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From early slave spirituals to modern movements in jazz, blues, and gospel, African American music has influenced the development of music worldwide. African American Music Reference is the first reference collection to chronicle the rich history of this music through 1970. It brings together for the first time the most important reference texts in this subject area—including discographies and bibliographies—together with songsheets, images, and other print resources.

CONTENT 

African American Music Reference offers the first comprehensive coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression—and it is the only electronic access to this information. Resources include biographies, anthologies, encyclopedias, images, lyrics (digitized and fully searchable), songsheets, chronologies, critical textbooks, a complete discography of the top African American artists, and links to editorially selected Web resources.  Rare and previously unpublished items are included. With an advisory board led by Samuel Floyd, Jr., founder and director emeritus of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, our editors have painstakingly compiled the largest, most functional discography for this area. 

ALEXANDER street’s semantic indexing™ for new ways to search and find 

Deep indexing and multiple, combinable search fields allow researchers to find information that might otherwise remain buried or unreachable. Answers are delivered in many forms, organized and integrated into one orchestrated search result, including

• Full text from major reference works
• Personal narratives from oral histories and interviews
• Manuscripts, songsheets, lyrics, discography data, and other text sources
• Sheet music covers, photographs, and related visual images
• Links to editorially selected Web resources, made searchable with Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™.

For subscribers to the Alexander Street music listening services (e.g., African American Music), many of the reference citations link to the actual musical tracks and performances—users click and then listen to the music. 

HOW WILL YOU USE IT?

Scholars will use the material to bring new dimension to studies as diverse as civil rights, religious history, mining and plantation history, emancipation, regional studies, and other topics.

Users will find answers easily to queries such as:

• Find songs associated with the Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights era.
• Explain how slave songs were “coded” and show me examples.
• I want to learn about the early work of Louis Armstrong.
• What is “Chicago Style” jazz?
• What was Billy Emerson’s role in the evolution of minstrelsy?
• I want to read the transcript of an interview in which Moses Asch is the narrator.
• What is stride piano?
• Show me a picture of the composer Edmond Dede. What did he write?

 PUBLICATION DETAILS 

African American Music Reference is available on the Web, either by annual subscription or through one-time purchase of perpetual rights. At completion, it will include 50,000 pages.  Prices are scaled to budget and FTE. Libraries that purchase the database will receive an archival copy of the content. Contact sales@alexanderstreet.com or your sales representative for details, and to learn about the other collections in Music Online.