ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some different ways in which class has inflected US popular music since the Second World War. Critical discussions of the intersection of popular music and race in the United States have been couched in terms of primitivist appropriations of African–American music by white artists and audiences for fun and profit while reinforcing racial hierarchies and stereotypes. Class identification and the creation of a feeling of class community are often created indirectly by a cultural form that has gained a sort of class association. Alongside models of class articulation and identification that depend on notions of whiteness and blackness, of racial theft and authenticity, there have long existed broadly popular multiracial and multi-ethnic models of class and class-consciousness that can be traced, at least from the Knights of Labor to the present. As Michael Denning notes, swing was basically the sound track of the Popular Front in many parts of the United States.
