ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will tell the story of how one record-Terry Callier’s What Color is Love, recorded in Chicago in 1972, bought in a secondhand record shop in California in 1989-came to be in my hands as I sit in Central London, England, in 2014. It is a story that suggests the importance of movement in culture. We often assume a close relationship between culture and place, and imagine that cultural expression articulates the essence of a particular people or society. But such a view produces a very static notion of how culture works. What if we take another tack and focus instead on how culture moves: how cultural products produced in one context can acquire new meanings in other contexts far removed in space or time. If we supplement our image of cultural “roots” with a notion of “routes,” we can focus on exploring the journeys culture makes, and pay attention to the processes of hybridity that create new forms of culture. Through mixing different traditions a new image of how culture and music circulate emerges.
