A Note on the Economic Control of Black Popular Music

We didn't have writers, but we did have music, and the music was the vehicle to carry the remnants of Black history. The true history of Blacks is not in our history books, but in the music. The only blacks I ever heard of in school were Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. It was like nobody else existed. We had no folk heroes in books, ever. Our history is all locked in the music and is passed down in its different forms through that music.¹