In Stoever’s introduction to her book, The Sonic Color Line, Stoever describes a line regarding sound between White and Black people that is actively policed. Black people are not allowed to control the sonic space. “White Americans oft en feel entitled to respect for their sensibilities, sensitivities, and tastes, and to their implicit, sometimes violent, control over the soundscape of an ostensibly “free,” “open,” and “public” space.” Stoever goes on to cite examples of how many whites have enforced the sonic color line and how it is often overlooked in favor of the (more obvious) visual color line.
Elvis’s many covers of and influences drawn from African American artists like Fats Domino, BB King, and Chuck Berry raise interesting questions about the Sonic Color line’s position in music, and how it has developed in recent years. Elvis was a polarizing figure to some people because he was not a song-writer, and thus built his fame mostly off the backs of others. It is unquestionable that if Elvis had been black he would have been nowhere near as successful in his career, so we can say that he profited off of Stoever’s color line, and he most certainly enforced the “white constructed ideas about ‘sounding Other’— accents, dialects, ‘slang,’ and extraverbal utterances, as well as ambient sounds— have flattened the complex range of sounds actually produced by people of color, marking the sonic color line’s main contour.” Are there other musicians who have profited off the color line, what musicians have enforced the color line, and which musicians have been negatively affected by the color line.
