| Abstrakt: |
This article probes the historical significance of the black slave narratives, and particularly that of Frederick Douglass, in the USA. While a number of important narratives were published in the years surrounding the Civil War, only Douglass's performed a modern interpretation of slave music as embedded culture. Like other narratives, Douglass opened up for the first time a black psychocultural interior; but Douglass's narrative was also unique in that it paid attention to music in a manner that prefigured a sociology of music. The attention it and other narratives garnered, along with the burgeoning interest in black religious singing, helped constitute a prototype of ethnic and cultural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
