Category: Historical

Smith: “The Creolization of American Culture” (2013)

“William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy”

Dubois: “The Banjo” (2016)

“The growing of a new gourd in strange lands to replace the broken ones of the old, the crafting of strings to sound out new songs.”

Flaherty: “Music of the Old South: Polk Miller & the Old South Quartette” (2006)

Collects the recordings and ephemera of the OSQ (1909-1928), in all their shocking and confusing beauty…

Hugill: “Shanties from the Seven Seas” (1961)

“Shipboard Work-Songs and Songs Used as Work-Songs from the Great Days of Sail”

Epstein: “Sinful Tunes and Spirituals” (1978)

Black Folk Music to the Civil War

Jamison: “Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics” (2015)

“Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance”

Carter: “The Legacy of the African-American Spiritual” (2010)

“They found a secret door to take them into that world where the tears are wiped away…”

Attali: “Noise: The Political Economy of Music” (1977)

“Music is prophecy.”

Gac: “Singing for Freedom” (2007)

“The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth Century Culture of Antebellum Reform”

Rouleau: “In the Wake of Jim Crow” (2012)

How did impromptu bands of sailors in blackface become a significant channel of 19th century US cultural diplomacy?

Abrahams: Singing the Master (1993)

This carefully researched survey reconstructs the multicontinental roots of antebellum Southern cornshucking rituals:

Emerson: “Doo-Dah!” (1997)

Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture