Have you ever heard about The National Negro Opera Company? Founded by Mary Cardwell Dawson, the company made its debut in Pittsburgh in 1941. This is but one of the fascinating things you can discover in this marvelous book. If you have an interest in music of whatever variety, your library is incomplete without this book.
This 3rd edition was done in 1997, thus it is quite up-to-date in its coverage of classical, jazz, rock, pop, gospel, swing, ragtime or blues. If it is music as practiced, performed or composed by people of color, this is where you'll find valuable information about it. Beginning with Africa and continuing to the present day, the four sections detail this rich history: Song in a Strange Land (1619-1775); Let My People Go (1776-1865); Blow Ye the Trumpet (1865-1919) and Lift Every Voice (1920-1996). The latter section is particularly informative reading with sections on Jazz, The Harlem Renaissance, and the Mid-Century Decades. It is these years in which artists of color finally took their well-deserved place on the musical stages of the world. Of course, they had been visible in their own world, and the popularity of such major composers as Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington allowed them to more or less effortlessly cross-over to the 'white' world. Lena Horne, the Mills Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway were--and still are--names to be reckoned with in any list of fabulous performers.
And then there was Marion Anderson who finally made her way to the Metropolitan Opera at the very end of her career, making way for Robert McFerrin, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Simon Estes and George Shirley, who were very much pioneers in their respective repertoire. Today, thankfully, artists of color are not at all rare on the concert and/or opera stages of the world. But lest we forget the individual trauma these artists suffered in order to be able to compete in this way, we need to remember the past while we are glorying in the present. This book will, if you let it, open your mind and your ears to wonderful, glorious sounds, without which our world would be a much quieter and poorer place.
The author of this book is the renowned Eileen Southern (Professor Emerita of Music and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University) who is herself a musician as well as a writer, and is eminently qualified to illuminate The Music of Black Americans to the world in general.
Pages 613 through 646 comprise a rich bibliography and discography; the index takes up 41 pages. NO music lover should be without this invaluable reference work.
