On the surface, it may appear that there isn’t much of a connection between rapper Kendrick Lamar and abolitionist Harriet Tubman. But in his debut book, UMBC Assistant Professor of English and musician Earl Brooks, argues that the rhetorical power of music—specifically music created by Black artists—is what bridges the two cultural figures, and many others, together.
Brooks’ On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press, 2024), begins with a vignette describing Tubman singing spirituals to calm the nerves of the enslaved folks she led to liberation for the Union Army in 1863 as the first woman to plan and lead an armed attack for the American armed forces. The effect of the singing, Brooks writes, “brought composure to the crowds of people, leading to a safe evacuation.” Brooks explains how Tubman used music as a form of strategic communication, utilizing the same rhetorical tools he teaches his students at UMBC.
Tubman understood that the mode of sound, Brooks argues, would be the most expedient way to signal her authenticity and credibility, an example of what it means to understand the rhetorical function of Black music and its historical use as a mode of communication.
“On Rhetoric and Black Music recognizes the role that music has played in shaping public discourse in America,” says Brooks. “To understand where Black music is right now, you have to understand the musical history that the book engages.”
“The sonic lexicon of Black music”
Brooks ends On Rhetoric and Black Music with a comparison of Kendrick Lamar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018 for his critically-acclaimed album Damn., and composer Duke Ellington, who would have won the award in 1965 but was rejected because of his race. Brooks argues that Lamar and Ellington’s music had seismic impacts on American culture, and Lamar’s win represented a significant step forward for the public recognition of Black music’s influence in America. Lamar, who will be headlining the 2025 Super Bowl LIX halftime performance in February, is the first and only rapper in history to be a Pulitzer Prize recipient.
Beyond Lamar, Tubman, and Ellington, On Rhetoric and Black Music examines the artistry of iconic Black figures in music spanning a variety of genres and eras. Those artists include Scott Joplin, Mary Lou Williams, John Coltrane, and Mahalia Jackson. Brooks explains the historical context of these artists and how they shaped Black political and social discourse in the 19th and 20th centuries. Brooks argues that there would have been no such movements like the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know them without Black music.
Earl Brooks’ book On Rhetoric and Black Music.
Through rhetorical studies, archival research, and musical analysis, On Rhetoric and Black Music establishes the “sonic lexicon of Black music,” which Brooks defines as a “distinct constellation of sonic and auditory features that bridge cultural, linguistic, and political spheres with music.”
“The core of the book is reframing how we think about Black musicians. They’ve been shaping not just how we think about the world around us, but how we think about critical issues like freedom, identity, and community,” says Brooks, who is also the associate director of UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities.
For Brooks himself, his understanding of Black music’s impact on shaping public discourse began when he met renowned trumpeter, composer, and music instructor Wynton Marsalis during his senior year of high school in Topeka, Kansas. At the time, Brooks was a budding saxophone player who had not yet determined where his musical ability would take him.
Earl Brooks playing his saxophone in UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building.
“It was really transformative to hear how Marsalis conceptualized music history and American culture as one coherent thing. I hadn’t experienced that before,” Brooks recalled. “Meeting him was huge in terms of motivation.”
As an undergraduate student at the University of Kansas (KU), Brooks was a dual major in music performance and American studies. It wasn’t until attending a lecture on writer Ralph Ellison by acclaimed scholar Arnold Rampersad that Brooks began to seriously consider studying the intersections of music, culture, history, and politics. Brooks joined KU’s McNairs Scholars Program in 2009 where he first began his exploration into researching music history. The McNair program, he shares, introduced him to the research process and further motivated him to attend graduate school to advance his education in music history.
““I love to open students' minds to how interwoven their lives are with sound and music, and how that shifts so many things in their lives even if they’re not aware of it.”Earl Brooks
assistant professor of English and musician
Brooks later attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was introduced to the field of African American rhetoric. After receiving his master’s degree in African American literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, Brooks then went on to receive his Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition from Penn State University, where his ideas around the rhetorical implications of Black music began to take shape.
“Most folks acknowledge that music lyrics can be a really important form of communication, but we often don’t think about the music itself,” Brooks said in a local tv news segment last year. “We don’t often think of [composers] as seeking to be public intellectuals and contributing to public discourse on critical matters. The point of [On Rhetoric and Black Music] is to really give readers a deeper insight into just how entangled American history is with Black music.”
The power of sound and mentorship
In 2017, Brooks joined UMBC’s English department and currently teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. Brooks was awarded the university’s Summer Research Faculty Fellowship grant in 2018 to further develop his project “Black Sonority: Rhetoric and Black Music,” which later spawned into what is now On Rhetoric and Black Music.
In the classroom, Brooks’ lessons are expanding how students think about the power of sound: “I love to open students’ minds to how interwoven their lives are with sound and music, and how that shifts so many things in their lives even if they’re not aware of it,” he says. Brooks teaches his students critical analyses of audience expectations, the pros and cons of various communicative mediums, and understanding how social and cultural landscapes can construct what successful persuasion looks like.
In 2022, Brooks and the students in his “Sounds Like Social Justice” course collaborated with the Meadow Community Fellowship Church in the nearby Beechfield and Irvington communities to document their experiences during and after the 2016 and 2018 floods with the “Underwater/Underserved” podcast. The podcast’s production was supported through the Dresher Center’s Inclusion Imperative, a six-year humanities studies initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation that concluded in 2023. Brooks was then named as one of the Dresher Center’s 2023 Residential Faculty Research Fellows and was also a recipient of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Early Career Excellence Award.
Brooks (right) at the Dresher Center’s Inclusion Imperative Capstone event in 2023.
One of the things he’s most proud of, Brooks emphasizes, is helping the next generation of researchers from underrepresented backgrounds as a UMBC McNair Scholars faculty mentor and advisory board member. He fondly recalls meeting his McNair mentor, Dr. Maryemma Graham, a renowned African American literature scholar and the University Distinguished Professor in the department of English at KU, during his undergraduate years. Brooks says Graham’s presence was instrumental throughout his academic and professional journey.
“Dr. Graham was so warm and engaging, and I had not yet experienced that in college. She took an interest in something I was interested in and helped me make sense of it—that was a really big turning point for me.”
Now, Brooks is elated to be the one helping to guide emerging academics. “The McNair Program was critical for me, and it’s been amazing to experience being on the other side of things as a faculty member.”
A space of refuge
One of the functions of Black music, Brooks adds, is its ability to be a space of refuge during times of panic, chaos, and misery. He noted the significant role of music “as a place for dialogue and connection during a time of isolation” amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincided with a months-long wave of nationwide protests against police brutality and other related injustices against Black Americans.
Black music, he says, was one of the resources people utilized to cope with that time of mass devastation. In 2020, millions of viewers from around the world virtually tuned into the phenomenon of DJ D-Nice’s “Club Quarantine” and the “Verzuz” music series in which legendary hip hop, R&B, and gospel artists and producers battled against one another, highlighting their chart-topping discographies.
“That’s the role that music has played for [Black people] historically. On Rhetoric and Black Music speaks to the complete continuum of Black music,” says Brooks. “It’s a form of deliberation and a space where we make sense of the world around us.”
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