The history of rock music illuminates contentious issues of race and racism, including segregation and appropriation. Many now acknowledge that rock ‘n’ roll didn’t start with Elvis Presley, and more listeners recognize the genre’s Black American roots.
However, just a decade ago, the dearth of relevant scholarship and critical commentary on the topic was striking. The most useful source on the whitewashing of rock’s roots was a textbook on American popular music, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (1996), written by music historians Reebee Garofalo and Steve Waksman.
Since 2016, rock literature has changed a lot. In fact, the day before my PopMatters article on the topic, using the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as the springboard for the essay, the first monograph I found that focused on rock music and race was published: Just Around Midnight. Its arguments were not the launching point for the following decade of scholarship, as its author, Jack Hamilton, might have hoped, but it did mark a new era for scholarship on rock music and race. Hamilton notes in his book that not talking about race in rock was the most common way critics and scholars addressed the topic.
This article centers on contemporary authors whose books rethink the relationship between rock music and race. They challenge dominant narratives about rock history through multiple strategies, genres, and arguments.
This is not a list of the five best authors on rock music and race right now; instead, it highlights a few contemporary authors and their books that have had a major impact on the field. Some are scholars, at least one is a cultural critic, and one is a graphic memoirist, and all are important works. The focus is on authors who examine multiple artists or eras, rather than studies of single artists or albums, in ways that make readers rethink rock music’s broader relationship to race.
For further reading, Portia K. Maultsby, Danyel Smith, Kelefa Sanneh, Lynnée Denise, RJ Smith, Mark Ribowsky, Jordan Bassett, and Sasha LaPointe also challenge such narratives; see the Works Cited list at the end of this article for their work as well.
5. Jack Hamilton’s Just Around Midnight
In 2016’s Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, critic Jack Hamilton boldly reimagines how rock ‘n’ roll became white-dominated “rock” in the 1960s. With astute but sometimes frustrating points that understate the significance of appropriation, Hamilton builds a complex analysis supported by copious research.
His attentiveness to the ironies of rock history and, he argues, the interracial roots of the genre’s institutionalization as a white form startles and offers some of the most nuanced and paradoxical arguments I’ve seen on rock music and race. Whether or not you agree that, for example, the Beatles’ Revolver is an avant-garde R&B album, Hamilton’s book is a provocative starting point for reimagining the relationship of rock music and race.
Just Around Midnight is published by Harvard University Press
4. Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
The best and most luminous writer on this list, critic Hanif Abdurraqib, engages with themes of rock music and race throughout his crucial 2017 essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Writing about race in relation to suburbia, punk rock shows, festivals, and Bruce Springsteen, Abdurraqib secures his place as the preeminent cultural critic of our time. In A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (2021), his essay on Merry Clayton, who sang backup for the Rolling Stones and many others, captures the importance of Clayton’s overdue renown.
Finally, his evocative essay on grief, race, and music in the 2023 anthology Black Punk Now moves readers much like his essays on They Can’t Kill Us. He may not have a sustained monograph on rock music and race, but his work on the marginalization of Black fans and musicians in rock is substantial, and thus warrants a place on this list.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is published by Two Dollar Radio
3. Preston Lauterbach’s Before Elvis
In his 2025 book, Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, music historian Preston Lauterbach establishes himself as the best, most absorbing storyteller among contemporary scholars on rock music and race. His work isn’t about rock history broadly; instead, it takes “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” Elvis Presley’s rise as a focal point for debates about racism and cultural appropriation. Lauterbach examines the contributions and legacies of a handful of especially influential Black American figures in Presley’s life and music, including Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Junior Parker. His most revelatory research concerns Calvin Newborn, a little-known guitarist who, Lauterbach argues, influenced Presley most.
The conclusion provocatively reframes current debates about appropriation while acknowledging the debt that Presley owed his influences. Before Elvis yields fascinating implications for the significance of race music in rock history.
Before Elvis is published by Da Capo
2. James Spooner’s It Starts with Anger
Director of the classic documentary Afro-Punk and cofounder of the AFROPUNK festival, James Spooner has written two graphic memoirs on being Black in punk rock scenes, The High Desert (2022) and the more text-heavy It Starts with Anger (2026), as well as coediting the multi-genre anthology Black Punk Now (2023). In both memoirs, he writes of his experiences as a Black teen in the punk scene, including a short, formative period in small-town Apple Valley, California, that formed the basis of the former. His spare visual style viscerally impacts readers, as do stories of Spooner’s confrontations with neo-Nazi skinheads.
In Black Punk Now, he and a host of authors contribute fiction, nonfiction, and comics that extend his documentary and festival’s legacy into the present. Practically speaking, Spooner may have done more than anyone to get average listeners to rethink the importance of Black people and cultures in punk and rock more broadly.
It Starts with Anger is published by Pantheon
1. Maureen Mahon’s Black Diamond Queens
Ethnomusicologist Maureen Mahon’s Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (2020) is the best historical synthesis on rock music and race I’ve read. Exceptionally well researched and focusing on several key artists–including Labelle, Tina Turner, and the Shirelles–from the 1950s to the ’80s, Mahon conclusively proves the foundational role of Black American women in rock and their marginalization within dominant rock institutions, including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Black Diamond Queens is essential reading on race and gender in rock. If there’s one book that would have benefited my and others’ work on rock music and race in previous decades, it’s this one.
Mahon has written other works, including Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (2004) and essays and articles like her surveys of Black Americans in rock in the reference work African Americans and Popular Culture (2008) and Black American women in rock in Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation (2017). She is undoubtedly the most essential scholar on rock music and race today.
Black Diamond Queens is published by Duke University Press
Works Cited
Abdurraqib, Hanif. “I Would Like to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses.” A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Random House, 2021.
—. “Standing on the Verge.” Black Punk Now. Edited by James Spooner and Chris L. Terry. Soft Skull Press, 2023.
Abdurraqib, Hanif. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. Two Dollar Radio, 2017.
Bassett, Jordan. Here’s Little Richard. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
Denise, Lynnée. Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters. University of Texas Press, 2023.
Friedberg, Josh. “Racializing Rock: The ‘60s and the White Sounds of ‘Pet Sounds.’” PopMatters, 2016.
Garofalo, Reebee, and Steve Waksman. Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., 6th ed. Pearson, 2013.
Hamilton, Jack. Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Harvard University Press, 2016.
LaPointe, Sasha. “Reservation Riot Grrrl.” Thunder Song. Counterpoint, 2024.
Lauterbach, Preston. Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King. Da Capo, 2025.
Mahon, Maureen. “African American Women and the Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Genre in Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation, edited by Portia K. Maultsby and Mellonee V. Burnim. Routledge, 2017.
–. “African Americans and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” African Americans in Popular Culture, Volume III: Music and Popular Art. Edited by Todd Boyd. Praeger, 2008.
—. Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. Duke University Press, 2020.
–. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Duke University Press, 2004.
Maultsby, Portia K. “The Politics of Race Erasure in Defining Black Popular Music Origins.” Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation, edited by Portia K. Maultsby and Mellonee V. Burnim. Routledge, 2017.
Mark Ribowsky. The Big Life of Little Richard. Diversion, 2020.
Sanneh, Kelefa. Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Penguin, 2021.
Smith, Danyel. Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop. Roc Lit 101, 2022.
Smith, RJ. Chuck Berry: An American Life. Da Capo, 2022.
Spooner, James. The High Desert. Harper, 2022.
–-. It Starts with Anger. Pantheon, 2026
Spooner, James, and Chris L. Terry, eds. Black Punk Now. Soft Skull Press, 2023.