Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international ...

Rhythm & blues emerged from the African American community in the late 1940s to become the driving force in American popular music over the next half-century. Although sometimes called “doo-wop,” “soul,” “fu ...

Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Milton, and James Waller-all of these musical powerhouses furthered their recording careers at a little label on once-thriving Farish Street, the historic black ...

With contributions by Raúl A. Fernández, Benjamin Givan, Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade, Warren R. Pinckney Jr., Linda F. Williams, Christopher G. Bakriges, Stefano Zenni, S. Frederick Starr, Bruce Johnson, Ch ...

When a jazz hero dies, rumors, speculation, gossip, and legend can muddle the real cause of death.

In this book, Frederick J. Spencer, M.D., conducts an inquest on how jazz greats lived and died pursuing ...

Yank Rachell and his mandolin playing style moved every musician lucky enough to hear him perform in the early sixties. When he died in April 1997, he left behind a stack of unanswered requests to tour ...

The family of musical styles known as jazz came into being around 1900 as several popular black musical idioms coalesced. This free-flowing, spontaneous music based in improvisation emerged primarily ...

In 1969 Gerhard Kubik chanced to encounter a Mozambican labor migrant, a miner in Transvaal, South Africa, tapping a cipendani, a mouth-resonated musical bow. A comparable instrument was seen in the hands ...

Although now sometimes called “America's classical music,” jazz has not always been accorded favorable appellations. Accurate though these encomiums may be, they obscure the complex and fractious history of ...

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence
Recorded Gospel Music (1998)

In Roosevelt's Blues, Guido van Rijn documents more than a hundred blues and gospel lyrics that contain direct ...