We are living in a golden age of Prince studies. Andrea Swensson’s Got to Be Something Here, Duane Tudahl’s two-volumes-so-far series, and Griffin Woodworth’s Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity, just to name three, have in the past decade all added depth and dimension to our understanding of, respectively, Prince’s background, recording sessions, and musicological import. This spring brought Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign, an eye-opening anthology edited by Daphne Brooks, taken from a joint conference on Prince and David Bowie at Yale. (Disclosure: I contributed a chapter to the Brooks book and helped edit Woodworth’s.)

For all of the range covered in those books, another new title may be the most ambitious yet. In Prince’s Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound & Place, the scholar Rashad Shabazz offers a compact but sweeping historical overview of the music in Minneapolis that made its way into Prince’s own. And by “historical,” I mean that it starts from the beginning of Minnesota’s statehood. Though it slots right onto the Prince bookshelf, Shabazz’s work is also in the lineage of America’s Musical Life, by the late Richard Crawford, and Steve Waksman’s heroic Live Music in America, both of them titles that begin the story of music’s development in the United States by going waaaay back.

Those books are doorstops, though, whereas Prince’s Minneapolis is swift — just over 200 pages before the acknowledgements and notes. (You can read an excerpt at LitHub.) It’s jargony in places — published by the University of North Carolina Press, so it comes with the terrain — but it’s also approachable, not to mention eye- and ear-opening. For reference, Prince himself doesn’t come into the story as a character until page 78. Shabazz eventually settles into readings of Prince’s recorded corpus, and those have their moments. But that early scene-setting — and the author’s look at the material conditions of Prince’s early music making — are the places where the book is richest.

The sounds of war — gunfire and cannons — inaugurate the tale, followed swiftly by military bugle calls and, in 1824, “a piano . . . purchased by a commander’s wife.” Amusingly, one of the early public musical performances in the region took place at a “territorial temperance convention” intended to “suppress the traffic in intoxicating drinks”—a very different situation than much of the relevant musical performances to follow, which took place in bars and speakeasies, but one that prefigures Prince’s liquor-less Paisley Park events.

Some of the city-specific historical tidbits that Shabazz unearths chime effortlessly with Prince’s specific story: Blacks and Jews were the only ethnic groups that arrived in Minnesota not as settlers but as refugees, for example. (They were the people who made up the Revolution, as well.) Shabazz goes into welcome detail about Thaddeus P. Giddings, who made music education compulsory in the Minneapolis Public Schools. By 1915, some 50,000 students received musical training — the entire student body — a number unequaled since. Shabazz writes that this “democratiz[ed] musical literacy and, thus, music-making,” and directly connects it to the high schools where the young Prince learned and woodshedded.

To the author, the “Minneapolis Sound” is an encompassing term, worth expanding from its widely known, Prince-centric definition — meaning everything from the city’s Scandinavian music societies of the 1870s to the rise of the local jazz scene. “St. Paul was Minnesota’s first jazz city,” Shabazz writes. He correctly situates the saxophone great Lester Young as a local musician and historicizes the Kit Kat Club, located in the Near North Side: “Its reputation as a place to jam also brought white people who wanted to listen. The mix of illegal booze, jazz, and white women in a club with Black male musicians brought the city’s ‘purity squad’ of Prohibition agents. But it wasn’t the illicit liquor that was the genuine concern. It was the potential for Black men and white women to meet, mingle, and have sex that concerned them.”

The segregation of Prince’s childhood is drawn sharply here, from housing covenants to local radio (KDWB only played white artists for many years, starting in the ’50s — a look ahead to Prince not catching on with local radio until “Little Red Corvette”) to the briefly lived Black downtown rock & roll club King Solomon’s Mines in the ‘60s. “Prince revolutionized Minneapolis’s sound by synthesizing the tension of the city’s apartheid and its musicality,” Shabazz concludes.

The opening of Paisley Park Studios in 1987 was the culmination, not only of Prince’s success and ambition, but also of the Minneapolis Sound as a whole. “[F]rom the daily bugle calls at Fort Snelling to the Hutchinson Singers at Woodman Hole to the Minneapolis Auditorium to King Solomon’s Mines to First Avenue, the Minneapolis Sound, for much of its history, lived near Minneapolis’s core,” Shabazz writes. “But Prince changed the city’s music geography when he moved his base of operation to the suburbs.”

For all its heft, the book does overreach in a few places, sometimes distractingly. “By 1978, Hüsker Dü and the Replacements were better known in Minneapolis,” Shabazz writes — except that the former played its first show in 1979 and the latter in 1980. The author cites Prince’s 1979 single “I Wanna Be Your Lover” as reaching number 22 on the pop charts; it actually reached number 11. And “Minnesota’s folk scene” was not “inspired” by Joan Baez — the Dinkytown coffeehouse circuit was already in place before her first album in 1960.

It’s fun to think of ways that future scholars might extend Shabazz’s framework. Perhaps looking at the instrument makers in town that Prince did business with — his relationship with Knut-Koupee, which built several guitars for him, is an obvious example. Or maybe the way Prince’s concerts extended the hybridity that Shabazz highlights. Even a pre-planned arena show like one that the author mentions, from March 30, 1985, in Syracuse, later released as on video as Live, has many overt callbacks that back up the book’s assertions. Think of the long, relaxed blues passage Prince takes on guitar on his way to the iconic solo of the climactic “Purple Rain,” or the R&B-revue interplay with Jerome Benton and a horn section borrowed from opener Sheila E.’s band during the extended “Baby I’m a Star” that directly precedes it.

Then again, you can see why Shabazz stops where he does. Prince’s music is positively littered with references, with that hybridity the author identifies as the Minneapolis Sound’s core. It’s almost as if Prince’s work contains too much music, too much history, for any one writer to hear all the way into. But this illuminating book makes a sizable dent.

Prince’s Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound & Place by Rashad Shabazz is out now on The University of North Carolina Press. More info here