ABSTRACT
Melting Pot' was a song released by Blue Mink in 1969. This chapter discusses black music in Britain differently. This is not a history, nor is it a genealogy in Michel Foucault's sense. It is a narrative focused on syncretic moments, on connections across different cultures that have the potential to remake musical forms; moments of intersection that forecast later developments and help us to understand, in this case, the specificity of black British popular music in the early twenty-first century. The chapter examines that the foundation of an identifiably British black popular music can be found in the syntheses of black music as these music were taken up, played and listened to, in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Paul Gilroy explains that, foregrounding the role of music allows us to see England, or more accurately London, as an important junction point or crossroads on the webbed pathways of black Atlantic political culture.
