Bobby Womack's BW Goes C&W (1976) presents a case study in country's long entanglement with race and genre boundaries. Though Womack incorporated country references on other albums, this was his only country album. It is sonically proximal to pop country of the 1970s, while including elements of soul and R&B. Womack aimed to make not just any country recording, but one that would address a black audience and highlight—visually and aurally—a black identity. This article provides close readings to show how Womack's album engaged with country music while actively confronting racial exclusion in the genre. Today's discourse about race and genre provide opportunities to reconsider these issues in country music's history—a history that continues to ramify. For comparison, I address parallels in recent country music, demonstrating that the genre-color line that hemmed in Womack is under scrutiny. But this scrutiny is a far cry from change. Womack explicitly confronted racial issues in BW Goes C&W , yet these remain just as troubling in 2020 as they were in 1976.

In 2015, country singer Chris Stapleton, lauded for his allegiance to hard country music, stepped on stage at the Country Music Association annual awards show in Nashville, Tennessee, and knocked out a stunning performance of “Tennessee Whiskey.” The moment was heralded by critics and fans alike as a celebrated return to roots-oriented, traditional, hard country music. But Stapleton's cover version rewrote the song over a historically significant soul groove. In so doing, he presented a musical-political statement about the past and present of country music that challenged its acknowledged racial politics. The analyses presented here, centered on Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson, weave these threads together into a sonic explanation of country music's contradictory senses of genre identity, musical style, and racial politics. They propose a new historical perspective on the confluence of country and soul in the early 1960s, most memorably realized in the two Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums that Ray Charles released in 1962. What emerges in conclusion is a subversive narrative that reinvents modern hard country music through a lineage of R&B and soul.

This article takes James Baldwin’s only children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, as a starting point to explore his theorizations of music, affect, and childhood. Based loosely on the lives of his nephew and niece as well as his own memories of childhood, the book follows children protagonists and friends TJ, WT, and Blinky as they play in the streets of 1970s Harlem. They jump rope, play ball, interact with their adult neighbors, and witness the effects of police surveillance and drug abuse on their community. Baldwin argues that, through these experiences, Black children grow up with the myth of American innocence quickly dispelled and are thus not naïve to the past and present of the United States’ structural racism. Music is integral to Baldwin’s exploration of the affective contours of Black childhood. When community is threatened by white supremacy, music repeatedly enters the story to repair communal ties. To Baldwin, Black-identified musics (especially jazz and the blues) are essential to experiencing joy amid hardship and pain, and he uses the blues to communicate a metaphysics of blackness. Combining archival sources, literary analysis, affect theory, and Black studies, this article listens to the joys, fears, hopes, and pains of Black childhood that Baldwin renders audible. It complicates white notions of childhood innocence and shows music’s importance in experiencing joy and sustaining struggle.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric about violence in Chicago spatialized a narrative that branded the city as the poster child of urban disarray. His bombast lacked any contextual understanding of the issue and offered no productive pathways for collective solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through textual analysis of three tracks from three breakout artists in 2016, my goal is to show how hip hop enables audiences to imagine Chicago’s 1) structural resistance to violence in the city’s communities of color, 2) a sense of place and belonging among the city’s youth, and 3) a loving and unapologetic “black liberation” lens to social movements in the city.

Audible in speech and song, electro-pop singer Grimes’s so-called “baby doll” lisp generates endless buzz online, ranging from light-hearted adoration, to infantilization, to sexual fetish and even to ableist, misogynist anti-fandom. This article uses the reception of her lisp to build an intersectional theory of lisping across its medical and socio-cultural constructions, bridging work in disability studies, dysfluency studies, voice studies, and popular music studies in the process. I situate the slippage between adoring, infantilizing, fetishistic, and violent characterizations of Grimes’s lisp as reflective of the infantilization of “communicative disorders” in speech language pathology, and the dysfunction associated with feminine coded-speech patterns (e.g. vocal fry and up talk) in the popular imaginary. Lisping is profitably understood as an audible form of “liminal” difference relative to visible physical disabilities (St. Pierre), and to certain ableist, gendered, and racialized conceptions of normative vocality. Ultimately, in the English-speaking world, the lisp is symbolically-coded feminine while exceeding the norms of female vocality, thereby giving rise to a polarizing set of associations that work against female authority and, by extension in Grimes’s case, female musical authorship. Grimes’s reception thus offers a valuable case study for interrogating how misogynist fantasies regarding femininity are thought localized in the female voice, and the symbolic ties between disability and femininity.