Alive in the Sound

Ronald Radano is Professor Emeritus of African Cultural Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Among his books is Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, also published by Duke University Press.

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xvIntroduction. Black Labor, Value, and the Anomalies of Enlivened Sound 1First Metamorphosis: Property’s Properties of Reconstructive Possibility1. Slave Labor and the Emergence of a Peculiar Music 41Second Metamorphosis: Free Labor and the Racial-Economic Transaction of Animated Form2. Scabrous Sounds of a Vagrant Proletariat 813. Minstrelsy’s Incredible Corporealities 118Third Metamorphosis: Contests of Ownership in Early National Markets4. Ragtime’s Double-Time Accumulation 1595. New Coalescences of Spectacular Form: Stride Piano and Ragtime Piano Rolls 1896. Commodity Circuits and the Making of a Jazz Counterhistory 223Fourth Metamorphosis: Racialized Embodiments of Hypercapitalized Pop7. Swing: Black Music’s New Modern Becoming 2838. Living Forms, Imagined Truths: Aesthetic Breakthroughs in Jazz at Midcentury 3319. Apotheosis of a New Black Music 365Afterword: Modernity’s Ghosts 424Notes 429Bibliography 493Index

“Uncovering striking and novel parallels across various forms of African American music while challenging conventional formulations of identity and historical periodization, Ronald Radano upends settled wisdom around African American music and presents a new historical and critical model for its development.” - George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music “Ronald Radano’s ambitious, well-researched book challenges some assumptions of the distinctness of Black music in the United States. Through careful scholarship and compelling argument, Radano demonstrates that the critical production of Black music as distinct from other US music produces notions of US culture, and produces the frameworks through which notions of music-in-general develop. Alive in the Sound is a significant achievement and a major book.” - Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production