Weekend self-care open thread: Moses Asch and the recording of Black folk music
This past week, musical luminary Clive Davis passed away. He has long been lauded as a champion of Black music. However, the legacy, as usual, is far more complex: A 1972 Harvard Report, commissioned by Clive Davis for CBS, outlined a strategy for white-owned corporations to enter and financially exploit the booming Black music market, which was then dominated by independent labels. pic.twitter.com/6bmDmmPgDI — Dirty Laundry Media đŸ‡ºđŸ‡¸ (@Billtheicon) June 23, 2026 As Ebony writes : In the late 1960s and early ’70s, much of the blackest music on the airwaves worldwide came directly from the Black-owned record labels Motown and Stax. Largely clueless about how to rake in more dollars from Black audiences, Clive Davis—president of Columbia Records in 1972—commissioned a report from Harvard Business School entitled “A Study of the Soul Music Environment.” Although the whitepaper led to the creation of Black music divisions at Columbia and elsewhere, including the widespread hiring of Blac...
.jpg)