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"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...
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English
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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.
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English
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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...
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English
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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...
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English
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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...
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English
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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...
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English
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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...
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English
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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.
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English
Appears on list
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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...
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English
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"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...
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English
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"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...
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University of Illinois Press
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"Now available in paperback, William C. Banfield's acclaimed collection of interviews delves into the lives and work of forty-one Black composers. Each of the profiled artists offers a candid self-portrait that explores areas from training and compositional techniques to working in an exclusive canon that has existed for a very long time. At the same time, Banfield draws on sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms...
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English
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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...
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Series
Publisher
Duke University Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"THE MEANING OF SOUL discusses Black resilience and innovation through soul music and soul logic. Emily Lordi analyzes soul music and musicians from the 1960s, the 1970s, and after, bridging the different valences of soul as a way of moving through the world. The book encompasses soul's racial-political meanings while being sensitive to the details of the music and small details that shaped artists' lives and their relationship to soul. Chapter 1...
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English
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This book "takes readers from 1979, widely regarded as the moment rap became recognized as part of the cultural and musical landscape, and comes right up to the present, with Shea Serrano ... discussing, debating, and deconstructing the most important rap song year by year. Serrano also examines the most important moments that surround the history and culture of rap music--from artists' backgrounds to issues of race, the rise of hip-hop, and the struggles...
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...
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