“Sell It Black”: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis's Early Fusion Jazz

Abstract

Although, as Steven Pond argues, “connections between the music and marketing loom over any discussion of fusion jazz,” those discussions often rely on either assuming or dismissing the idea that commercial concerns imply the corruption of an anterior musical purity. Such discussions not only disregard the necessity of material circulation which a recording's commodity status requires, but they also regularly conflate a musician's interests and goals with those of a record company. With this article, I make distinct what has previously been conflated by considering both the differences and the similarities between Miles Davis's and Columbia Records's values in relation to marketing during the contested and commonly misrepresented period of early‐1970s fusion jazz. I emphasize that while Columbia's primary concern was in reaching what it recognized to be an expansive and lucrative white youth audience, Davis would not be satisfied until Columbia began selling his music “black” in order for his recordings to reach a significant number of African American listeners. This article thereby contributes to an ongoing critical reevaluation of fusion jazz while highlighting a key issue for those jazz scholars concerned more broadly with a recording's role in the creation of musical meaning.

Notes

¹ Bruce Lundvall, memo to Morris Baumstein, April 1, 1969. The Teo Macero Collection, JPB 00–8, Music Division, the New York Public Library, in Box 13, Folder 15.

² Quoted in Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” The Real Paper: Boston's Weekly Newspaper, March 21, 1973, 13.

³ Steven F. Pond, Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 18. As the genre‐based nomination for this music varies, I adopt Pond's term “fusion jazz” as the most appropriate and most thoughtful designation thus far proposed. See his discussion in Head Hunters, 10–18.

⁴ Pond, Head Hunters, 27. For examples of jazz musicians attempting to navigate the perceived art/commerce divide prior to the advent of fusion jazz, see Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 273–317; and Iain Anderson, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

⁵ For examples of this conflation in journalistic and scholarly writing alike, see Stanley Crouch, “Play the Right Thing,” The New Republic, February 12, 1990: 30–37; John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 222–225; and Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 95. While jazz scholars have been largely hesitant to address the complexities of agency and structure as they relate to music's commodification and circulation, such concerns have long been prominent within the field of popular music studies. See, for instance, Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977).

⁶ For valuable recent studies of fusion jazz, see Stuart Nicholson, Jazz‐Rock: A History (New York: Schirmer, 1998); Kevin Fellezs, Between Rock and a Jazz Place: Intercultural Interchange in Fusion Musicking (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2004); Pond, Head Hunters; Lawrence A. Wayte, Bitches Brood: The Progeny of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and the Sound of Jazz‐Rock (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2007); and Kevin Fellezs, “Emergency! Race and Genre in Tony Williams's Lifetime,” Jazz Perspectives 2 (May 2008): 1–27. For two important studies of the use of recordings in jazz scholarship, see Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 134–162; and Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and Thelonious Monk's Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958,” Ethnomusicology 48 (Fall 2004): 315–347.

⁷ Greg Tate, “The Electric Miles, Parts One and Two [1983],” reprinted in Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 72.

⁸ Gary Tomlinson, “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies,” in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, eds. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79, 81–82.

⁹ Eric Porter, “‘It's About That Time’: The Response to Miles Davis's Electric Turn,” in Miles Davis and American Culture, ed. Gerald Early (Saint Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 134, 144–145.

¹⁰ See, for example, Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, rev. ed. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998), 209–292; Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis, vol. 2 (New York: Da Capo, 1998; repr. 1985), 135–232; and John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 252–303. For more on this era in general, see Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2001).

¹¹ See, for instance, Edwin Pouncey, “The Man Who Sold the Underworld,” Wire, July 1997, 29; Szwed, So What, 336–337; Joel Selvin and Dave Marsh, Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1998), xvii, 163, 166; and Bill Murphy, “Raging Bullhorn: Miles Davis and A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” The Wire, October 2003, 32.

¹² See memos by Clive Davis, November 22, 1967, and Robert Altshuler, December 4, 1967, Macero Collection, in Box 16, Folder 16; and memo by Bruce Lundvall, April 1, 1969, Macero Collection, in Box 13, Folder 15.

¹³ Advertisement, Rolling Stone, May 31, 1969, 31. Strengthening the link between this album and rock music is the fact that Filles was the first recording by Davis to feature electric bass and was also among the earliest to include electric piano.

¹⁴ Advertisement, Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 23. The connection between Davis and rock music is further reinforced in many of the liner notes for Davis's albums from the time, including those for Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969) and Bitches Brew (1970), both of which were written by Rolling Stone co‐founder (and consulting editor) Ralph Gleason. For more on the relationship between rock and jazz journalism at the time, see Matthew Brennan, Down Beats and Rolling Stones: An Historical Comparison of American Jazz and Rock Journalism (Ph.D. diss., University of Stirling, 2007).

¹⁵ See the following advertisements: Rolling Stone, May 14, 1970, 51; Creem, April 1970, 11; LA Free Press, March 13, 1970, 48.

¹⁶ Advertisement, Down Beat, August 20, 1970, 23.

¹⁷ Columbia similarly attempted to promote musicians associated with other genres to rock‐focused white youth. For example, the company launched a five‐month promotional campaign of its classical music library. For a Hector Berlioz recording, the campaign included an ad that boasted, “Hector Berlioz Took Dope, and His Trips Exploded into Out‐of‐Sight Sounds.” Quoted in Robert Shelton, “Rock Music Groups Going for Baroque in the New Eclecticism,” New York Times, September 6, 1968, 37. For information on other record companies' evolving approaches to marketing and advertising at this time, see Frank Kofsky, “The State of Jazz,” The Black Perspective in Music 5 (Spring 1977): 44–66; Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 103–105, 211–261; Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 95–146; and Stan Cornyn, Exploding: The Highs, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 115–125, 204–210.

¹⁸ See Clive Davis, with James Willwerth, Clive: Inside the Record Business (New York: William Morrow, 1975), 3; and Gary Marmorstein, The Label: The Story of Columbia Records (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2007), 252.

¹⁹ Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 5. In this article, I refer to Miles Davis as “Davis” and to Clive Davis as “Clive.”

²⁰ See Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 74–77; and Chapple and Garofalo, Rock 'n' Roll Is Here, 44, 73, 80.

²¹ See Michael Lydon, Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rock Revolution, 1964–1974 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 21–39; Sarah Hill, “When Deep Soul Met the Love Crowd: Otis Redding, Monterey Pop Festival, June 17, 1967,” in Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, ed. Ian Inglis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28–40; and Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 283–312.

²² See Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, eds. Braunstein and Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 10; Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 5–10; and Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 6, 74–76.

²³ See Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here, 52; and Marmorstein, The Label, 221–222.

²⁴ Quoted in “Columbia Records in Record Stores,” Rolling Stone, February 1, 1969, 10.

²⁵ Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 124.

²⁶ See Chapple and Garofalo, Rock 'n' Roll Is Here, 24–25, 89–92.

²⁷ See Pond, Head Hunters, 155–186; and Chapple and Garofalo, Rock 'n' Roll Is Here, 89–92, 98–102.

²⁸ Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 106. See also the commentary on Columbia's purchase in “Columbia Records in Record Stores,” 10.

²⁹ Donna Lloyd Ellis, “The Underground Press in America: 1955–1970,” Journal of Popular Culture 5 (Summer 1971): 102, 105.

³⁰ See Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 183; and Robert Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), 6, 10, 92.

³¹ Quoted in Ellis, “Underground Press,” 115.

³² The Seed 3, no. 9, 1969, 17.

³³ Creem, February 1970, 14.

³⁴ See advertisements for albums by Aum and the Elvin Bishop Group in Creem, January 1970, 8, 26. For more on the Fillmore venues, see Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004); and the special edition of Planet Magazine, “A Tribute to the Fillmore,” December 1971.

³⁵ In 1969, in fact, Columbia ceased advertising in many underground publications, and the company claimed this decision was made because of the apparent lack of benefit to album sales. For responses to this decision, see Rolling Stone, “Columbia to Stay Above Ground,” July 26, 1969, 10; Clive Davis, “Correspondence, Love Letters, and Advice,” Rolling Stone, August 23, 1969, 3; and Peck, Uncovering the Sixties, 176.

³⁶ Advertisement, Rolling Stone, September 21, 1968, 16–17.

³⁷ Advertisement, Rolling Stone, December 7, 1968, 31.

³⁸ Advertisement, Rolling Stone, November 9, 1968, 12–13.

³⁹ Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 6.

⁴⁰ See bass player Dave Holland's recollection of his surprise at the small audiences Davis's band was performing for in the late 1960s in Paul Tingen, Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991 (New York: Billboard Books, 2001), 82.

⁴¹ Clive Davis, letters to Bill Graham, November 17, 1969 and April 20, 1970, Macero Collection, in Box 13, Folder 18.

⁴² Those appearances took place at the Fillmore East on June 17–20 and the Fillmore West on April 9–12 and October 15–18.

⁴³ This advertisement appears in Creem, February 1971, 3; LA Free Press, November 27, 1970, 43; and Rolling Stone, December 2, 1970, 13.

⁴⁴ For a comprehensive listing of Miles Davis's concerts, see Peter Losin, “Miles Davis Sessions: 1945–1991,” http://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/Sessions.aspx (accessed June 17, 2008).

⁴⁵ See “Miles Davis: The Prince of Darkness Also Brings Light,” Zygote 1 (August 12, 1970), 35; Hubert Saal, “Miles of Music,” Newsweek, March 23, 1970, 99; Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 261; and Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” 13. For Clive's response to Davis's complaints, see Chris Albertson, “The Unmasking of Miles Davis,” Saturday Review, November 27, 1971, 68–69. Private correspondence offers a more nuanced view of Davis's opinion of Columbia's promotional strategies. See Miles Davis, letter to Clive Davis, January 8, 1970, Macero Collection, in Box 14, Folder 2.

⁴⁶ Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” 13. See also Gregg Hall, “Miles: Today's Most Influential Contemporary Musician,” Down Beat, July 18, 1974, 18. Davis was further critical of the general lack of African American musicians on Columbia's roster. See Hollie I. West, “Black Tune,” The Washington Post, March 13, 1969, L1, L9; and “Miles Davis Rips Record Firm for Bias,” Jet, January 7, 1971, 59.

⁴⁷ West, “Black Tune,” L9.

⁴⁸ Michael Watts, “Miles Davis,” in Today's Sound: A Melody Maker Book, ed. Ray Coleman (London: Hamlyn, 1973), 127; West, “Black Tune,” L1; and Stephen Davis, “Miles Davis: An Exclusive Interview,” 12–13.

⁴⁹ West, “Black Tune,” L1.

⁵⁰ Gregg Hall, “Miles,” 19; Albertson, “Unmasking of Miles Davis,” 67. See also Carr, Miles Davis, 226; and Chambers, Milestones, vol. 2, 186.

⁵¹ See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–1263, for an emphasis on the media's facilitation of the expansion of various black nationalist discourses in the late 1960s.

⁵² This perspective has been chiefly advocated within the growing body of scholarship known as New Black Power Studies. For an introduction, see “New Black Power Studies,” special issue, ed. V. P. Franklin, Journal of African American History 92 (Fall 2007); The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights‐Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006); and “New Black Power Studies,” special issue, ed. Peniel E. Joseph, Black Scholar 31 (Fall 2001). For other book‐length contributions, see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, eds. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). A response to this position can be seen in Sundiata Keita Cha‐Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (Fall 2007): 265–288.

⁵³ See, for instance, Lerone Bennett, Jr., “What's in a Name?: National Controversy Rages Over Proper Name for Americans of African Descent,” Ebony, November 1967, 46–51; John Leo, “Militants Object to ‘Negro’ Usage,” New York Times, February 26, 1968, 31; Charles V. Hamilton, “How Black Is Black?,” in The Black Revolution: An Ebony Special Issue (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1970), 23–29; Ben L. Martin, “From Negro to Black to African American: The Power of Names and Naming,” Political Science Quarterly 106 (Spring 1991): 83–107; and William Van Deburg, Black Camelot: African American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 220–221.

⁵⁴ In a related fashion, the assassination on April 8, 1968, of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who had been the national embodiment of non‐violent protest, was arguably the single most important event in motivating African American activists to embrace the political ideology that “blackness” had come to symbolize.

⁵⁵ Although the phrase “Black Power” had previously been used by other African American leaders—such as its titular invocation in Richard Wright's Black Power: A Record of Reaction in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954)—the year 1966 marked the moment when the phrase gained widespread popularity. For more on Black Power, see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967); and Joel Aberbach and Jack Walker, “The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan,” American Political Science Review 64 (June 1970): 367–388.

⁵⁶ For more on Brown's construction of musical grooves, see Anne Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006); and David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 108–156.

⁵⁷ Some African American sociologists at the time developed the concept of the “Negro‐to‐Black conversion experience” to describe the phenomenon by which individual African Americans learned to formulate a positive racial identity based on assertiveness, self‐reliance, and self‐determination. See William S. Hall, William E. Cross, Jr., and Roy Freedle, “Stages in the Development of Black Awareness: An Exploratory Investigation,” in Black Psychology, ed. Reginald L. Jones (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 156; William E. Cross, Jr., “The Negro‐to‐Black Conversion Experience: Toward a Psychology of Black Liberation,” Black World 20 (July 1971): 13–27; and Nathan Hare, “The Plasma of Thinking Black,” Negro Digest 18 (January 1969): 12–18. See also Van Deburg, Black Camelot, 69–70.

⁵⁸ Quoted in Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 169.

⁵⁹ For more on the various black nationalist ideologies, see William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 132–191; Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

⁶⁰ “Miles Davis: The Prince of Darkness Also Brings Light,” 35; Paul Tingen, “The Jack Johnson Sessions,” December 2003, http://www.miles-beyond.com/jackjohnson.htm (accessed February 14, 2009); and Frederick D. Murphy, “Miles Davis: The Monster of Modern Music,” Encore: American and Worldwide News, July 21, 1975, 36. Davis's advocacy for “blackness” increased further after he added James Mtume to his band in late 1971. Mtume had been an advocate of the cultural nationalist organization US since 1966, and he regularly sought to proselytize on its behalf. See Brown, Fighting for US, 131–158.

⁶¹ Hoyt W. Fuller, “Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1971), 8.

⁶² See The Black Aesthetic, ed. Gayle; Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writing, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1989); and The Black Revolution: An Ebony Special Issue (Chicago: Johnson, 1970). For studies that have problematized the main tenets of the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movements, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro‐American Literature [1981],” reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 179–217; and Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 171–224.

⁶³ For more on 1960s‐era collectives, see George Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 191–239; and Ronald Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Ruth Feldstein, “‘I Don't Trust You Anymore’: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1349–1379; and Lorenzo Thomas, “Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 256–274.

⁶⁴ For a valuable counter‐narrative that demonstrates more mainstream jazz players' involvement in the freedom struggle, see Monson, Freedom Sounds, 152–237.

⁶⁵ According to Melody Maker magazine, in 1970 Davis signed a new three‐year contract with Columbia Records that was reportedly worth up to $300,000. See “Jazz News,” Melody Maker, March 21, 1970, 4.

⁶⁶ Michael Watts, “Miles Davis,” 124.

⁶⁷ See, for example, Gerald Early, “The Art of Muscle: Miles Davis as American Knight and American Knave,” in Miles Davis and American Culture, 3–23; and Gerald Early, “Miles Davis, Vince Lombardi, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Mid‐Century America,” Deadalus 131 (Winter 2002): 154–159.

⁶⁸ Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo, 1971; repr. 1981), 142–147. Eric Porter has similarly argued that emphasizing “blackness” in advertisements was a way to increase sales among a variety of listeners. See Porter, What Is This Thing, 207, 230–234.

⁶⁹ For more on the historical commodification of blackness, see S. Craig Watkins, “‘Black Is Back, and It's Bound to Sell!’: Nationalist Desire and the Production of Black Popular Culture,” in Is It Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 189–214.

⁷⁰ Murphy, “Miles Davis: The Monster of Modern Music,” 36; Dave Marsh, “Review of Jack Johnson,” Creem, September 1971, 56; and Dick Hadlock, “Caught in the Act: University of California Jazz Festival,” Down Beat, July 23, 1970, 28. Jet review quoted in Leonard Feather, “The Name of the Game,” Down Beat, October 15, 1970, 11.

⁷¹ For prominent examples of categorizing black music as a style, see Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African American Music,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright (Michigan: Harmonie Park, 1992), 327–338; and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6. For more recent scholarship that has sought to understand “black” music as “a mutable and geographically and historically contingent process,” see Gabriel Solis, “Hearing Monk: History, Memory, and the Making of a ‘Jazz Giant,’” The Musical Quarterly 86 (Spring 2002), 85; Veit Erlmann, “Communities of Style: Musical Figures of Black Diasporic Identity,” in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland, 2000), 83–102; and Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

⁷² For more information on the “Harvard Report,” see David Sanjek, “Tell Me Something I Don't Already Know: The Harvard Report on Soul Music Revisited,” in Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music, ed. Norman Kelley (New York: Akashic, 2002), 63–80.

⁷³ This statistic, and the quotations that follow, are drawn directly from a personal copy of the “Harvard Report.” Seven percent equated to $120 million of the nearly $1.7 billion music industry in 1970.

⁷⁴ See Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 145–147; Rob Bowman, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 277–284; John Jackson, A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96–99; and Marmorstein, The Label, 458–461.

⁷⁵ As mentioned earlier, a photograph of Francis Davis, his wife at the time, first appeared on the cover of the album Some Day My Prince Will Come (1961). This practice continued, for example, when Francis Davis appeared on the cover of E.S.P. (1965) and when Cicely Tyson appeared on the cover of Sorcerer (1967).

⁷⁶ In the late 1960s, Columbia similarly began using images of other African American artists on its roster for album covers and advertisements. See, for example, advertisements for Taj Mahal (advertisement, Rolling Stone, November 15, 1969, 19) and the Last Poets (advertisement, Rolling Stone, April 30, 1970, back cover). For more on jazz album covers, see Carissa Kowalski Dougherty, “The Coloring of Jazz: Race and Record Cover Design in American Jazz, 1950–1970,” Design Issues 23 (Winter 2007): 47–60; and Robert G. O'Meally, “Jazz Albums as Art: Some Reflections,” International Review of African American Art 14 (1997): 38–47.

⁷⁷ As, for example, the Davis advertisements in Rolling Stone and Down Beat discussed above.

⁷⁸ The ad appeared in no fewer than the following six publications: Down Beat, April 29, 1971, 21; Rolling Stone, April 15, 1971, 47; Essence, May 1971, 79; The Village Voice, April 15, 1971, 41; LA Free Press, April 16, 1971, 27; and Creem, June 1971, 21. The same ad appeared again in the LA Free Press, April 23, 1971, 11.

⁷⁹ For more on the discursive uses of the body in African American music, see Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Theorizing the Body in African‐American Music,” Black Music Research Journal 14 (Spring 1994): 75–84.

⁸⁰ This issue had garnered prominent theoretical attention in the U.S. with the 1967 publication of the English translation of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, which included his influential notion of “epidermalization.” See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove, 1952; repr. 1967), 11.

⁸² Quoted in Bill Milkowski, “Miles' Rock Manifesto,” in the accompanying booklet to The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions (Columbia/Legacy 86359, 2003), 57. See also Bill Murphy, “Raging Bullhorn,” 32; and Marsh, Sly and the Family Stone, 56.

⁸¹ Admittedly, though, Columbia's interest in retaining Davis on its roster was as much for cultural prestige as for potential profits from record sales. Although Columbia strove to market Davis as effectively as it could in order to maximize album sales, it recognized that Davis's primary value to the company was not in generating profitable albums. In fact, according to Clive, Davis never fully recouped the advances that Columbia gave him. Instead, the company placed Davis in a category with classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Both artists were kept on Columbia's roster because the resulting monetary loss “was more than offset by the musical contribution and accompanying prestige.” Davis and Willwerth, Clive, 236, 260–263.