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Black Chicago in the post–civil rights era was constantly refreshed by an influx of newcomers from the American South via the Great Migration. Chicago was a beacon, disseminating a fresh, powerful definition of Black identity primarily through music, art, and entrepreneurship and mass media. This book uses ruminations on oft-undervalued found ephemeral materials (like a fan club pamphlet or a creamy-white Curtis Mayfield record) and a variety of in-depth original and archival interviews to unearth tales of the aspiration, will, courage, and imagination born in Black Chicago. It also questions what vestiges of our past we choose to value in this digital age. These stories serve as homespun folktales of hope to counter darker popular narratives about the South and West Sides of the city. They also express the ongoing quest for identity and self-determination, a quest that fueled the earlier Black Arts Movement, and is again at the heart of the Black Arts renaissance currently blossoming in Black Chicago, from genre-spanning musicians like Chance the Rapper, Noname, the Juju Exchange, and Makaya McCraven, and from visual artists like Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall, and up-and-comers like Brandon Breaux. Meanwhile, many of the creative giants of previous generations are struggling (Ebony magazine and the groundbreaking DuSable Museum among them). But this text asserts that energy never dies, and creativity will live on beyond this juncture, regardless of the outcome.

This book theorizes and conceptualizes the Middle space musical theater maintains in America--between professional and amateur, urban and rural, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, truth and deception. It focuses on communities in the middle of America who, for various reasons, use homegrown musicals to distance themselves from truth. Musicals grant such communities space to engage belief and religion, to flex the tension musicals maintain between reality and unreality in order to imagine worlds unlike their own. This book makes the case that musicals are a particular form of lying. Building upon anthropologist Mary Douglas’s observation that dirt is simply “matter out of place,” this book promotes what might be called prosocial lies as no less than “stories out of place.” In this moment when truth and facts have lost currency, this book suggest lies have more to offer the world than is often admitted. Whereas musicals promote lying as a means of imagining worlds unlike our own, it concludes we must first fiercely embrace and commit to the Middle space of lying in order to jolt ourselves out of the current post-truth malaise and move toward building a world that is more in line with hopes of justice, reconciliation, and community. Whatever web of deception musicals spin for Americans, this book claims we desperately need more of it and now.