On Rhetoric and Black Music

Earl H. Brooks (Author)

9780814346471

Hardback, published 4 June 2024

232 pages, 20 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.453 kg

Brooks reveals how music served to broaden boundaries of "what can be said—and to whom" and helped to spread changing ideas of Black identity, liberation, and protest. It's a fascinating look at the complicated relationship between art, culture, and social change.

How Black musicians and composers used their craft to define and influence public discourse.

This groundbreaking analysis examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Author, musician, and scholar Earl H. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music. Through rhetorical studies, archival research, and musical analysis, Brooks establishes the "sonic lexicon of Black music," defined by a distinct constellation of sonic and auditory features that bridge cultural, linguistic, and political spheres with music. Genres of Black music such as blues and jazz are discursive fields, where swinging, improvisation, call-and-response, blue notes, and other musical idioms serve as rhetorical tools to articulate the feelings, emotions, and states of mind that have shaped African American cultural and political development. Examining the resounding artistry of iconic musicians such as Scott Joplin, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Mahalia Jackson, this work offers an alternative register in which these musicians and composers are heard as public intellectuals, consciously invested in crafting rhetorical projects they knew would influence the public sphere.