Matthew Morrison, Ph.D. Blackface and the Making of Black Music in the United States

Join NCCU's Music Department for a lecture with Matthew D Morrison!

Dr. Morrison is an assistant professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Blackface and the Making of Black Music in the United States

This talk will explore the development of popular music out of the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the United States. Through the author’s concept of Blacksound, this talk traces the sonic, legal, and racialized legacies of early American popular music, as well as how Black musicians and performers created unique performance practices that were simultaneously absorbed and commercialized into popular music under the unjust structures of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

About Matthew D. Morrison

Matthew D. Morrison is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and is an assistant professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Matthew received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in musicology and has held the Susan McClary and Robert Walser American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, as well as fellowships at institutions such as Harvard, the Library of Congress, the University of Edinburgh, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/Center for Popular Music Studies. His book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, is forthcoming in March 2024 with the University of California Press. His work has appeared in numerous publications, such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy, and American Music, and he contributes creatively as a dramaturg and artistic consultant within the arts.