| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Group Harmony: The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues. By Stuart L. Goosman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xii, 291 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8122-3886-9.)

According to the deep and consequential folklore that surrounds the vocal group music of the 1950s and early 1960s that would later be named "doo wop" by ardent revivalists, something like fifteen thousand bands were plying this trade at any moment during that era. This unverifiable "fact," first published in fan-based works, and then repeated (and embroidered) by Greil Marcus and other mythologizers, is a central agent of what is now a decades-long project of obscuring the actual history and meaning of the music: if, as the title of Philip Groia's 1983 book put it, They All Sang on the Corner, then it becomes nearly impossible to engage with rhythm and blues vocal group music as an actual feature of America's cultural geography in the post–World War II era. Instead, the music stays in the ether as a comforting echo of a simpler time. The most pernicious aspect of this mythologizing is that it carries at least an implicit message (and usually a more manifest one) about how poorly today's black teenagers compare to those of the doo wop past. Aside from Robert Pruter's work on the Chicago scene (Doowop: The Chicago Scene, 1996), a few scattered academic essays, and a handful of detail-rich, analytically vacant reference works, there is simply no good historical work yet done on this important music.

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