From Spirituals to Hip Hop:
American Music of the African Diaspora
(MUS 113)
SUNY Broome Department of Music
and Theater Arts
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell

  • Freedom Now?

    The “Greensboro Four” sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, 1960. Read about the protests here. The cover of drummer Max Roach’s 1961 album We Insist! was an explicit reference to the Greensboro protests. We Insist! drew analogies between social and political freedom, and the aesthetic freedom of Roach’s music. The Max Roach Quintet performing “Driva…

  • R&B, Rock & Roll, and Integration

    As Little Richard’s drummer, Charles Connor, who later played with James Brown, put it, rock and roll is really just “rhythm and blues played with a fast beat.” Now, however, black artists were sharing spaces formerly reserved for white artists, and were at the forefront of American popular culture. In spite of the efforts of…

  • A First-Stream Rhythm and Blues Primer

    Handbill distributed by the Citizens’ Council of New Orleans, one of many such groups opposed to integration. Early rhythm and blues was essentially what its name says: an uptempo version of the blues, with a strong emphasis on the kind of driving, propulsive beat popularized by jazz. It was marketed to black urban record-buyers as…

  • Soul and Sacrament

    (Pentecostal church service.) According to Peter Guralnick: Southern soul music developed out of a time and a set of social circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated. . . when I speak of soul music, I am not referring to Motown, a phenomenon almost exactly contemporaneous but appealing far more to a pop, white, and…

  • Godfather of Soul vs. Bad Boys of Rock

    The T.A.M.I. (Teenage Awards Music Intenational) Show was a concert documentary that combined footage from two concerts held in Santa Monica, California in October 1964. The concerts were attended mostly by local high school students, who had been given free tickets to the show, and were headlined by a mix of white pop and rock-and-roll…

  • We Shall Overcome

    The Library of Congress describes the famous Civil Rights Movement song, “We Shall Overcome”: It was the most powerful song of the 20th century. It started out in church pews and picket lines, inspired one of the greatest freedom movements in U.S. history, and went on to topple governments and bring about reform all over…

  • How Billie Sang

    Billie Holiday began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at sixteen, and made her first recordings in 1933, at the age of eighteen. By the time she returned to the studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she…

  • Swinging at the Savoy

    Big band jazz was also known as swing. Swing dance developed in the segregated dance halls and ballrooms of New York City, such as the famous Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue and 140th Street. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, who you see in the film below, were the professional dance team at the Savoy. Note that the…

  • Jazz 59

    In 1959, African-American composer Ed Bland made the influential short semi-documentary film The Cry of Jazz, which explains jazz for the newbie, and situates the music in the history of black life in America. Bland used the music of avant-garde Afrofuturist composer and pianist Sun Ra as the soundtrack. 1959 was also the year that…

  • Butterfly Resources, part III: Critical Responses

    The Japanese Fan (Gustave de Jonghe, 1880s). Read “Madama Butterfly: A Study in Ambiguity” by Jordan Serchuk. Read “The Heartless GIs Who Inspired Madame Butterfly“ by Rupert Christiansen. Read “Washington National Opera’s Madama Butterfly, Reviewed,” by Mike Paarlberg. Read “Past vs. Present: Puccini’s Madame Butterfly vs. Weezer’s Pinkerton” by Maxime Scraire. Weezer’s “Across the Sea”: Read “What About Yellowface?”…

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