American soul music of the 1960s is one of the most creative and influential musical forms of the twentieth century. With its merging of gospel, R&B, country, and blues, soul music succeeded in crossing ...

Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh, the Itals, the Ethiopians—they all dropped dazzling proverbs into their best-known reggae tunes.

“What come bad in the morning, can't come good in the evening. ...

2020 Blues Hall of Fame Classic of Blues Literature

Jimi Hendrix called Earl Hooker “the master of the wah-wah pedal. ” Buddy Guy slept with one of Hooker's slides beneath his pillow hoping to tap ...

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily ...

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands ...

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence
Best Research in the General History of Recorded Sound (2000)

The invention of the cylinder phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century ...

The Johnson Family Singers, a gospel group from North Carolina, rose to national acclaim during the 1940s and 1950s. This memoir was written by one of the three sons who sang with them. It focuses not ...

Although now sometimes called “America's classical music,” jazz has not always been accorded favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious ...

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence
Recorded Gospel Music (1998)

In Roosevelt's Blues, Guido van Rijn documents more than a hundred blues and gospel lyrics that contain direct ...