The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music Studies

Abstract

This essay reflects on Black musical culture in the United States and its criticism with an eye toward how these ideas implicate new directions and areas of potential growth in the burgeoning field of American music studies writ large. We cannot fully understand American music and its study without intensely engaging the parts that comprise its sum. The relationship of African American musical studies to American musical studies remains a symbiotic and dynamic one and, therefore, we should keep in mind that any discussion of either should recognize that they simply would not exist in their present forms without one another.Yet one of the first orders of business in this exercise is a difficult and, to some, a potentially divisive task: facing and coming to terms with some uncomfortable truths about the Black experience both in 210