Now is an apt time to look back on Caleb Peterson’s protest, both as an antecedent and as inspiration. His strategy, which turned Hollywood’s moneymaking spectacles into race relations controversies, smartly used theatricality as a tool for protest. While its impact on equal hiring practices was unclear, it can still be read as radical and successful.
For every custom there is some sort of a reason. Then if it is the custom generally to ignore or not to accord recognition to the writer of the words to a musical composition on what reason is the custom founded?
In Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir, a personal and historical account of upper middle-class black family life in 1950s and 1960s Chicago, the colorline is something that must be learned.
Greenspan's biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown's life. More than a time-line, Greenspan's contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.
There was something about Mayberry that evoked a kind of Southern nowhere-ness. It was the not the New South of Henry Grady, not the romanticized South of a natural and benign unequal social order like Thomas Nelson page’s. How could Mayberry be that when it had, amazingly, no black people?
We’re all familiar with pain. Ranging from a stubbed toe to a severe injury, some level of pain is experienced on a near daily basis. But many of us are fortunate enough that our experiences with pain tend to be limited to relatively brief episodes that will eventually end, sooner…
The complicated relationship between girls and music, and the mobility that it both affords and denies them, is only legible through conversations with girls. As it turns out, the music of Katy Perry makes that relationship most legible.
There may be songs whose histories are uncorrupted or wholly unrecoverable. “(The) Lonesome Road” is not among them. The road that everybody, including “E.V. Body,” in this story tredges on is crowded with two-way traffic: some stretches are dusty, others are paved with Tin Pan Alley gold or earnest populist intentions, and it is constantly being dug up and laid anew.
On Twitter the entire point is that somebody is watching you. Success is measured in followers. No wonder Sly Stone never seems at home there, and never alights there too long.
If Pokey LaFarge is post-nostalgic, it is only partway. If anything, his music and personae expose the extent to which older, simpler virtues—for worse and for better—survive in St. Louis in so many ways.