In 2017, Rhiannon Giddens reflected on a recent performance as part of the first African American string band to play the Grand Ole Opry. As she recalled, “people started calling it a Healing Moment. But I have to ask: a healing moment for whom? One or two Black groups, or one or two Black country stars is not a substitution for recognizing the true multi-cultural history of this music. We have a lot of work to do.” These words are a touchstone for assessing Giddens’s first two solo albums, as works that reclaim and re-member the racially mixed roots of country music alongside other distinctively American genres. The analysis pushes against paradigms in which musical sounds align neatly with racial categories, specifically the presumed whiteness of country music. Giddens’s work makes clear that, though convenient, racialized conceptions obscure more than they reveal about US music and the people making it.

The influence of black artists and music genres on Krautrock‘s pioneers fed directly into the conception of electro, Detroit techno, and Chicago house, largely developed by exponents of black communities in their respective localities. A universal funk, present in the black music that inspired early Krautrock artists, through to Kraftwerk and their industrielle Volksmusik, permeated through to black communities in America. The programmed funk of Kraftwerk‘s automated computer music spoke to black pioneers in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, sparking the development of ground-breaking genres such as electro, house, and techno. Barnes explores the lineage and transnational influence of Krautrock on America‘s black communities via the tributaries of German free jazz and krautfusion.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.