Performers, music educators of all types, historical interpreters, and whomever else finds themselves here. In particular, this resource is directed towards people with a music education that is typically called “Western Classical,” meaning that it assumes readers have been trained in a particular performance aesthetic typically designed for nineteenth-century European concert music. That aesthetic privileges smooth tone and attention to dynamics and blending; experts in it typically categorize expressive musical devices in other aesthetics—like intense changes in tone or uncoordinated singing—as noise or mistakes. This site is directed at reversing some of that thinking.

A broad variety. When this site uses the phrase “Black music,” it casts a somewhat wide net: music performed and/or created by musicians of African descent, enslaved and free. These essays focus primarily on music created in the geographic United States, but there are some references to music stemming from outside those bounds. Readers who want music from a wider area are encouraged to use other resources like the Carnegie Hall Timeline of African American Music.

“Early” is admittedly not a precise word but here it is meant to conjure a sound world that predates modern recording technology. The aim is to use available recordings and scholarship to help us imagine music from the early twentieth century and earlier. The reason for this focus is the observed preference in existing resources for music from the mid-twentieth century or later. 

This resource brings attention to early twentieth-century and nineteenth-century musics through discussion and listening examples. Finding Written Music describes available repertoire of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Listening to Music is meant to help educators develop listening skills through exposure to a curated selection of recordings from the early twentieth century. Honoring History gives an overview of past music participation. These sources derive mostly from before the several record booms of the mid-twentieth century, surges in sales that reflected, for instance, widespread interest in blues (early 1920s) and r&b and rock ‘n’ roll (1950s). Stylistically, these listening examples derive from traditions outside of concert spirituals, blues (though some vocal recordings here are clearly related to blues), and jazz–styles that are often seen as pillars of expression for Black-American musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.

Most recordings are from the Lomax collection, a set of musical records elicited by John and Alan Lomax from residents of the mostly rural United States in the 1930s and 1940s. It is a lengthy and impressive collection, one of a kind in how it documents the music-making of a generation not otherwise recorded. The musicians represented here were likely born in the 1880s and 1890s (and some even earlier), so living through the peak of Jim Crow South and at most one generation removed from enslaved life. 

Though these musicians were recorded in the twentieth century, I take them as our best window onto earlier musical practice.

John Lomax did bring several types of bias to his recording approach which are necessary to acknowledge:

• he preferred recording men
• he preferred recording singers over instrumentalists
• he preferred rural settings
• he preferred less modern sounding music. Despite the time period, he was much more likely to solicit work songs from the field than blues-style songs
• his subjects might sing for more urban entertainment

The recordings used here reflect these biases.

A musicologist-educator with training in modern performance and historical performance practice. I have been teaching music educators about music history for more than ten years and have seen—and perpetuated—the holes in that education: most people trained at music schools graduate with little knowledge of Black American repertoire and techniques from the nineteenth century and earlier. Most students with degrees in music are able to speak about jazz and blues and not much else. Further, they graduate with a keen sense of priorities that, as mentioned above, encourages them to hear some musical techniques as expressive or universal or traditional and other techniques as subversive or damaging or limited. (I encourage you to probe your own received knowledge and think about that.) Inspired by the work of  Philip Ewell and Loren Kajikawa, I would like to participate in correcting these areas of educational neglect rather than perpetuating them. 

This site distills some of the examples and approaches I have amassed in my teaching over the last several years, partly developed with the help of colleagues mentioned in the acknowledgements page. The development of this material through conservatory-style teaching also further explains the chronological limits of the material; these mostly nineteenth-century and early twentieth century examples provide, in my view, the strongest counter-balance to the repertoire with which students in the Western Classical concert tradition have the most comfort and familiarity.

I am not a person of color and cannot claim a personal identification with the racialized past of the United States. My hope nevertheless is that this site feels inclusive to a broad audience of musicians.

No, or at least not purposefully. So that this site is a safe and positive space, I have taken care to reference anti-racist, supportive, representational language and sources where possible rather than giving further voice to past hurtful language. If you are curious about that missing perspective, links have been provided.