Black Music

Introduce your students to the rich history of African-American music with "A Celebration of Black History through Music"from spirituals to hip-hop. Featuring some of the most important musicians of each style of music covered, "A Celebration of Black History through Music" highlights how the roots of African-American music can be traced from the slave songs of the 1700s through hip-hop music of the 1970s and 80s, and demonstrates how this music has influenced and shaped the music of the world. Words alone will not do justice to any of the music described in this book. An enhanced CD containing audio examples of the featured music styles is included to allow your students to hear the music in the lessons. In addition, a discography, reproducible worksheets, extension activities, and a complete PowerPoint presentation are all included for use with your class.

Weaves poetry and pop-surrealist illustration, teaching readers about icons like Big Mama Thornton, BB King, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Max Roach, Prince and Alice Coltrane. It also mentions modern-day musicians Our Native Daughters, Saba, Rapsody, Big Joanie, Black Thought, and more. Bebop, the cat, plays records by Black musicians in five genres: blues, hip-hop, rock, bluegrass, and jazz. Follow Bebop on a journey through American music history. Every record takes the cat to a different colorful sonic world.

Given than hip hop music alone has generated more than a billion dollars in sales, the absence of a major black record company is disturbing. Even Motown is now a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group. Nonetheless, little has been written about the economic relationship between African-Americans and the music industry. This anthology dissects contemporary trends in the music industry and explores how blacks have historically interacted with the business as artists, business-people and consumers.

Black music is the beat the world dances to - the sound of soul, funk, reggae, rhythm and blues, disco, and jazz-funk. This book is the first comprehensive encyclopedia ever published on black music. It includes extensive biographies on hundreds of black music personalities - from superstars to one-hit wonders. Here are all the singers, songwriters, bands, producers, and record companies that have made black music a worldwide success. This book includes more 650 alphabetically listed entries, arranged by decade. Each entry presents a career history and discography of the star. This is the definitive source book on black music.

This second volume of Music in Black American Life offers research and analysis that originally appeared in the journals American Music and Black Music Research Journal, and in two book series published by the University of Illinois Press: Music in American Life, and African American Music in Global Perspective. In this collection, a group of predominately Black scholars explores a variety of topics with works that pioneered new methodologies and modes of inquiry for hearing and studying Black music. These extracts and articles examine the World War II jazz scene; look at female artists like gospel star Shirley Caesar and jazz musician-arranger Melba Liston; illuminate the South Bronx milieu that folded many forms of black expressive culture into rap; and explain Hamilton's massive success as part of the "tanning" of American culture that began when Black music entered the mainstream. Part sourcebook and part survey of historic music scholarship, Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020 collects groundbreaking work that redefines our view of Black music and its place in American music history. Contributors: Nelson George, Wayne Everett Goins, Claudrena N. Harold, Eileen M. Hayes, Loren Kajikawa, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tammy L. Kernodle, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gwendolyn Pough, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mark Tucker, and Sherrie Tucker

In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, as he weaves together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry, all the while paying homage to Black music of the last 40 years and beyond. In Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again?, Banfield honors the legacy of artists who have graced us with their work for more than half a century. The essays and interviews in this collection are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries, which reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons. These include Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Spike Lee, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, and many others. Though many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well-known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, are no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions to the culture. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many of these fellow artists as they participate in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, behind the scenes, in rehearsal, or even during meals and teaching class. This unique book of essays, interviews, diary entries, and Banfield's personal photographs will be of interest to scholars and students, of course, but also to general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating the beauty of Black culture.

Covering the vast and various terrain of African American music, this text begins with an account of the author's own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago. It goes on to explore the global influence and social relevance of African American music.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

How black electronic dance music makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban--ecologies that can never simply be reduced to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiment with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life. Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism.