This chapter addresses Sterling A. Brown’s essays and blues-based poems, particularly those appearing in his 1932 collection Southern Road, to raise questions of commodification in the context of the technologized recording and dissemination of African American musical forms, especially the blues. The chapter claims that in Brown’s work (and that of other commentators), the folksong collector emerges as a figure antithetical to the commodification of folk forms suggested by the phonograph. Brown’s attitude toward the phonograph was ambivalent: He embraced it at times, and at others dismissed it as an emblem of commodification and cultural appropriation. The phonograph, however, emerged within a shifting set of cultural practices in which the boundaries between live performance and recorded sound, as well as bodies and recording apparatuses, became permeable and negotiable. Thus, even when Brown’s poems celebrate the blues as an uncommodified oral cultural form indissociable from its social and material milieu in the folk community, as in his iconic poem “Ma Rainey,” the phonograph becomes a kind of vanishing mediator between the poem and its vernacular sources, as Brown’s poems’ constructions of orality are underwritten by its inescapable technologized presence.

The fifth chapter examines Forster’s ironic representations of musical scholarship in its institutional form, analysing his negative portrayals of two rarely discussed women characters, Vashti in ‘The Machine Stops’ and Dorothea in Arctic Summer, as his championing of musical amateurism and his criticism of the professionalization of musicology. The chapter analyses Forster’s satirizing of early twentieth-century academia’s antiquarian interest in folk revival. What problematizes his satire, the chapter argues, is Forster’s conception of gender: on the one hand, Forster exposes that professionalism is often constructed by gendered discourses that depend on the conventionalism mind–body dualism of patriarchal culture; but on the other, he casts professional women in roles against which his narratives rebel. Asking whether the portrayals of the two women hide his misogyny, the chapter explores how Forster’s advocacy of musical amateurism is at the same time an attempt to negotiate women’s place in his often homoerotically charged envisioning of companionship.