Books like African-American Music by Earl L. Stewart

An analytical overview of modern jazz movements and key African American musicians, covering figures such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, and Sun‑Ra.

Alan Lomax chronicles the rise of the blues from the cotton‑rich Mississippi Delta, revealing the hardships of African‑American life, and its influence on legends like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and modern guitarists.

"In Conjugal Union, Robert F. Reid-Pharr argues that during the antebellum period a community of free black northeastern intellectuals sought to establish the stability of a Black American subjectivity by figuring the black body as the necessary antecedent to any intelligible Black American public presence. Reid-Pharr goes on to argue that the fact of the black body's constant and often spectacular display demonstrates an incredible uncertainty as to that body's status. Thus antebellum black intellectuals were always anxious about how a stable relationship between the black body and the black community might be maintained. Paying particular attention to Black American novels written before the Civil War, the author shows how the household was utilized by these writers to normalize this relationship of body to community such that a person could enter a household as a white and leave it as a black."--BOOK JACKET.

Blues People offers an in‑depth, scholarly examination of African‑American music, tracing the evolution of blues and jazz and their social, cultural, and economic impact on American society.

Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths, and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early New Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory.

Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in the English colonies, Eileen Southern weaves a fascinating narrative of intense musical activity, which has not only played a vital role in the lives of black Americans but has also deeply influenced music performance in the United States and many other parts of the world. Dr. Southern fully chronicles the singers, instrumentalists, and composers who created this rich body of music and skillfully describes the genres and styles that characterize it from its earliest manifestations among a people in slavery to the rap beat of the late twentieth century. Along the way, she covers numerous topics - such as Colonial-Era music, Revolutionary War performers, church music, minstrelsy, ragtime, swing, concert music, soul, pop, and opera - bringing them to life and placing them in their historical and cultural contexts.