African American Music
Do You Remember?
In Do You Remember? Celebrating Fifty Years of Earth, Wind & Fire, Trenton Bailey traces the humble beginning of Maurice White, his development as a musician, and his formation of Earth, Wind & Fire, ...
Creole Soul
Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of ...
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. ...
Following the Drums
Following the Drums: African American Fife and Drum Music in Tennessee is an epic history of a little-known African American instrumental music form. John M. Shaw follows the music from its roots in West ...
Songs of Slavery and Emancipation
Throughout the history of slavery, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and rebellion. Sustaining them in this struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. While the ...
Voices of Black Folk
In the late 1920s, Reverend A. W. Nix (1880–1949), an African American Baptist minister born in Texas, made fifty-four commercial recordings of his sermons on phonographs in Chicago. On these recordings, ...
Instruments of Empire
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States extended its empire into the Philippines while subjugating Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, one of the most popular musical acts ...
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. ...
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 ...