John Blacking

Who was John Blacking?

John Anthony Randoll Blacking was a British ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist.

John Blacking was educated at Salisbury Cathedral School and at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a pupil of the illustrious anthropologist, Meyer Fortes.

After serving with the British Army in Malaysia, he was employed by Hugh Tracey in the International Library of African Music and further studied music and culture of the Venda people in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1965 he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand for his work on Venda children's songs, and in the same year he was made Professor and Head of the Department of Social Anthropology.

In the field of ethnomusicology, Blacking is known for his early and energetic advocacy of an anthropological perspective in the study of music.

He spent most of his later academic career at Queen's University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, where he was professor of social anthropology from 1970 until his death in 1990. Many of his ideas about the social impact of music can be found in his 1973 book How Musical is Man?.