sound history : Lawrence Gellert, Black musical protest, and white denial

Title remainder

Lawrence Gellert, Black musical protest, and white denial

Statement of responsibility

Steven P. Garabedian

Creator

• Garabedian, Steven P.,

Author

• Garabedian, Steven P.,

Subject

• African Americans -- Historiography
• African Americans -- Music
• African Americans -- Music | History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Folk music
• Folk music -- United States -- History and criticism
• Gellert, Lawrence, 1898-1979
• Gellert, Lawrence, 1898-1979
• History
• Music -- Historiography
• Music -- Historiography
• Music -- Political aspects
• Music -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century
• Protest songs
• Protest songs -- United States -- History and criticism
• United States
• 1900-1999
• African Americans -- Historiography

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A "lean, straggly-haired New Yorker," as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors. By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication-an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century"--

Member of

• American popular music (Amherst, Mass.)

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

American popular music