Headbanging as a legacy of Black dance and the racialized origins of heavy metal

In this article I argue that headbanging is a transformation of Black American vernacular dance, filtered through White audiences’ racialized understandings of Blackness in music and dance. Headbanging is shown to share many overt characteristics and underlying dynamics observed by scholars of Black American dance. A likely point of transmission is identified in the British White blues scene of the late 1960s, from which the earliest British heavy metal bands emerged. The similarities between headbanging and Black dance are interpreted through dance-focused theories of appropriation and transformation. Metal’s history is often described as a process of gradually leaving the blues behind, but headbanging is a legacy of blues and Blackness that remains central to the metal genre. This work serves as the first step in a broader project showing how Blackness has been an enduring influence on metal, not just a precursor.