Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

by Jack Hamilton

Overview

When Jimi Hendrix died, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet ten years earlier, Chuck Berry had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll become white? Jack Hamilton challenges the racial categories that distort standard histories of rock music and the 60s revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674416598
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/26/2016
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,048,871
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jack Hamilton is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Dreams and Nightmares 1

1 Darkness at the Break of Noon: Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, and the Birth of Sixties Music 26

2 The White Atlantic: Cultural Origins of the "British Invasion" 86

3 "Friends Across the Sea": Motown, the Beatles, and Sites and Sounds of Crossover 121

4 "Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul 169

5 House Burning Down: Race, Writing, and Jimi Hendrix's War 213

6 Just Around Midnight: The Rolling Stones and the End of the Sixties 246

Notes 277

Acknowledgments 323

Credits 329

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

…this is not a book looking for easy solutions. Hamilton…offers a long-overdue look at the racial dynamics of rock in the 1960s, which he argues is far more fluid than it appears at first glance…The book is most revelatory when challenging lazy conventional wisdom.

The New York Times Book Review - Alan Light

From Little Richard and Chuck Berry to the Dominoes, Ike Turner, and Howlin’ Wolf, rock and roll’s founding figures were African American, yet ‘rock’ as we know and hear it now is coded white…In some of his sharpest passages, Hamilton shows how much rockism’s whiteness depended on [the] confining ideas of blackness…He contributes a new and valuable piece to a larger and still contentious project: the struggle against the essentialization of racial and ethnic identity.
-- Colin Vanderburg Los Angeles Review of Books

Ambitious and rewarding… Just around Midnight seeks to tell the story of [black] erasure [from rock ‘n’ roll], and it does so quite compellingly by bringing together artists and songs that our implicitly segregationist narratives have encouraged us to keep apart.
-- Kevin J. H. Dettmar Chronicle of Higher Education

Extraordinary…Hamilton doesn’t pretend to have all the answers in Just around Midnight but he asks all the right questions. It challenges so much of what we’ve taken for granted about rock and roll history that one reading won’t do…Any future book that deals with the social and racial aspects of popular music in the 20th century will have to contend with Just around Midnight. The bar has been raised.
-- Adam Ellsworth Arts Fuse

Brilliant…[A] valuable engagement with the unheard narrative of race in rock and roll.
-- Emma Rees Times Higher Education

To the age-old cries that ‘rock is dead,’ Jack Hamilton’s book says, ‘Think again!’ Just around Midnight considers the often-elided racial mythologies, cross-cultural intimacies, and racially-charged aesthetic obfuscations that haunt the foundations of American popular music culture. For anyone who remains easily seduced by the romance of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame canon-building, this book is a necessary read.
-- Daphne Brooks, Yale University

This new listening to the black-and-white racial politics of rock in the 1960s is full of rich insights, provocative thinking, and persuasive writing. As the revolutions of critical race and ethnic studies continue to reveal new generations of critics born in their wake, revisitations of rock history like this one will be crucial to rethinking the musical past.
-- Josh Kun, University of Southern California

As musically detailed as it is theoretically expansive, Just around Midnight reveals that popular music of the 1960s was defined by more vibrant interracial collaborations and more violent anti-black erasures than we could have imagined. This is a beautifully written and provocatively argued work of intellect, heart, and soul.
-- Emily Lordi, University of Massachusetts Amherst

As Jack Hamilton makes clear in this exceptionally perceptive work, the most common way to talk about race in rock music is to not talk about it at all…Hamilton’s text is bold, sophisticated, and brilliant. For anyone looking for a book challenging conventional narratives of music history, this is a fantastic candidate.
-- Joshua Friedberg PopMatters

From the Publisher

As musically detailed as it is theoretically expansive, Just around Midnight reveals that popular music of the 1960s was defined by more vibrant interracial collaborations and more violent anti-black erasures than we could have imagined. This is a beautifully written and provocatively argued work of intellect, heart, and soul.

Emily Lordi

Extraordinary…Hamilton doesn’t pretend to have all the answers in Just around Midnight but he asks all the right questions. It challenges so much of what we’ve taken for granted about rock and roll history that one reading won’t do…Any future book that deals with the social and racial aspects of popular music in the 20th century will have to contend with Just around Midnight. The bar has been raised.

Arts Fuse - Adam Ellsworth

This new listening to the black-and-white racial politics of rock in the 1960s is full of rich insights, provocative thinking, and persuasive writing. As the revolutions of critical race and ethnic studies continue to reveal new generations of critics born in their wake, revisitations of rock history like this one will be crucial to rethinking the musical past.

Josh Kun

Ambitious and rewarding… Just around Midnight seeks to tell the story of [black] erasure [from rock ‘n’ roll], and it does so quite compellingly by bringing together artists and songs that our implicitly segregationist narratives have encouraged us to keep apart.

Chronicle of Higher Education - Kevin J. H. Dettmar

Brilliant…[A] valuable engagement with the unheard narrative of race in rock and roll.

Times Higher Education - Emma Rees

From Little Richard and Chuck Berry to the Dominoes, Ike Turner, and Howlin’ Wolf, rock and roll’s founding figures were African American, yet ‘rock’ as we know and hear it now is coded white…In some of his sharpest passages, Hamilton shows how much rockism’s whiteness depended on [the] confining ideas of blackness…He contributes a new and valuable piece to a larger and still contentious project: the struggle against the essentialization of racial and ethnic identity.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Colin Vanderburg

To the age-old cries that ‘rock is dead,’ Jack Hamilton’s book says, ‘Think again!’ Just around Midnight considers the often-elided racial mythologies, cross-cultural intimacies, and racially-charged aesthetic obfuscations that haunt the foundations of American popular music culture. For anyone who remains easily seduced by the romance of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame canon-building, this book is a necessary read.

Daphne Brooks

As Jack Hamilton makes clear in this exceptionally perceptive work, the most common way to talk about race in rock music is to not talk about it at all…Hamilton’s text is bold, sophisticated, and brilliant. For anyone looking for a book challenging conventional narratives of music history, this is a fantastic candidate.

PopMatters - Joshua Friedberg