American bass-baritone Dashon Burton's 2015 recording of the song sermon “He Never Said a Mumberlin’ Word” provides a case study of the interaction between sung melodies and audible breaths in the expression of a lyric. Acknowledging the relationship between Burton's performance and earlier notated arrangements by Roland Hayes, J. Rosamond Johnson, William Arms Fischer, and John W. Work, this study draws an arc from the macro-level of the song sermon's oral and notated history to the micro-level of Burton's sung syllables and, finally, to a spectrographic examination of his individual breaths. One of these, the solemnizing breath that inaugurates the fifth stanza of the work, is pinpointed as the expressive denouement of Burton's track. A contrast is drawn between the liturgical framework of Hayes's arrangement and the images of anti-racist protest marches that accompany Burton's recording. An emphasis on the granular aspects of Burton's voice invokes Sanden's concept of corporeal liveness, Barthes's writings on cinematic sound, and Bain's recognition of breath sounds as music. Studying the narrative totality of Burton's utterance engenders a connection between singer and orator, and builds a historical continuity between Burton and his antecedents.

This article locates intersectionality, agency, and hybridity within the singing voices of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand by comparing recordings of “I'd Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose,” and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice's My Man (1928) with the audio from the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) of Streisand's Funny Girl (1968). Brice and Streisand's virtuosic stylized vocal performances communicate particular classed, gendered, geographic, and racialized identities for audience consumption. This project aims to restore the sonic and aural to a body of scholarship on these performers that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. An untapped inroad for analysis lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom attempts to posthumously portray the other. By practicing close listening on these recordings and taking seriously the Jewish right to hybrid musical expression within and beyond the United States in the twentieth century, we can move past the essentializing discourses of the US racial binary to which Jews pose a definitional challenge, and open up further avenues for thinking about Jewish sonic difference generationally and contextually.

In his television program Sing Along with Mitch (1961–1964), Mitch Miller employed the talents of African American singer Leslie Uggams in ways that explicitly countered the legacy of minstrelsy. Although the program can be criticized as reactionary on other grounds, the fact that Sing Along with Mitch presented older, white viewers with a nostalgic vision of American identity realized through collective song amplified the impact of Uggams's performances. The program was well-received by Black viewers, and suited the dominant integrationist philosophy of the early 1960s. However, surviving correspondence indicates that some viewers persisted in perceiving Uggams through a lens clouded by minstrel stereotypes. This article documents and analyzes the ways in which these viewers continued to see and hear Uggams as a minstrel performer despite her presentation as a consummate professional and fully integrated member of the Sing Along “family.”

From September 24 to October 2, 1968, two apparently unrelated events took place in an area of less than two square miles in downtown Mexico City: Duke Ellington performed in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and the Mexican army massacred hundreds of protesting students. The student-driven movement of 1968 attracted people from different backgrounds in Mexican society. Their desire for freedom of speech and civil liberties echoed the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Received as El rey del jazz (the King of Jazz), Ellington's visit to Mexico constituted a musical place of cultural encounters. In this essay, I explore the connections between jazz, cultural diplomacy, race, and social justice. I argue that neither paradoxes nor seeming contradictions account for the fluidity of social activism on both sides of the border and its connections with playing and listening practices of jazz; rather I look at this social phenomenon as an example of an audiotopia, borrowing Josh Kun's term for a musical space of differences where contradictions and conflicts don't cancel each other out—a kind of identificatory contact zone. I do so by setting aside nationalistic approaches to music and viewing jazz as more than an emblem of U.S. national identity; rather, I explore the transnational aspects of the cultural artifacts resulting from these exchanges and the dynamic processes that took place in Ellington's visit with and among Mexicans.

This article illuminates an underexplored moment in the formation of the well-known archive of recordings of incarcerated people collected by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. In 1934, John Lomax wrote to 350 correctional institutions across the country, asking officials to transcribe the texts of songs “current and popular among prisoners or ‘made up’ by them.” Despite contacting institutions incarcerating people of many races, ethnicities, genders, and ages, however, the Lomaxes ultimately continued to center on music performed by Black men in Southern prisons. Because of this, I position the letter as a critical juncture in the formation of the Lomaxes’ prison work. Choices made by prison officials (whether to respond to the letter and in what manner to respond) and by the Lomaxes themselves (whether to express interest in songs addressed by correspondents) were influenced by perceptions of the role of music in relation to criminality, imprisonment, reform, and race. These perceptions in turn defined the boundaries of the Lomax prison project. The correspondence considered in this article therefore offers a counternarrative to popular representations of music and incarceration and suggests the limits of the well-known Lomax prison song collection.