Books
Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2021.
Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Edited Works
Co-editor (with Gerald Early and Mina Yang), “American Music,” special issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (vol. 142, no. 4, Fall 2013).
Articles
“Powell Hall: Safe Space, Comfort Zone,” forthcoming in edited collection The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson.
“Race in the New Jazz Studies,” 185-95 in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, ed. Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton. New York: Routledge, 2019.
“What Is Music?” Humanities 36, no. 1 (January-February 2015).
“The Fugs, The Lower East Side, and the Slum Aesthetic in 1960s Rock,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 4 (November 2014): 538-566.
“The Screamers,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 142, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 11-23.
“Clamor of the Godz: Radical Incompetence in 1960s Rock,” American Music 29, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 35-63.
“Rock, Race, and Radicalism in the 1960s: The Rolling Stones, Black Power, and Godard’s One Plus One,” Journal of Musicological Research 29, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 275-294.
“Tear Down the Walls: Jefferson Airplane, Race, and Revolutionary Rhetoric in 1960s Rock,” Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 61-79.
“Oasis of Swing: the Onyx Club, Jazz and White Masculinity in the Early 1930s,” American Music 24, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 320-346
Music and Racial Segregation in Twentieth-Century St. Louis: Uncovering the Sources
“Come in and Hear the Truth”
BY PATRICK BURKE
Between the mid-1930s and the late ’40s, the center of the jazz world was a two-block stretch of 52nd Street in Manhattan. Dozens of crowded basement clubs between Fifth and Seventh avenues played host to legends such as Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, as well as to innumerable professional musicians whose names aren’t quite so well known. Together, these musicians and their audiences defied the traditional border between serious art and commercial entertainment—and between the races, as 52nd Street was home to some of the first nightclubs in New York to allow racially integrated bands and audiences. Patrick Burke argues that the jazz played on 52nd Street complicated simplistic distinctions between musical styles such as Dixieland, swing, and bebop. And since these styles were defined along racial lines, the music was itself a powerful challenge to racist ideology.
Come In and Hear the Truth uses a range of materials, from classic photographs to original interviews with musicians, to bring the street’s vibrant history to life and to shed new light on the interracial contacts and collaborations it generated.