To Do This, You Must Know How traces black vocal music instruction and inspiration from the halls of Fisk University to the mining camps of Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama, and on to Chicago and New Orleans. In the 1870s, the Original Fisk University Jubilee Singers successfully combined Negro spirituals with formal choral music disciplines, and established a permanent bond between spiritual singing and music education. Early in the twentieth century there were countless initiati...

NAMED A 2026 BLUES HALL OF FAME INDUCTEE AS A CLASSIC OF BLUES LITERATUREThe commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. “Coon songs,” with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendanc...

A landmark study, based on thousands of music-related references mined by the authors from a variety of contemporaneous sources, especially African American community newspapers, Out of Sight examines musical personalities, issues, and events in context. It confronts the inescapable marketplace concessions musicians made to the period’s prevailing racist sentiment. It describes the worldwide travels of jubilee singing companies, the plight of the great Black prima donnas, and the ...

"A product of old-fashioned, back-wearying, foundational scholarship, yet very readable, this book is certain to feature importantly in future studies of early jazz and its prehistory. Highly recommended." --Library Journal"This volume makes possible the study of the rise of black music in the days that paved the way for the Harlem Renaissance--the brass bands, the banjo and mandolin clubs, the male quartets, and theatrical companies. Summing up: Essential." --Choice

Blues Book of the Year —Living BluesAssociation of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for ExcellenceBest Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018)2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature categoryWith this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American p...

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. "Coon songs," with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz.In Ragged but Right, now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug S...

Black education in the South was the great social program of the post–Civil War era. Desperately strapped for operating capital, the first freedmen’s schools resorted to a bold fundraising experiment. Student troupes were sent to the North singing Negro spirituals, the sacred songs of slavery, in order to generate goodwill and entice financial support. The Fisk University Jubilee Singers set this strategy in motion in 1871; in the wake of their success, it was adopted by HBCUs throughout t...

Ever wonder how you can give back to God? Ever wonder if God will look at you and use you even if you are young? This book may have the answer for you. Worship can wear many different hats. God knows if we are truly giving him praise, because He sees what we don't. After all God doesn't look at us with a human eye. He sees everything and knows every emotion and attitude. This book takes you down a path of understanding what God looks at. I pray it helps give you a better understanding of y...

Located near the convergence of the Choccolocco Creek, the Blue Eye Creek, and the Coosa River, whose Native American names pay tribute to the Muskogee who once populated the town, Lincoln attracted early settlers after the Cusseta Treaty was signed with the Creek Indians on March 24, 1832. Andrew Jackson passed through Lincoln on his way to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, when the town was still known as Kingsville and before it was renamed in 1856 for a famous soldier who fought in the War...

In the 1920s, Southern record companies ventured to cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans, where they set up primitive recording equipment in makeshift studios. They brought in street singers, medicine show performers, pianists from the juke joints and barrelhouses. The music that circulated through Southern work camps, prison farms, and vaudeville shows would be lost to us if it hadn't't been captured on location by these performers and recorders.Eminent blues historian Pau...

Renowned folklorist William R. Ferris has captured the voices of southern musicians, artists, writers, and thinkers for forty years—and we have been proud to publish his work in Southern Cultures for nearly half of that time.To celebrate Southern Cultures' 20th anniversary, we present our inaugural special omnibus ebook, The William R. Ferris Reader. Collected here for the first time are all 20 of Bill Ferris’s essays and interviews as they have appeared ...

Southern music has flourished as a meeting ground for the traditions of West African and European peoples in the region, leading to the evolution of various traditional folk genres, bluegrass, country, jazz, gospel, rock, blues, and southern hip-hop. This much-anticipated volume in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates an essential element of southern life and makes available for the first time a stand-alone reference to the music and music makers of the American Sou...