Music and Ethnomusicology
New York City Blues
A first-ever book on the subject, New York City Blues: Postwar Portraits from Harlem to the Village and Beyond offers a deep dive into the blues venues and performers in the city from the 1940s through ...
My Melancholy Baby
2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence—Certificate of Merit in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music
Ten songs, from “Bill Bailey, ...
Rough Tactics
In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932, author Mark A. Johnson examines three notable cases of Black participation in the spectacles of politics: the 1885–1898 local-option ...
Chapel of Love
In 1963, sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Hawkins and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson traveled from the segregated South to New York City under the auspices of their manager, former pop singer Joe Jones. ...
Scattered Musics
Contributions by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Benjamin Burkhart, Ivy Chevers, Martha I. Chew Sánchez, Athena Elafros, William García-Medina, Sara Goek, David Henderson, Eyvind Kang, Junko Oba, Juan David ...
Crossing Bar Lines
In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space James Gordon Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five creative ...
Improvising Sabor
Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York begins in 1960s New York and examines in rich detail the playing styles and international influence of important figures in US Latin music. Such innovators ...
The Sacred Language of the Abakuá
In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. ...
New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean ...
Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus!
Folklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended ...