Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory

by Ronald Radano

Overview

In Alive in the Sound, Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities—spirit, soul, and groove. While acknowledging these qualities are always embedded in Black music, Radano shows they developed not simply from performance but from musicians’ status as laborers inhabiting an enduring racial-economic contradiction: Black music originated publicly as an exchangeable property owned by people whose subhuman status granted them—as “natural” musicians—indelible properties of sound. As a contradiction of the rules of ownership, wherein enslaved property was forbidden the right to own, modern Black music emerges after emancipation as a primary possession, moving dialectically into commercial markets and counterhistorically back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contests of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music. By reconceiving US Black music history as a history of value, Radano rethinks the music’s place in US and global culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478032175
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/29/2025
Series:	Refiguring American Music
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. Black Labor, Value, and the Anomalies of Enlivened Sound  1
First Metamorphosis: Property’s Properties of Reconstructive Possibility
1. Slave Labor and the Emergence of a Peculiar Music  41
Second Metamorphosis: Free Labor and the Racial-Economic Transaction of Animated Form
2. Scabrous Sounds of a Vagrant Proletariat  81
3. Minstrelsy’s Incredible Corporealities 118
Third Metamorphosis: Contests of Ownership in Early National Markets
4. Ragtime’s Double-Time Accumulation 159
5. New Coalescences of Spectacular Form: Stride Piano and Ragtime Piano Rolls  189
6. Commodity Circuits and the Making of a Jazz Counterhistory  223
Fourth Metamorphosis: Racialized Embodiments of Hypercapitalized Pop
7. Swing: Black Music’s New Modern Becoming  283
8. Living Forms, Imagined Truths: Aesthetic Breakthroughs in Jazz at Midcentury  331
9. Apotheosis of a New Black Music  365
Afterword: Modernity’s Ghosts  424
Notes  429
Bibliography  493
Index  535

Editorial Reviews

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.

Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production - Anthony Reed

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.

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music - George E. Lewis

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

From the Publisher