ABSTRACT
The serious study of contemporary popular music could go a long way to offset this bias. Three of the eight books in this series (GV, SF and DH) are specifically concerned with black music styles. Moreover, one of the principal themes of the series is that Afro-American music has been the major influence on much con temporary popular music. Graham Vulliamy’s ’Jazz and Blues’ traces the way in which a new musical tradition was born as the result of the merging of two other traditions - the African and the European - in the Southern states of America. John Shepherd’s ’Tin Pan Alley’ shows how the commercial white American popular music industry periodically created new markets by appropriating and diluting black American forms into white, adolescent fashions, whilst Dave Rogers’s ’Rock’n ’Roll’ illustrates how black rhythm and blues was a key ingredient in 1950s’ rock’n ’roll. Other books in the series testify to the dominance of black musical values today - in disco music, as discussed in Simon Frith’s ’Soul and Motown’, and in contemporary rock music (see Dave Rogers’s ’Rock Music’). Finally, Dick Hebdige’s ’Reggae’ traces the other major tradition of black popular music - that emanating from the West Indies and culminating in this country with the reggae of West Indian communities.
