You're about to hear the first episode of Pop, Race, and the 60s, a new Slate Academy featuring Jack Hamilton.

This series is for Slate Plus members.

To find out more, or to sign up for Slate Plus at a special discount rate, go to slate.com slash pop academy.

That's slate.com slash pop academy.

Hello, and welcome to Pop Race in the 1960s, a new Slate Academy podcast available exclusively

to Slate Plus members.

I'm your host, Jack Hamilton.

Some of you may know me as Slate's pop critic, and I'm also an assistant professor of American

studies and media studies at the University of Virginia.

In my more scholarly role, I've just published a book called Just Around Midnight,

Rock and Roll, and the Racial Imagination.

The book takes on the question of how rock and roll music became white.

In other words, how a music that at the beginning of the 1960s was seen and heard

as something that both black and white artists did, by the end of the

decade, had come to be imagined as the nearly exclusive province of white performers.

Maybe the best and most concise way to illustrate this shift is the case of Jimmy Hendricks.

When he died in 1970, many of Hendricks's obituaries remarked on the unusualness of a black man playing electric lead guitar.

But only 10 years earlier, no one thought it unusual in the least when Chuck Barry was doing the same thing.

The question of how and why this happened is especially fascinating,

considering that the 1960s was a decade we often associate with racial fluidity in popular music. Just think about

the crossover success of Motown Records or the interracialism of southern R&B in places like

Memphis and Muscle Shoals. There was also the civil rights conscience of the American folk revival

...