Black Music Site

Portia K. Maultsby who is the author of the research on the Carnegie Hall site is also co-editor of a really crucial new collection on African American Music. It is composed of many chapters dealing succinctly and clearly with the various genre of African American music, their historical background, and the various debates commentators and historians have been engaged in ever since African Americans have been in this continent.

The book is African American Music: An Introduction edited by Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby, Routledge 2006.  

The chapters are short, precise and composed with questions and projects in a manner that would suggest that it is intended to be either a college or even a high school text. Nonetheless, despite its introductory layout, the information contained herein would be useful to even the most advanced of generalists in the humanities or the social scientists.

It begins with a diagramattic breakdown of the Evolution of African American Music into three main categories: African American sacred traditions, African American secular traditions and African American secular traditions instrumental from the 1600s when African Americans were first brought to these shores through the 1990s. While Maltsby, an ethnomusicologist does a lion's share of the writing, there are also chapters by Daphne Duval Harrison on women in the blues, Lawrence Levine on "African American music as Resistance antebellum Period," Bernice Johnson Reagon on the "Civil Rights Movement" and "Post-Civil Rights Period" by Mark Anthony Neal.

There is besides a huge glossary, bibliography, discography and videography.

http://www.carnegiehall.org/honor/history/index.aspx