Is it weird to say that I love race records? I listen to Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Miles Davis, and many others, but I never thought of their music as “race music” or “race records” until today and I’m black. 

I don’t know how I feel about the fact that many record labels, like Atlantic, Chess, and King made money off “race records” and would turn around and sell them to white audiences with white artists singing the same song. Business is just business, so it shouldn’t seem like that big of a deal. Right?

Although I know I’m speaking from a different time period and era, we talked about Romanticism and how it influenced the way we look at music and argues that we are moved by music not a rational feeling. If so, then why is it that the universality of music did not come about until decades later? Because United States has this weird contractual relationship with race and we find anyway to enforce it. Music is just music.