Book Review: Just Around Midnight by Jack Hamilton

In the history of rock, the subject of race, specifically that of black and white relations, has long served as a major point of contestation and contention. How is it, many have wondered, that rock music, a genre that sprang largely from African American musical practices, came to be performed predominantly by white musicians, and subsequently became a space where blacks were viewed as interlopers and oddities? The answer, as Jack Hamilton, assistant professor of American studies and Media studies at the University of Virginia, reveals in his excellent book, lies in the 1960s, the decade that established a set of values and meanings for rock...