We academics who write about music, something often eminently enjoyable, are privileged people. It doesn't mean that we sit around spending an inordinate amount of time grooving to various recordings, although this kind of activity is not unknown to exist. Many historians fall in love with their subject matter to some extent, while keeping a sense of impartiality in their work, but perhaps with music this affection is easier to cultivate compared to other subjects. During my two decades in academia, I have noticed that some seem to want to justify their working in such a field by infusing their writing with impenetrable jargon and theory known only to a few hundred fellow travellers, making the research they publish largely indecipherable to the general reading public. It's as if they're intimating that there must be an existential price to pay for daring to write about a subject that some (incorrectly) see as only pleasurable, that obfuscation needs to be applied to make work about music seem sufficiently serious for academics to justify doing it.

That's too bad, and just plain wrong. This belief is also responsible for some horrible academic writing. In reality, academics working in music have nothing to apologize for. Music serves as a unique and important historical resource, one ignored or belittled by academics and history departments on both sides of the Atlantic until fairly recently (about a decade ago, I was told by members of two history departments in the US that a book about the historical significance of Duke Ellington did not connote a “serious” enough subject for a historian they would want to hire). Actually, my book Duke Ellington's America and many other examples published in recent decades demonstrate that recordings and sheet music are essential primary documents in helping historians and other cultural observers understand society in various periods and geographic locations. When examining these sources along with their attendant technological, business and political issues, as well as how they illustrate unequal access to power, success and status across lines of race, gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity, the field of music harbours resources as rich as any in the historical palette. African American history, with its dramatic arcs of repression and redemption, has served as a particularly fruitful area for such scholarship. Four recent books exhibit apt and not so apt examples of how music can serve as the foundation for historical work that significantly forwards our understanding of this field.

From the start, Tony Whyton informs readers that his book on John Coltrane's 1964 landmark album A Love Supreme (ALS) will not represent another fawning encomium of this much-analysed work:

So far, so promising, but it unfortunately becomes obvious early on that this is a book by, and often about, scholars, and no one else need look in.

Much of the book does not concern itself with ALS, but with arguments in jazz scholarship, arguments usually more distracting than fruitful. To take examples from chapter 1, much space is taken exploring the idea of strict “binaries” in jazz, principally whether jazz represents an endeavour of composition or improvisation. Such either/or dualities resemble arguments about jazz from the 1950s in periodicals like Down Beat, but few apart from a small coterie of academics have seriously believed in them for decades. Most of the time, jazz musicians balance these two concepts. The Duke Ellington small band sessions of the 1930s and early 1940s, for example, balanced and mixed these two “binaries” elegantly, providing rich melodic themes for the groups to elaborate upon while they improvised in the studio. The main composition at issue here, ALS, is also obviously a mix of the two concepts, as seen in the one complete live performance of the composition. Yes, as the oft-published story by John's wife and musical compatriot Alice maintains, ALS was apparently Coltrane's first “perfectly conceived composition” (22–23, 26), but his Classic Quartet added their own contributions, as John certainly meant for them to do. Droning on about this old composition/improvisation issue for pages makes an easy target; there is actually no controversy in modern jazz to debunk here. Similarly, going on for pages about the four-part structure of ALS, and how its impact supposedly changes when listened to on compact disc instead of LP, represents topics allotted much more space than their limited insight into the larger issues brought up by this album warrant.

In the same chapter of Whyton's book, he discusses at length scholar Michael Jarrett's ideas of “jazzography,” “the associated body and writings and understandings of the music” (27), and attempts to apply it to ALS. Anyone not a student of this obscure and confusing corner of jazz studies would instantly be at a loss to understand:

The italics above are mine, and represent concepts that cry out for explanation (never supplied), especially when someone like myself, who has read hundreds of books about popular music, cannot fathom what is being discussed.Footnote ¹ The “politics and discourse” referred to are not described (nor are they when also mentioned on page 40). Why are such esoteric and distancing labels given to an attempt to describe the differences and connections between improvisation and composition, especially when we cannot know exact definitions of these terms in a musical context without getting into the heads of geniuses like Charlie Parker, and when every artist approaches this artistic process differently anyway? How do such labels help us gain understanding? Actually, there are many examples over the decades in various books and articles of musicians trying to explain this process, much of which is probably unconscious and probably impossible to ever fully explain. What is needed more than obscure concepts appealing to a few is what has always been needed in studies of art, culture and music: rigorous research and straightforward clear writing that draws upon what we can know and makes educated and hopefully insightful guesses on the rest. Improvisation in jazz is, in the end, a wonderful mystery, and Derridean concepts employed by Jarrett and Whyton that attempt to deconstruct this process by calling into question “the very use of the terms of ‘composition’ and ‘improvisation’” (28) leave us with little or nothing of insight that we did not possess previously. Every skilled historian questions the meanings of key terms they use, and how those meanings have changed over time; insisting that they mean little or nothing does not advance our understanding.

Many more dead ends sold as interesting byways emerge. Isn't it obvious that cameras at a concert will “mediatize” (58–59) an event and change the way performers will perform and react, and how audiences will view that event in the future? Chapter 3 is probably the best chapter, yet its central concept seems to deviate from the book's central concept by focussing on Coltrane's works post-ALS, repeating similar points concerning the album Ascension (1965) over and over, and, like the other chapters, it is mostly a compendium of other scholars' observations. In the same chapter, Whyton insists that ALS, with its theme of “universal love … can be understood as a work that does not resonate with the social and political sentiment of the times” (83). If one only observes the more ideologically and physically violent turn that the civil rights movement took in the post-1965 period which Whyton subsequently describes, this may be true, but the ALS “love” ethic resonates well with other areas of society such as the 1962 Port Huron Statement that called for “unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, love,” and the sentiments of much post-1965 popular music that appealed to the counterculture. Coltrane's masterpiece fit snugly within such environs, which perhaps accounts for its steady and impressive sales throughout the last half-century. Whyton argues that Coltrane's “mythologised and simplified representation prevents a critical and in-depth engagement with the artist's life and work” (68), but several books (by Ashley Kahn, Ben Ratliff and others) do just that, and it is a minority of fans who seriously view Coltrane as some sort of divine God-like figure, despite the fact that Whyton repeats such beliefs and concepts ad nauseam throughout the book (46, 50, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, etc.) Some major-league editing needed to happen and not just on this topic; many points are repeated throughout, making it a frustrating read at times. Sometimes this 132-page monograph feels artificially stretched; Whyton's best points would have made for an absorbing academic article.

In the end, not much new is imparted by Whyton, and the book contributes to the trend of academic music studies drifting to a place where issues and language of the moment matter more than making a lasting contribution through deep research and insight. Unnecessary and unexplained jargon, used repeatedly, causes the general public and the media to dismiss what we academics do, and rightly so. In these days of reduced budgets and ideological swipes against humanities disciplines, scholars who labour in cultural-history studies can't afford to be dismissed that easily; we need to be able to prove our utility for society and our ability to create both pleasurable and important work.

Similar problems exist in Heble and Wallace's edited volume People Get Ready, but clear and thought-provoking work also makes the cut. The editors' introduction lays the foundation for what will follow. They insist that jazz music has a future despite dwindling sales and a long-term lack of widely known new artists, that contrary to popular belief the music is not invisible these days, and that the most effective and possibly best jazz is connected to issues of social change. The editors' aim is to focus on modern jazz that achieves all of these goals.

Numerous authors anthologized in this book (particularly the essay by master guitarist /composer Marc Ribot) decry the lack of funding, from civic or cultural institutions, given to jazz composers and performers. Jazz music is an important part not just of American culture, but of world culture, and an argument can easily be made that such music deserves support. But I wondered if this also represented an unrealistic wish. Most of the artists featured in this volume are rather avant-garde, their music ranging beyond what popular audiences will tolerate, and I don't see how such arcane and academically theorized arguments as those offered by Tamar Barzel in this volume would inspire bureaucrats or funders to support experimental jazz offerings. Did Miles Davis and other successful innovators during the last century desire or accept funding for their most daring pieces? Not from the kinds of institution that many in this book believe should support today's jazzers. They often received support from record companies, but there existed a price for such support and for the public's support as well. Those artists largely subscribed to director Martin Scorsese's famous dictum for his films: he usually does one film for the studios designed to clean up at the box office, and then a more challenging and less commercial film for himself. Pretty much all the most legendary jazz artists followed a similar strategy: Coltrane, Davis, Ellington, and perhaps most recently Herbie Hancock, who has deftly mixed boundary-busting esoteric album releases with commercial hits (such as the recent Album of the Year Grammy winner The Joni Letters) of high quality for over half a century now, his popularity growing with each decade. Why can't the artists profiled in People Get Ready pull off the same trick, and earn support for the important work many of them are doing? One can sell lots of recordings and concert tickets without being labelled a “sell-out.” Other essays (by Alan Stanbridge and Scott Thomson) in the section of this book that deals with these issues offer more thoughtful and realistic ways of resolving these problems.

Unfortunately, jargon predominates in Part 1 of the anthology (apart from the reliably thoughtful John Szwed's piece, and Rob Wallace's “Kick Out the Jazz” essay, which clearly and skilfully uses music as a historical document to illuminate the links between jazz and punk rock). One example among many: Julie Dawn Smith and Ellen Waterman's essay on the supposedly revolutionary aspects of improvisation argues that

Many similarly obscure sections follow this one. But, like Whyton's attempts to draw broad meanings out of improvisation, Smith and Waterman have difficulty and never quite succeed in demonstrating how improvisation is “revolutionary,” particularly in a social or political sense. The quartet headed by George Lewis described in the article, and the completely unplanned process by which they create music, are artistically and personally fascinating, but a wider significance is not proven. Furthermore, by reducing this live experience to a largely academically absorbed exercise amidst often impenetrable jargon, their approach relegates this music into a kind of cultural basement where few will hear it, and this music deserves a better fate. A similar problem usually besets Eric Porter's essay on the unjustly ignored vocalist Jeanne Lee.

But there's much to recommend in this volume as well. Greg Tate's questioning of why newer African American musical forms such as hip-hop have not often cross-pollenated with jazz brings together numerous historical sources and periods and an eclectic approach to genre that brings forth much insight. Reading jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and DJ Spooky's riffs on how recordings alter (and sometimes improve upon) reality is mostly playful and surprising, and sometimes overly theoretical – but, overall, bringing musicians into an academic volume like this vastly improves the scope of the work. The anecdotes and philosophies recounted in the celebration of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians' fortieth anniversary add to the legacy of that organization. Lastly, the lengthy and accomplished photo essay by Thomas King bestows additional depth and personality to the musicians that the essayists focus upon.

Kevin Le Gendre's Soul Unsung boasts a brilliant concept: a history of the band in black music (particularly soul, using an expanded Le Gendre version of the usual definition of the term), with each instrument having its own chapter, and vocalists, usually the predominant focus among fans and scholars, being mostly relegated to the sidelines. Another strategic masterstroke employed is, whenever possible, to take an international perspective to the subject, featuring music not just from the United States, the usual focus for such studies, but also from Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. Also included in the book is a wealth of knowledge on eclectic and independently released modern black artists usually bypassed by the mainstream, such as Me'Schell N'degeocello. Le Gendre skilfully connects these disparate artists to a tradition of black music extending before World War II.

But there are also problems in this study, as enjoyable and original as it often is. As Le Gendre argues, black music often reflects the black history of the period it emanates from, so a closer understanding and retelling of this history is necessary, even if this is a book whose focus is on musicians. Subjects like the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and the definition of the term “black power” in the 1960s (10–11) are handled much too lightly; a more thorough but not overbearing explanation of these historical events and many others would have enlightened the discourse here, not bogged it down. The book needed more effective editing: there are numerous wordy run-on sentences (check the confusing whopper attached to footnote 11 in chapter 2); concepts repeated several times; epigrams provided at the beginning of chapters that contain no dates or sources; a frequent lack of examples and evidence to prove assertions made (pretty much the whole of pages 33–34, 40–41, for example). Le Gendre may be right when he claims that “funk [music] may just be a collision of sexuality and parody, love-making and joke-making, the recognition that physical union is both life-enhancing and rib-tickling in its potential for dysfunction,” (66) but without providing musical examples to bolster his assertion, the words are mostly just musical and sexual foreplay without consummation. Gospel music is (correctly) argued as a significant antecedent for soul music several times in the book, but we are never given a proper history, definition or description of the genre. In general, the opening chapters that provide a rough history of the music often feel incomplete and confusing, and it is not clear where most of the historical referencing comes from.

But in the main stem of the book, where each instrument stars in its own chapter, starting with the bass, the work comes alive. Le Gendre exhibits an impressive ability to think about music (that many of us already know well) in new ways. The bass guitar in funk music “became the mighty upholstery in the seat of a song, but without remaining a static entity,” he writes during a discussion of the changes wrought in popular music by James Brown's mighty 1970 single “Sex Machine.” “The emphasis on bouncing, lengthy scalar figures, repeated with composure, enshrined this new authority” (108). As one can see in this passage and others throughout, Le Gendre knows how to make intriguing musicological points that nonmusicians can appreciate and understand, a rare talent. At its best, this book can unleash a spending frenzy on recordings in order to listen as closely to these musicians and recordings as Le Gendre has. Drums, guitars, keyboards, horns, strings, and (surprisingly) spoken words all get their turn in the spotlight as well.

Unlike most histories of this kind, Soul Unsung covers twenty-first-century music, and explores its relationship with previous black music. Le Gendre argues that, in recent decades, new technology such as drum machines and synthesizers, added to old-fashioned acoustic technique, has led to bigger, more complicated sounds over time, often with fewer people involved. Their programmability and adaptability expanded what could be accomplished – it didn't limit it – though certainly there was a price to be paid in terms of the cultivation of musical ability – a situation that Le Gendre admits (263) sometimes concerns him in terms of the future of black music. While others have viewed hip-hop, house music and sampling in general as genres and practices destroying traditions of generations of skilled musicianship and arranging, Le Gendre attempts to recast these prejudices, demonstrating how these latter more automated genres fit into and draw from the soul tradition. I personally do not concur in all cases, but it's a well-drawn argument not often, if ever, seen previously in the literature.

Problems resurface in Le Gendre's last chapters, especially the repeating of points made several times, and what feels like a last-minute attempt to fit all the artists he studied into the book after already making his main points clear. For me, the major missing facet of black music and its bands that deserved a chapter in his book is the role of recording producers. Maybe he's saving that important and underserved subject for his next venture.

Hidden in the Mix, edited by Diane Pecknold, is simply the best collection of academic essays about popular music I have read in years. It covers the long-term influence of African Americans and their music on the country music genre, a fact most music fans still seem unaware of. A recent New York Times extended-feature story on the infusion of hip-hop into modern commercial country music made it appear as if such cross-influence arrived only a decade ago,Footnote ² but, going back as far as the 1920s, the three principal avatars of country music (the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams) all had African American musical mentors significantly impacting their styles. Pecknold's book ventures even farther down this complicated and usually hidden historical path.

The first, longest and perhaps best essay, by Patrick Huber, goes back to the recorded beginnings of country music in the 1920s to demonstrate the surprising frequency with which black musicians appeared on “hillbilly” records, the antecedents of the country music genre, marketed to white audiences. Forty-nine black musicians appeared on 112 such recordings between 1924 and 1932 (21). Yet advertisements for these discs rarely mentioned their participation, and even tried to hide it. This is news enough, but, through his extensive research, Huber outlines something rarely seen in music history scholarship: step by step, he reveals the birth of a major American music genre, demonstrating how record companies transformed country music into a saleable and recognizable product, usually defined as more respectable than more obviously black-derived genres of the period such as jazz that were attracting controversy for supposedly being immoral. Yet, behind the scenes and the family-style marketing almost exclusively catering to whites, African American influence proved central to the music's development. Not only that, but the same musicians who played on KKK-promoting records interacted frequently with African American country musicians. Such duplicitous arrangements showed how Jim Crow segregation extended into the musical field, and how such constructions were often permeated.

Pecknold's own essay surveys the first million-selling albums in country music history: Ray Charles's two early 1960s albums celebrating and redefining Modern Sounds in Country and Western. Whereas in Huber's essay black people were excluded from the marketing picture to maintain a racist respectability, Charles's unprecedented success advanced a “vision of country-format radio as a thoroughly modern, respectable and profitable enterprise, and that image decisively moved the genre from margin to mainstream, from a denigrated niche market to the most programmed format in the country” (87). The irony is dizzying, and I would argue that it represented no accident that this occurred at the height of the civil rights movement. Pecknold's essay (and almost every other one in the book) sports clear, insightful writing that invites the reader in, without resorting to off-putting jargon to infer its seriousness, and this is precisely the correct approach – it doesn't get more serious or consequential in American music than Ray Charles. This essay would fit well in US history courses, demonstrating how in this one episode (and many others from his life as well), Charles's significance extends to political and cultural history.

Other fascinating musical, racial, historic and geographic leaps emerge throughout Hidden in the Mix: the surprisingly multiracial history of square dancing, the reasons black musicians largely abandoned the banjo, country music's popularity in the black Caribbean (where “George Jones is king” – 210); the twenty-first-century emergence of “hick-hop”; an exploration of race in the country soul triangle of Memphis, Nashville and Muscle Shoals, and many more. The concluding essay by the late David Sanjek, a premiere scholar in the field, forms another highlight, recounting the racially progressive hiring, marketing and production policies behind independent-label powerhouse King Records in the 1950s and 1960s, which specialized in the rare combination of releasing both country and R & B artists. “That urge to merge [races and genres] that [African American King producer Henry] Glover embodies with individuals and bodies of music that might well have been kept isolated illustrates how the inhibitions that cripple America socially can prove to be surprisingly porous in the cultural realm,” concludes Sanjek. “And if that is not an illustration of e pluribus unum, then I don't know what is” (336, 337). Amen, David. When it comes to proving the centrality of American music to the study of American history, Hidden in the Mix has few recent equals.