About the Author

Mark A. Johnson is lecturer in the Department of History at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He is author of An Irresistible History of Alabama Barbecue: From Wood Pit to White Sauce, and his work has appeared in such publications as Southern Cultures and Louisiana History.

Reviews

In Rough Tactics, Mark A. Johnson brilliantly and painstakingly uncovers and interprets the nonintuitive intersections of popular music, popular politics, and Black-white relations during the rise and height of the Jim Crow South.--H. Paul Thompson Jr "The Journal of the Civil War Era"

n Rough Tactics, Mark A. Johnson brilliantly and painstakingly uncovers and interprets the nonintuitive intersections of popular music, popular politics, and Black-white relations during the rise and height of the Jim
Crow South. . . . [Its] contribution will be appreciated by all students of the era.--H. Paul Thompson Jr. "The Journal of the Civil War Era"

Mark Johnson's Rough Tactics is a story of the courage, prudence, and resilience Black Americans displayed in the face of unrequited grievance and unrelenting violence. It is also the sad account of the burden and pain the white South's unconquered but hopeless loyalty to the Lost Cause inflicted on its native sons and daughters.--Terrence W. Fitzmorris "Louisiana History"

Rough Tactics remains a thought-provoking work that will appeal to scholars of Black politics, music, and culture writ large inside and outside the Jim Crow South.--Billy Coleman "The Journal of American History"

Rough Tactics is a breath of fresh air. By showing the complex centrality of music to the politics of the post-Civil War South, Mark A. Johnson has contributed greatly to our understanding of the breakthroughs and backlashes of that pivotal period. It will be an essential addition not only to the understanding of Black and white music in US history, but also to the ways that music intersected with larger cultural, political, and social shifts.--Charles L. Hughes, director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center, Rhodes College

A truly original and marvelous book! From the opening pages, when we learn that W. C. Handy, the 'father' of the blues, played at rallies for the most strident white racists of the age to an account of the fraught negotiations between Black musicians and Confederate veterans in New Orleans, Johnson reveals the nexus of politics, public spectacle, and African American music in the New South. Beautifully written and elegantly illustrated, Rough Tactics is a powerful reminder of complexity of cultural politics during the simultaneous renaissance of Black musical creativity and the zenith of white supremacy.--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill