"This work easily makes Guthrie one of the top musicologists of his generation who writes on black music. The scope, depth, and breadth are highly impressive. His criticisms of other scholars are fair. And his treatments of black musical artists in time, in space, and in place are quite illuminating. I know no one else who has his mastery of knowledge over such a broad range of black musical works of different genres and periods."-Cornel West, Princeton University

"Witty, powerful, smart, opinionated, beautifully written, groundbreaking, and bold. Scholars will read Race Music and debate it for years to come."-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Race Music is slammin'! Ramsey brilliantly interweaves oral history with his own scholarly readings of jazz, gospel, popular music, and film soundtracks with pathbreaking results. Race Music revolutionizes the way we receive and critique African American popular culture and provides a new context for our understanding of black music and cultural memory. A must read---intelligent, engaging and powerful."-Rae Linda Brown, author of The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price, 1887-1953

"One of the most engaging, thought provoking and original treatments of black music that I have read. Ramsey seamlessly combines ethnographic research, musicological theory, historical investigation, and personal narrative in a work that is at once rigorous and poetic. Spanning blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul and hip-hop, Race Music offers us the scholarly monograph as jam session-a first-rate intellectual essay whose rhythms, tones, and melodious voice are as captivating as the music Ramsey brilliantly explains and masterfully performs."-Michael Eric Dyson, author of Open Mike and Holler If You Hear Me

“Race Music . . . provides a framework for rethinking the facets of African-American music and the ethnocentric energy that birthed it.”