Just around Midnight explores the interplay of popular music and racial thought in the 1960s by asking how, when, and why rock and roll music "became White." By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 the idea of a Black man playing electric lead guitar was considered literally remarkable in ways it had not been for Chuck Berry only ten years earlier: this book explains how this happened. By excavating an extraordinarily cosmopolitan aesthetic amidst a...

"On a winter day in 1910, at a train station in Ohio, two girls wait in the cold with their mother to begin a new life in the West. Tommy, the eldest, feels responsible for her sister, and in the years to come, as their mother campaigns for women's suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses across Montana, she takes care of Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while her sister goes to school. But as soon as Katherine graduates,...