When we characterize music as constructed as “white music” and “black music”, what do these supposedly objective descriptions reveal about value? Examining several examples of how the academy teaches 1960s rock and soul—genres largely associated with whites and blacks, respectively, in terms of both performers and audiences—in popular music history courses can give us some answers.
More numerous than even general African-American music history textbooks (see Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans: A History, Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby’s African American Music: An Introduction, and Burton W. Peretti’s Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music) and more useful for analyzing the role of race in the construction of music history than most general American popular music history textbooks (see David Lee Joyner’s American Popular Music and Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman’s American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, for example), rock music history textbooks mark 1960s rock as white and soul as black in language that sometimes unintentionally values rock over soul in racist ways.