Reds, Whites, and Blues:
Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in America
William G. Roy

Cloth | August 2010 | $35.00 / £24.95
304 pp. | 6 x 9 | 4 tables.

Shopping Cart | Endorsements

Music, and folk music in particular, is often embraced as a form of political expression, a vehicle for bridging or reinforcing social boundaries, and a valuable tool for movements reconfiguring the social landscape. Reds, Whites, and Blues examines the political force of folk music, not through the meaning of its lyrics, but through the concrete social activities that make up movements. Drawing from rich archival material, William Roy shows that the People's Songs movement of the 1930s and 40s, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s implemented folk music's social relationships--specifically between those who sang and those who listened--in different ways, achieving different outcomes.

Roy explores how the People's Songsters envisioned uniting people in song, but made little headway beyond leftist activists. In contrast, the Civil Rights Movement successfully integrated music into collective action, and used music on the picket lines, at sit-ins, on freedom rides, and in jails. Roy considers how the movement's Freedom Songs never gained commercial success, yet contributed to the wider achievements of the Civil Rights struggle. Roy also traces the history of folk music, revealing the complex debates surrounding who or what qualified as "folk" and how the music's status as racially inclusive was not always a given.

Examining folk music's galvanizing and unifying power, Reds, Whites, and Blues casts new light on the relationship between cultural forms and social activity.

William G. Roy is professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Socializing Capital (Princeton) and Making Societies.

Endorsement:

"This exceptional book provides one of the most grounded sociological accounts of music and its role in social movements to date. Integrating insights from the sociology of culture, music, and organizations with in-depth historical analyses of American folk traditions, Red, Whites and Blues is both theoretically astute and innovative. It is a must-read, with implications for many specialties in our field."--Vincent Roscigno, Ohio State University

Another Princeton book by William G. Roy:

• Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America.

Series:

• Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
  Paul J. DiMaggio, Michèle Lamont, Robert J. Wuthnow, and Viviana A. Zelizer, Series Editors

Subject Areas:

• Sociology
• Political Science and International Relations
• Music

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $35.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-14363-7

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Cloth: £24.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-14363-7

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

Questions and comments to: webmaster@press.princeton.edu
Princeton University Press