Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop

Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. By Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii, 281 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-21048-4.)

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.'s study of modern black music focuses on questions ranging from the more general "how do we learn what music means" to the more specific "how does the music under consideration work as discourses and signifying practices at specific historical moments" (p. 3) to facilitate the convergence of his interests as an ethnomusicologist and memoirist. In fact, Ramsey describes his work as an ethnomemoir, as he draws on his family's experiences from the 1940s through the late 1990s to explore the relationship among black musical practices, social contexts, and historical memory. He defines it as "race music" because of the specific techniques and concepts that identify it...