John Anthony Randoll Blacking (22 October 1928 – 24 January 1990) was a British ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist.
John Blacking was born in Guildford, Surrey, and was educated at Salisbury Cathedral School and at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a pupil of the illustrious anthropologist, Meyer Fortes.
He spent most of his later academic career at Queen's University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, where he was a professor of social anthropology from 1970 until his death in 1990.
[3] In 1967 he published the book Venda Children's Songs, one of the first ethnomusicological works to focus directly on the interpenetration of music and culture.
The Callaway Centre in the University of Western Australia holds an archive of his field notes and tapes, the John Blacking Collection.