African American Musicians

African American Musicians

Author: Eleanora E. Tate

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 70

ISBN-13:

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Presents biographical profiles of African Americans, both legendary and less well-known, who have made significant contributions to music in the United States over the past 200 years.


The Negro Motorist Green Book

The Negro Motorist Green Book

Author: Victor H. Green

Publisher: Colchis Books

Published:

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13:

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The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.


ABC - African American Musicians

ABC - African American Musicians

Author: The Thomas Family

Publisher:

Published: 2019-11-29

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9780578602790

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This is a book about the ABCs of African American Musicians history. So many African American Musicians have paved the way, The Thomas Family just wanted to highlight some of our favorites over time. From Ray Charles, to Stevie Wonder, from Beyonce to Chance the Rapper, this book showcases many talented singers, songwriters, producers and rappers. It is a fun rhyming book teaching young children their ABCs, in addition to the history of music. The Thomas Family values education, having fun and loves listening to music of all genres! ABCs of African American Musicians will be a delight to every child's bookcase!


What Is This Thing Called Jazz?

What Is This Thing Called Jazz?

Author: Eric Porter

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-01-31

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 9780520928404

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Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulating around jazz, as well as in relationship to broader currents in African American thought. Porter examines several crucial moments in the history of jazz: the formative years of the 1920s and 1930s; the emergence of bebop; the political and experimental projects of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; and the debates surrounding Jazz at Lincoln Center under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Yusef Lateef, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Lou Williams, and Reggie Workman also feature prominently in this book. The wealth of information Porter uncovers shows how these musicians have expressed themselves in print; actively shaped the institutional structures through which the music is created, distributed, and consumed, and how they aligned themselves with other artists and activists, and how they were influenced by forces of class and gender. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? challenges interpretive orthodoxies by showing how much black jazz musicians have struggled against both the racism of the dominant culture and the prescriptive definitions of racial authenticity propagated by the music's supporters, both white and black.


African-American Musicians That Changed Music Forever

African-American Musicians That Changed Music Forever

Author: Michael Carson

Publisher:

Published: 2020-09-13

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780578995694

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Throughout history, African-American musicians and artists have made a profound impact in music, they have given sound and voice through a wide variety of musical genres. Universally they have expressed emotions that is shared through faith, passion, joy, comfort, and injustice through songs that speaks directly to the heart and spirit. Many of these performers have the power to influence, inspire, and affect social change through their musical talent. Their personal stories and experiences have transcended time and encouraged several generations to continue singing, dancing, preaching, and perform with musical instruments. Over the past two centuries these experiences have become part of a cultural identity. The incredible men and woman featured in this book are responsible for creating some of the most iconic songs ever recorded in the history of music. Their trailblazing sounds have been synonymous in the inception of several musical genres such as Gospel, Blues, Jazz, Soul, Rock & Roll, R&B, Disco, and Hip-Hop, to name a few. Their timeless musical treasures continue to enrich and endure our culture, history, spirit, and soul. While recognizing the impact African-American musicians have made worldwide, through inspiring millions to sing, dance, express their faith, and march for justice, the federal government officially declared the month of June as "African-American Music Appreciation Month," which was originally established in June, 1979. In an effort to honor the countless musicians, singers and composers who have played an integral role in crafting America's soundtrack as well as contribute to every musical genre ever conceived, each year during the month of June, the country recognizes and highlights the contributions African-American artists have made throughout history, and the impact their music has made in our society and the world.


Father Of The Blues

Father Of The Blues

Author: W. C. Handy

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 1991-03-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780306804212

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W. C. Handy's blues—“Memphis Blues," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues"—changed America's music forever. In Father of the Blues, Handy presents his own story: a vivid picture of American life now vanished. W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a sensitive child who loved nature and music; but not until he had won a reputation did his father, a preacher of stern Calvinist faith, forgive him for following the "devilish" calling of black music and theater. Here Handy tells of this and other struggles: the lot of a black musician with entertainment groups in the turn-of-the-century South; his days in minstrel shows, and then in his own band; how he made his first 100 from "Memphis Blues"; how his orchestra came to grief with the First World War; his successful career in New York as publisher and song writer; his association with the literati of the Harlem Renaissance.Handy's remarkable tale—pervaded with his unique personality and humor—reveals not only the career of the man who brought the blues to the world's attention, but the whole scope of American music, from the days of the old popular songs of the South, through ragtime to the great era of jazz.


Representing Black Music Culture

Representing Black Music Culture

Author: Bill Banfield

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2011-10-07

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0810877872

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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.


Hidden in the Mix

Hidden in the Mix

Author: Diane Pecknold

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-07-10

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0822351633

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Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever


Singing Like Germans

Singing Like Germans

Author: Kira Thurman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 150175985X

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In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.


Soundtrack to a Movement

Soundtrack to a Movement

Author: Richard Brent Turner

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1479800368

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**FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts** **Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research** Explores how jazz helped propel the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation Amid the social change and liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X’s emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp saw similarities between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the era. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp’s sentiment, recognizing that Coltrane’s music represented the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached. Soundtrack to a Movement examines the link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and ’50s though the 1970s, Islam rose in prominence among African Americans in part because of the embrace of the religion among jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the values that Islam and jazz shared—Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination—were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic “cool” that shaped both Black religion and jazz styles. Soundtrack to a Movement demonstrates how by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements in the African diaspora and Africa.