Product Description

African American Music: An Introduction is a collection of thirty essays by leading scholars which survey major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. It is the most comprehensive study of African American music currently available, with sixteen essays on major genres of African American music, as well as lengthy sections on the music industry, gender, and music as resistance. The work brings together, in a single volume, treatments of African American music that have existed largely independent of each other. The research is based in large part on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, while interpreting their narratives through a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. The book is replete with references to seminal recordings and recording artists, musical transcriptions, photographs, and illustrations that bring the music to life as expressions of human beings. At the same time, it includes thekind of musical specificity that brings clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify the music of African Americans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #288580 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-21
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive book
This book was very comprehensive I can't think of anything it has left out

A college-level introduction perfect for classroom text use or library reference
Co-edited by Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby for a college-level introduction perfect for classroom text use or library reference, you can't go wrong with African American Music: An Introduction - it gathers thirty essays by leading scholars to survey major Afro-American musical genres both sacred and secular over the extent of American history, uses studies from both ethnographic fieldwork and recordings, and adds biography, photos and illustrations, and references which bring the scholarly focus to life. The blend of scholarly research, field research and cultural observation makes African American Music: An Introduction the perfect text for study.