Black music, white musicians, and integration
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/28/800061464/series/black-music-white-musicians-integration/
Black music, white musicians, and integration
Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 250 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
We are coming to the end of Black Music Month. Sometimes the artists featured here are not Black but are known for playing Black music, a subject we haven’t really delved into. This country has checkered history about integrated music venues and musicians who refused to perform for segregated audiences, which I have written about in the past.
Here is a short history on the month: “Celebrating Black Music Month.”
June is African American Music Appreciation Month! Created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, this month celebrates the African American musical influences that comprise an essential part of our nation’s treasured cultural heritage.
Formerly called National Black Music Month, this celebration of African American musical contributions is re-established annually by presidential proclamation. Though by no means exhaustive, we’ve prepared a primer that will guide you through some of the different genres that African Americans have created, inspired and fostered.
Music professor Philip Ewell wrote this piece for The Conversation: “Why Quincy Jones should be prominently featured in US music education – his absence reflects how racial segregation still shapes American classrooms.”
Quincy Jones, who died on Nov. 3, 2024, at the age of 91, was one of the most influential musicians in U.S. history.
You might think such a notable figure would factor prominently in American music classrooms. Yet my research shows that Jones, who was Black, is rarely mentioned in mainstream U.S. music curricula.
As a Black music professor, I believe his absence reflects the fact that music education in the U.S. is still segregated along racial lines, just like the country was for much of its history.
In 2020, music theorist Megan Lyons and I analyzed the seven most common undergraduate music theory textbooks used in the U.S. We found that only 49 of the nearly 3,000 musical examples they cited were written by composers who were not white.
This article for the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music continues the discussion: “For Coloreds Only: Blackface and Segregation in the Billboard Charts and the GRAMMY Awards.”
The Billboard charts and GRAMMY Awards reflect the ongoing issue of racial oppression that shapes the flow of capital within the United States. In the 1840s, the most desired commodity in the music industry was not physical records but the false, laughable representation of Black folks. The mockery of the Black race was in high demand as the need for an “authentic” white race emerged after an economic disaster. The primary driving force for the commercialization of music in the U.S. was blackface minstrelsy. Using Matthew Morrison’s concept of Blacksound, the prominence of blackface performance heavily contributed to the formation of whiteness as it juxtaposed Black folks as “other.” And as publishers became increasingly vital to the industry and physical recordings materialized, this concept of racial divisions would purposely reinforce the necessary segregation of white and Black audiences. The creation of musical genres for catalogs would be highly racialized, rock and country for whites, and r&b for Blacks. “white” genres and the reverberations of Jim Crow laws leading up to the 1960s in the contemporary music industry.
“When The Beatles Refused To Play To Segregated Audiences“:
In 1964, The Beatles said they would not play a concert in Jacksonville, Florida if the audiences were going to be segregated – as they normally were, there, at that time.
For Historian Dr. Kitty Oliver, seeing the band perform at Jacksonville was transformative, after growing up in an environment where the only time she would otherwise see a white person might be if a salesman came into the community.
Larry Kane said, “It was amazing that the four of them (…) started to act up and blow back on this very, very hot and sensitive issue, knowing that it would really irritate a lot of Americans.”
Kudos to Benny Goodman for the early stance he took.
Steve Knopper wrote for Rolling Stone: “The Rope: The Forgotten History of Segregated Rock & Roll Concerts.”
One night in the late 1950s, the Flamingos’ bus pulled up to a concert hall in Birmingham, Alabama, and a row of 30 to 50 police officers holding rifles and billy clubs was waiting for them. The cops escorted the six-member doo-wop group, famous for “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “The Ladder of Love,” to its dressing room and gave strict instructions: As black performers, they were to make eye contact with only the black fans, who were confined to the balcony, and not with whites on the floor.
“It was ridiculous,” recalls Terry Johnson, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–inducted group. “The cops were up there making sure we did not look at any white person. It was a rule when we came in: ‘I don’t want to see any of you darkies looking at the white women out there. If you do, your ass is mine.’ Cruel things like that.”
“Soul Music and the Civil Rights Era: Breaking the Racial Barriers.”
Interestingly, unlike Motown, the Stax owners were white.
How Stax Records Set an Example for America:
At its heart, Stax’s music was church-based. It was Southern through and through. That’s what made it culturally distinctive. What made it socially significant, though, was its back story: the fact that both the music and the business of Stax were created by an integrated team in the late 1950s, working-class white and black people working together in quiet opposition to Jim Crow, right in the middle of the strictly segregated city of Memphis, the same city whose fathers chose to close public swimming pools rather than comply with the Civil Rights Act’s directive to integrate them.
Writer and historian Robert Gordon, the author of “Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion,” was growing up in Memphis as Stax gained its first taste of national notoriety.
“I got interested in Stax because of the music — the way it made me move,” he says. “When I realized, as a kid, it was from my hometown, it intrigued me more. Then when I was 15, I began to read more into the music. Like reading someone’s palm, the songs told me about the culture all around me, the oppression, the freedom, the expression. I learned about myself as I Iearned the music.”
Frank Sinatra and Civil Rights:
Frank Sinatra was an extraordinarily complicated man. Obviously, he was one of the greatest pop-culture superstars of all time. He was an accomplished film actor. Sinatra was stunningly generous in giving to charities, both publicly and privately. We know that he was also moody, violent, a womanizer, an alcoholic, and a Mafia instrument. What is not well-known is the story of Frank Sinatra and civil rights. It turns out that Sinatra, the skinny Italian street kid from Hoboken, was a man who championed the rights of all people, regardless of race. He did so publicly. And he did so in his private life. It is a story worth telling.
Stax Records: A Refuge From Racial Tensions:
Sam And Dave, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Booker T. and the MG’s, Wilson Pickett are just some of the soul stars whose careers were established at Stax Records — the label that began in a Memphis garage and went on to produce hundreds of hit songs.
But Stax was more than just a record label, according to Memphis music historian in his new book In an interview with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Gordon explains that Stax was both a refuge from the harsh racial realities of the 1960’s South and also a reflection of the turbulent civil rights movement churning just beyond its doors.
These two stories made me chuckle. The first: “15 Songs by White Artists We Thought Black People Sang.”
The second: “12 White Soul Artists Many People Assumed Were Black.” From that one:
Crossing racial lines and defying expectations have been part of rock and roll since the very beginning. Then there’s the sticky predicament of white singers that sound Black to the masses. Elvis was famously thought to be Black when radio stations first played “That’s All Right Mama,” and Buddy Holly and the Crickets were booked at the Apollo before anyone realized they were three white guys from Lubbock. The white singers below, mostly from the 1960s, blurred racial distinctions simply by doing what they loved.
“7 White Male Performers We Thought Were Black Because Of Their Voices“:
Most of the time White artists are spoken about in the context of Black music, it’s with the expectation of appropriation. Musicians from Elvis Presley to Miley Cyrus leveraged Black sound for their own personal profit throughout their careers, often breaking records and earning accolades that belonged to Black folk.But there are some White singers and rappers who made contributions to our music with nothing but pure, raw talent. These artists are actually so damn good that they sonically passed as Black, until the music video dropped.
Richard Sandomir, an obituary writer for The New York Times, shared this story: “Gregory Williams, Academic With an Uncommon Perspective on Race, Dies at 81.”
As a child, Williams discovered that his father — and therefore he and his siblings — had been passing for white. For the rest of his life, he identified as Black.
I will not be featuring many white artists here, but I wanted to give those who made a difference some credit here today.
Who can you name? Join me in the comments section below to discuss.
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