On February 11, 2024, Beyoncé surprised listeners when she released her country music single, “Texas Hold ‘Em”, which features MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on the minstrel banjo and viola. This paper examines the notion of Black music reclamation by placing this single—and Beyoncé’s sentiments to reclaim her Texan roots—within broader discussions which are redefining the borders of Blackness and Black music. By highlighting significant moments in the music careers of Beyoncé and Giddens, this paper demonstrates that Black musicians are not only acknowledging the undeniable presence of Black contributions to country music history, but also, they are reclaiming their space in country music’s present and future. Building upon my research about Black banjo histories, this paper locates ways that the country music industry perpetuates racially segregated music. I also provide a music analysis which compares the clawhammer banjo style of Giddens in “Texas Hold ‘Em” to that of twentieth-century Black banjo player, Elizabeth Cotten. Through this comparative analysis and ethnographic interviews, I show that Giddens pays homage to Cotten and thus shares the popular music sphere with the Black banjo players who came before her. In this way, I demonstrate that Black music reclamation efforts are inspired by previous generations of Black musicians. This paper reflects upon an era of Black musicians disrupting legacies of chattel slavery, blackface minstrelsy, a racially segregated record music industry, and white supremacy through the reclamation of Black music.

This paper proposes that the study of sampling can be used as a methodology in music studies. As a case study, I analyze Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016), Homecoming (2019), and Renaissance (2022), all of which sample artists that pull from the Black community and its intersections with other minority communities such as the queer community. By sampling such artists, these albums create an inclusive conversation between intergenerational cultural contexts, further exploring how music can create a sonic archival record, in this case, of the Black community itself and all who exist at its margins. In practice, sampling as a methodology uses production equipment to examine the historical backing behind the composition process. Rooted in the toasting traditions of Jamaican masters of ceremonies (MCs), American sampling practices are deeply connected to Black diasporic forms of disk jockeying (DJing). Exponentially growing from its early stages of the hip hop genre, sampling has since evolved into a signifying citational practice, referencing influences of past music to create new musical motifs and expressions (Tillet 2014). Further adopting this citational practice as an analytical lens, I demonstrate how production equipment such as MIDI controllers, samplers, and DAWs can serve as crucial tools for understanding musicological historiographies, blending cultural context with the usage of 1s and 0s (Katz 2010). Using sampling as a methodology emphasizes the process of musicking as opposed to solely valuing the polished recording, and studies the ways in which sampling can give new meaning to the genre of popular music (Small 1998).

This paper presents a case study on the "In the Sanctuary" meme trend that swept TikTok in the latter half of 2022, exploring the digital transmutation of a specific gospel music vamp into a widespread memetic phenomenon. Drawing on Braxton Shelley's concept of the Gospel Imagination, the analysis elucidates how the repetitive nature of gospel vamps, particularly in the gospel song "In the Sanctuary" by Kurt Carr, not only enlivens belief but also catalyzes user participation in Black Technoculture. Shelley's framework underpins the argument that such repetition within memes can evoke a similar spiritual resonance in a virtual context. By synthesizing Richard Dawkins's meme theory, Limor Shifman's perspective of memes as a form of digital folklore and humor, and Andre Brock, Jr.'s critical analysis of memes in Black internet cultures as instruments of representation and resistance, the paper argues that the memefication of "In the Sanctuary" on TikTok is not a mere happenstance. Instead, it represents a deliberate and complex continuation of gospel music's profound role in the Black community.

In 1963, Plainfield, New Jersey barbershop proprietor George Clinton drove 10 hours to Detroit to audition with his doo-wop group, the Parliaments, for Berry Gordy’s Motown label. The group was rejected, but Motown signed Clinton on as a staff songwriter. Following the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, the Motown Corporation would leave the namesake city it had pushed to the center of the pop universe for Los Angeles, and Clinton’s doo-wop group would set up shop permanently in the Motor City, blossoming into a psychedelic funk collective known variously as Parliament, Funkadelic, or simply P-Funk and dominating the R&B charts throughout the 1970s. As Motown Herein I examine Clinton and P-Funk’s sometimes-fraught relationship with Detroit and with the Motown label, drawing on interviews with band members and analyses of the band’s expansive body of work to detail how Clinton’s hyper-referential postindustrial soul functions as both tribute to and critique of the Motown dream - and also as a nexus point for an alternate Afrofuturist universe that sprang up amidst Detroit’s civic decline, from J. Dilla’s fragmented beats to Bryce Detroit and Ingrid LaFleur’s Afrotopian art happenings.