Peter Stanfield's introduction to Body and Soul launches directly into a discussion about a dance in the film Gangs of New York, showing it to be representative of miscegenated American culture, “of low estate and mixed origin … emerg[ing] from the gutters and streets of the metropolitan New World” (3). This intense, concise beginning sets the tone for the remainder of the book, as Stanfield examines minstrelsy (as symbolic of a nostalgic past), coon songs, jazz – (contrasting “low-down black primitivism and high-rise white urban modernity” (16)), the burlesque dancer (perceived as already dead, a “zombie,”) and the striptease to demonstrate how Hollywood films used the medium of music to create an American cultural identity.

The phonograph is examined, though perhaps not in as much detail as Alexander G. Weheliye devotes to it in Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005). However, Stanfield does show how the phonograph, and the African American music played upon it, is used to allude to sexual prowess, “I really get her going when I take out my big ten inch [pause] record of her favourite blues” (107).

In particular, Stanfield looks at the song “Frankie and Johnny” in great detail and convincingly argues how this was used in films to present a white viewpoint of black culture. “Frankie and Johnny,” in conjunction with alcohol consumption, conveys “lustful significance to compensate for the lost dialogue” (53), and on another occasion represents “a potentially unsuitable mother” (55). Whereas “Frankie and Johnny” once signified that which could not be articulated explicitly, over time the song itself became taboo, due to its low-class underground connotations, and any film that contained it was immediately subjected to censorship. Sometimes “Frankie and Johnny” was replaced with “St. Louis Blues,” “to invoke a lewd, violent, vital, and racially confused vision of American life” (71). Stanfield comments how after a 1942 meeting between Hollywood executives and the NAACP African American characters were less likely to be portrayed negatively with racial stereotypes. However, jazz and blues music continued to play a rile with vulgar nuances; where these applied to white characters, the “white” characters were often presented as being of undetermined race or effectively portrayed as possessing “blackened” morals. Stanfield suggests that it is the suggestion of a racial mixing which makes this a particularly American music.

This is a highly recommended, interesting, persuasively argued, well-researched essential text for university students of American cultural studies, which combines the music of jazz and blues with issues of race, class and gender.