Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory

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 b...