Jack Hamilton. Just around Midnight

In Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, Jack Hamilton uses six case studies to show “how rock and roll music—a genre rooted in African American musical traditions, and many of whose earliest stars were black—came to be understood as the natural province of whites” (3). According to Hamilton, this narrative relies on constructions of black music as collective and traditional and white music as individual artistic expression. Hamilton, who is an academic and a journalist, directly and indirectly draws on much recent scholarship, including authors such as Marybeth Hamilton and Steve Waksman, who have written on the racialization of blues and rock in the 1960s and on discourses of authenticity. Hamilton chooses to discuss many well-known and much-discussed artists in this, his first book, in order to develop an argument that, while offering some rich analysis of musical structures, lacks some depth and consistency, as the breakdown of the chapters shows.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Blues · Call and response · Literature · Midnight · Musical · Musical composition · Musical expression · Narrative · Natural (archaeology) · Race (biology) · Racialization · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies