"Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family ofBlack country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite...

On August 20, 1972, more than 100,000 people attended what came to be known as 'the black Woodstock.' Wattstax documents this historic event and includes the once-lost original ending.

A story about a period in the childhood of Elvis Presley when his family was dirt poor and he was introduced to the soulful music of the Sanctified Church that travelled to his town.

"Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment. In Move On Up, Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers...

"Now available in paperback, William C. Banfield's acclaimed collection of interviews delves into the lives and work of forty-one Black composers. Each of the profiled artists offers a candid self-portrait that explores areas from training and compositional techniques to working in an exclusive canon that has existed for a very long time. At the same time, Banfield draws on sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms...

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of...