Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture.

Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture, by Kevin Phinney. Billboard Books/Watson-Guptill (770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003), 2005. 343 pp. $29.95.

The subject of black American influence on American culture, as a whole, has been a widely debated topic for many decades. One can agree that in the area of music, such contributions should be easily recognized, with blues, jazz and R&B as the most obvious examples. However, it is widely known that black Americans, have never been given adequate historical documentation for their contributions and the subsequent value of such to American popular culture. Kevin Phinney's book explores this issue in a well-researched, truthful and informative manner, and with a frankness about past and present race relations regarding music. For example, he has carefully sidestepped political correctness by identifying some revealing truths about notable 19th- and early-20th-century composers and performers (both white and black) whose greatest works, by today's standards, might be viewed as racist--in the case of whites--or less than conscious, in the case of blacks. By doing so, Phinney suggests that we study this "hidden history" in its appropriate context, no matter how harsh or offensive, instead of the "kinder, gentler approach" taken by so many authors and educators. In many instances, Phinney compares those past icons to current-day performers to identify both positive and negative cultural retentions from these examples.

The book is organized into nine chronologically assembled chapters covering the periods of achievements in black-American music from 1619 to the present. Each chapter's title reflects the subject matter directly or in a manner that ranges from humorous to evocative. This book can be a great supplemental resource for teaching historical music courses in jazz, rock-and-roll and American popular music, as it details many facts that either are not included or not detailed in most of the prominently used texts in teaching such courses. While the book identifies black and white American music experiences as a microcosm of race relations in the United States, it does not offer a solution to the controversies or a "better way" for our society to move forward. Instead, there is a not so subtle theme throughout the book: if there was a greater awareness of how much black and white Americans have journeyed together through music, our interaction as people could be remarkably different. This is both the question that the book asks and the answer it supplies readers. In a time such as now, when race issues are once again prevalent in the headlines, it is refreshing to read a book that has been written with such an "eyes-wide-open" approach. Reviewed by Horace Alexander Young, Pullman, Washington.