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Pat Mullen Lecture:
"'They All Go Native On a Saturday Night:' Race and American Vernacular Music, 1947-1957"
Prof. Mullen's was the first in a series of lectures on Race and Memory in American Vernacular Music, co-sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies and the School of Music. The lecture drew both on Mullen's own memories of listening to popular music as young adult in the 1940s and 50s and on his extensive reading in ethnographic and folkloric research.
Mullen analyzed chart-topping songs by both black and white singers/musicians to demonstrate the extent to which musical compositions and styles were shared between black artists in the blues and R&B genres and white artists in country and rockabilly genres. He looked at the changes made to songs by black artists when they were rerecorded by white artists and made connections between these songs and the loose-living, hard-drinking atmosphere of the honky-tonks and juke joints where they were performed and had their origins.
Mullen also suggested that American popular music of the 40s and early 50s as a venue in which changes in racial attitudes took place in the United States, paving the way for the civil rights movement of the later 50s and 60s. He pointed to the passage of musical material from black artists to white ones and the growing popularity of music recorded by black artists like Chuck Berry, which gave many white Americans their first positive contact with African American culture, arguing that radio played an important role in overturning segregation in the United States.
