Just around Midnight

By Jack Hamilton,

Book cover of Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination

Book description

By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the idea of a black man playing lead guitar in a rock band seemed exotic. Yet a mere ten years earlier, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley had stood among the most influential rock and roll performers. Why did rock and roll becomeā€¦

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Why read it?

1 author picked Just around Midnight as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Some time in the 1960s, rock ā€™nā€™ roll became rock, and rock became white. That moment forms the core of Jack Hamiltonā€™s exploration of the fraught racial politics of this music in the United States.

Putting different artists into dialogue ā€“ such as Dylan and Cooke, or Janis and Aretha ā€“ allows Hamilton to excavate the original complexity of genre labels that, over the fifty years since, have too often effaced the original, more complicated story about race, music, and American society. 

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