Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly-line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America. A history of the last half-century and an intimate...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Formats
Description
Enslaved African Americans longed for freedom, and that longing took many forms including music. Drawing on biblical imagery, slave songs both expressed the sorrow of life in bondage and offered a rallying cry for the spirit. Like a Bird brings together text, music, and illustrations by Coretta Scott King Award-winning illustrator Michele Wood to convey the rich meaning behind thirteen of these powerful songs.
Author
Publisher
Candlewick Press
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
When Esquire magazine planned an issue to salute the American jazz scene in 1958, graphic designer Art Kane pitched a crazy idea: how about gathering a group of beloved jazz musicians and photographing them? He didn't own a good camera, didn't know if any musicians would show up, and insisted on setting up the shoot in front of a Harlem brownstone. Could he pull it off? In a captivating collection of poems, Roxane Orgill steps into the frame of Harlem...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite...
Language
English
Formats
Description
This acclaimed documentary covers the 200 year history of African-American Christianity, featuring the legends of Gospel music, including The Staple Singers, The Clara Ward Singers, The Dixie Hummingbirds, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.. Culled from hundreds of hours of music, tracing the evolution of gospel music through its many styles – the spirituals and early hymns, the four-part harmony-based quartets, the integration of blues and swing, the emergence...
Author
Publisher
Chicago Review Press
Pub. Date
c2003
Language
English
Description
It was not until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this music black and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crude made it onto records for all to hear. This book brings a forgotten music, hot music, to life by describing how it became the dominant American music how it outlasted sentimental waltzes and parlor ballads, symphonic marches and Tin Pan Alley novelty numbers and how it became rock n roll. It reveals that the young men and women...
Author
Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed...
Author
Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Pub. Date
c2004
Language
English
Description
Black gospel music grew from obscure nineteenth-century beginnings to become the leading style of sacred music in black American communities after World War II. Jerma A. Jackson traces the music's unique history, profiling the careers of several singers--particularly Sister Rosetta Tharpe--and demonstrating the important role women played in popularizing gospel.Female gospel singers initially developed their musical abilities in churches where gospel...
Author
Publisher
[Music World Publishing]
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
In The Emancipation of Slaves Through Music, music mogul Dr. Mathew Knowles presents a keen examination of the liberating effects of music on an oppressed people. By taking readers on the journey of its secret use during slavery up through its eventual commercialization in the industry, he exposes the art form's true power. Between its informative pages, the book explores the uprooting of Africans via the transatlantic slave trade and the evolving...
Author
Publisher
Lucent Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
The influence of African Americans on music in the United States cannot be overstated. A large variety of musical genres owe their beginnings to black musicians. Jazz, rap, funk, R & B, and even techno have roots in African American culture. This volume chronicles the history of African American music, with spotlights on influential black musicians of the past and present. Historical and contemporary photographs, including primary sources, contribute...
Author
Series
Publisher
Core Library, an imprint of Abdo Publishing
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
Anthems, or songs of hope and praise, can help support communities through difficult times. Throughout the 1900s, the song "Lift Every Voice and Sing" evolved into an anthem for black people in the United States. The Story of the Black National Anthem explores the history and the legacy of this uplifting song.
Author
Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of 'Crazy Blues' set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for 'race records.' Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"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 Antonin Dvorák prophesied a "great and noble" school of American classical music based on the searing "negro melodies" he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would found popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold...
Didn't find it?
Didn't find it in the Minuteman Library Network? Request it from other Massachusetts library systems.
Can't find what you are looking for? Recommend it to your local library as a future purchase. Suggest a Purchase