“Denise Sullivan represents the insider intellectual stamina of rock ‘n’ roll journalism without the pomp and pretense. She is the past and future of the form, rolled into one uncanny style.” –Pop Matters, February 2012
Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip-Hop
The marriage of music and social change didn’t originate with the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but never before and never again was the relationship between the two so dynamic. Political activism shaped the music, and the music spread the word, calling people to join in.
In Keep On Pushing, author Denise Sullivan presents the voices of the musician-activists from this pivotal era and the artists who followed in their footsteps to become the force behind contemporary liberation music. Through extensive research and exclusive firsthand interviews with Yoko Ono, Richie Havens, Solomon Burke, Wayne Kramer, Michael Franti, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and other icons, Sullivan chronicles the struggle that went into the creation of liberation music and how the defenders of black, women’s, and gay liberation ran headlong into suppression by the music industry as well as by the government.
Joining authentic voices with a bittersweet narrative covering more than fifty years of fighting oppression through song, Keep On Pushing defines the soundtrack to revolution and the price the artists paid to create it.
Denise Sullivan is a freelance writer and an online columnist for Crawdaddy!–the first U.S. magazine to cover rock music in the 1960s through a social and political lens. She is the author of three previous music titles, including The White Stripes: Sweethearts of the Blues.
