Teaching the history of 20th century American popular music

In the fall, I’m teaching a new music history class at NYU on 20th century American popular music. This is not a history of rock. When the department says “20th century”, they mean the entire 20th century. We don’t get to Elvis until after the midterm. The most difficult part is going to be the beginning, because I regret to tell you that for the first several decades of the twentieth century, the most popular form of entertainment in the US was blackface minstrelry. Let me give you an idea of how big a deal it was. When Warner Brothers wanted to make their first feature film with sound, they needed a guaranteed box-office smash to mitigate the risk of this new and unproven technology. This is why they went with a lightly fictionalized biography of Al Jolson: evidently, nothing sold movie tickets in the 1920s more reliably than a white guy singing in blackface. Minstrelry is going to be a fraught topic for everyone, but we need to do it, and not just as a historical matter. Matthew…