Alongside love ballads, technical piano exercises, and popular dances, blackface minstrelsy appears in half of the sixteen bound sheet music collections held in the University of Maryland’s Special Collections in the Performing Arts. These volumes, which collectively contain music dating from 1829 to 1907, all belonged to women in northern or western US-American states, such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California. Blackface minstrelsy scholarship prior to the 2020s often contextualized this genre as a reflection of animosity towards the United Kingdom or class issues rather than anti-Black racism (Mahar 1988, Lott 1993). Binder’s volume scholarship on Southern volumes has often argued that this genre would have been inappropriate for performance in respectable nineteenth-century parlors, especially when written in a mocking dialect (Meyer-Frazier 2015, Bailey 2021). Given the presence of minstrelsy in the books that I have examined, I draw on more recent work on this genre (Hartman 2022, Morrison 2024) to conduct close readings of selections tied to minstrelsy to better understand how these songs reflected and constructed white supremacy. Ultimately, I argue that while some books suggest abolitionist leanings, the majority of bound sheet music volumes upheld a culture of white supremacy. More broadly, the presence of blackface minstrelsy in these books reflects how anti-Black racism was integral, not incidental, to the ideals of white femininity in the nineteenth century.

In a November 2007 review of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra’s (SBYO) performance at Symphony Hall, Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe concluded, “What insights can be drawn from El Sistema and applied to the United States? Similar discussions are happening around the country… and in the meantime, this orchestra is the best possible emissary for the cause.” El Sistema–a Venezuelan music education initiative founded in 1975 that seeks to address social inequality through intensive orchestral training–emphasizes collective musical excellence and discipline as a pathway to individual and societal empowerment. To understand the impact of the 2007 North American performances of the SBYO in relation to U.S. understandings of its relationships with Venezuela, I analyze reviews of this four-city tour from prominent newspapers. Overwhelmingly, the SBYO was lauded by critics across the country for their technical prowess, passion, and their ability to connect with diverse audiences with their inspiring messaging. However, in conversation with critical scholarship on El Sistema by Geoffrey Baker, I find this romanticized reception obfuscates the use of the SBYO as a tool in ideological and diplomatic messaging. I position these 2007 performances as a direct result of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933–1938)–a foreign policy championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that used music to improve relations with Latin American countries–in which performances of Western art music shaped mutual socio/political perceptions between the Americas. I argue that the SBYO has been under-contextualized within the broader history of music and cultural diplomacy.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was one of the most important Black American activist-musicians of the 1960s. While a university student in Albany, GA, Reagon joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961 and co-founded SNCC’s official musical group, The Freedom Singers. In 1973, after having moved to Washington, DC, Reagon founded the social justice vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, which became an international sensation. A lesser-known aspect of Reagon’s career was that she was a skilled music historian. Her still-unpublished 1975 dissertation, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1965: A Study in Culture History,” for which she received a PhD from Howard University, has become a cult hit among scholars of music and politics. Reading “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement,” it’s easy to see why: Reagon’s work is a sophisticated historiographic intervention in which she argues that tactical changes in the use of music by political organizations should be taken seriously as a basis for the periodization of their internal history (Reagon 1975). Yet, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement” is rarely referenced for this insight. Rather, Reagon’s dissertation is cited most often for historical information presented in its initial chapters, which act as expository sections covering the origins of the Movement’s musical canon and the social role of southern Black churches in its musical activity (Eyerson & Jamison 1998, Roy 2010, Redmond 2014, Spener 2016). This presentation will reveal how the near exclusive focus on these chapters has decontextualized Reagon’s dissertation, stripping it of complexity.