LibGuides: Primary Sources: African-Americans: Music

Online Sources: Music

African-American Sheet Music (John Hay Library, Brown University)
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"The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University. The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use. It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States. "
African American Musicians
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A collection of items from JScholarship digital collections from Johns Hopkins University.
Blues Photograph Collection
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"The Blues Archive houses a large number of blues-related photographs. Taken by a variety of photographers, these images help document the blues from the beginnings of its popularity in the 1920s through today. The photographs highlight performers, festivals, and locations important to the blues.

The Blues Archive does not own copyright to the majority of these images and permissions must be obtained for their use. "
Field School for Cultural Documentation - North Mississippi Music Project
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"This collection consists of oral histories regarding music in north Mississippi, with particular emphasis on gospel music."
Leona Williams & Edna Winston (1922-1927)
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Louisiana Sheet Music Collection (Tulane University)
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"The Louisiana Sheet Music Collection is comprised of sheet music published in, or with topical relevance to, Louisiana (with an emphasis on New Orleans). Many important local composers are represented, including Basile Bares, Eugene Chassaignac, Edouard Dejan and Louis Moreau Gottschalk as well as several interesting, but lesser known, nineteenth-century composers. The collection covers 100 years in the history of local publishing (1838-1938) and represents a wide range of styles of popular and vernacular music, including Creole songs, nineteenth-century dance music, Confederate anthems, Mexican and Cuban danzas and danzon, ragtime, blues, and jazz . "
Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection
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"At the core of the Louisiana State Museum's Music Collection is its internationally known Jazz Collection, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world. The Jazz Collection chronicles the music and careers of the men and women who created, enhanced and continue in the tradition of New Orleans jazz at the local, national and international levels. It consists of instruments, pictorial sheet music, photographs, records, tapes, manuscripts and other items ranging from Louis Armstrong's first cornet to a 1917 disc of the first jazz recording ever made. It includes the world's largest collection of instruments owned and played by important figures in jazz- trumpets, cornets, trombones, clarinets and saxophones played by jazz greats such as Bix Beiderbecke, Edward "Kid" Ory, George Lewis, Sidney Bechet and Dizzy Gillespie." Some materials are available online
Marsalis on Music, Episode 2, Listening for Clues: Marsalis on Form
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A series for young people of our time, it embraces classical music as well as jazz. After each performance, Marsalis illuminates the music in terms that everyone can understand, using language that is clear and simple, and infused with the colourful vernacular of Jazz. Musical performances include 'The Nutcracker', Prokofiev´s 'Classical Symphony', 'Stars and Stripes Forever' and more.
Ralston Crawford Collection of Jazz Photography
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"Ralston Crawford was a painter, lithographer and photographer. " Tulane University provides an online collection of some of his photographs related to jazz music and culture.
Ralston Crawford Collection of Jazz Photography (Tulane University)
"Ralston Crawford was a painter, lithographer and photographer. He was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1906, but grew up in Buffalo, New York, where his father worked as a cargo ship captain. "
Sheldon Harris Collection
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"Many of the minstrel songs contained in this digital collection are extremely offensive. However, it is impossible to adequately understand American racial attitudes of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, without examining some blatantly racist ideas. Most of the music featured in this collection is not fringe material, but some of the most popular songs of their times."
Victim of the Joke?-- An Opera
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Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions Vol. I-IV
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Walter Lyons Scrapbook
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"In 1967 Mrs. Walter Lyons wrote letters to a number of her husband’s favorite jazz musicians, asking them to surprise her husband by wishing him happy birthday. This scrapbook contains letters, postcards, and signed photographs extending birthday greetings to Mr. Walter Lyons. Musicians include Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Chuck Mangione, J. J. Johnson, Benny Golson, Sonny Rollins, Phil Woods, Wayne Shorter, and others."

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Academic Video Online (via ProQuest Platform) This link opens in a new window
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Academic Video Online is the most comprehensive video subscription available to libraries. It delivers ~ 68,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.More than 14,000 titles are exclusive to Alexander Street, all with a predictable annual cost.Academic Video Online includes a variety of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, feature films, performances, news programs and newsreels, demonstrations, and raw footage. Patrons will find thousands of award-winning films, including Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners. Academic institutions will find the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
Academic Video Online (via Alexander Street Press) This link opens in a new window
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Academic Video Online is the most comprehensive video subscription available to libraries. It delivers more than 66,000 titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more.
Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
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Always on the cutting edge, Films On Demand‘s platform provides users with the content, tools, speed, and performance that today’s online experience demands. With films from top producers including A&E, PBS, BBC Learning, National Geographic, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, HBO Documentary Films, PBS NewsHour, Open University, Bill Moyers, California Newsreel, Annenberg Learner, TED, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, and more.
Docuseek This link opens in a new window
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Tip: After searching, check the box Show only licensed films to eliminate any films to which CNU does not have access.
An interdisciplinary collection of documentary and social issues films and videos. It includes exclusive educational streaming access to content from Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films (including The Fanlight Collection and dGenerate Films), Kartemquin Films, MediaStorm, the National Film Board of Canada, Scorpion TV Sincerely Films, Terra Nova Films and KimStim.
Music & Dance Online This link opens in a new window
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Music and Dance Online delivers the largest, most diverse catalog of music content in the world for students, scholars, and patrons of the arts. The multimedia resource features works from thousands of respected partners, covers hundreds of genres from alternative to zydeco and from alternative dance to operatic arias, and encompasses a wide range of content formats - including scores, reference, and high definition audio and video.
Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
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- Faculty Playlist Creation
- Student Access to Faculty Playlists
A comprehensive collection of music available online. It also includes notes on the works being played as well as biographical information on composers and artists.

Book Sources: Music

A selection of books/e-books available in Trible Library.
Click the title for location and availability information.

Off campus access instructions (for e-books)

The Black Composer Speaks by David N. Baker et al.
Call Number: ML390 .B628
ISBN: 081081045X
Check the Technique. Volume 2 by Brian Coleman; Adam Mansbach
Call Number: ML3531 .C651 2014
ISBN: 9780990307600
Check the Technique : Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies by Brian Coleman and Questlove
Call Number: Online - Ebook Central
ISBN: 9780307494429
Folk songs of the American Negro. Number One by Frederick J. Work
Call Number: Online - free - HathiTrust
Jubilee and Plantation Songs
Call Number: Online - free - HathiTrust
Characteristic Favorites, as sung by the Hampton students, Jubilee singers, Fisk University students, and other companies : also, a number of new and pleasing selections
Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History by Robert Walser
Call Number: ML3507 .K4 1999
ISBN: 0195091736
Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion by Judith Tick
Call Number: ML200 .M89 2008
ISBN: 0195139887
"The anthology of primary sources contains about 160 selections from 1540 to 2000."
My Song: A Memoir by Harry Belafonte; Michael Shnayerson
Call Number: ML420.B32 A3 2011
ISBN: 0307272265
Negro Folk-Songs. (volumes 1 & 3)
Call Number: Online - free - HathiTrust
Recorded by Natalie Curtis-Burlin
A New Anthology of Art Songs by African American Composers by Jeanine Wagner (Editor); Margaret R. Simmons (Contribution by); William Brown (Foreword by)
Call Number: M1619 .N48 2004
ISBN: 9780809325238
Old Plantation Hymns by William Eleazar Barton
Call Number: Online - free - HathiTrust
A collection of hitherto unpublished melodies of the slave and the freedman, with historical and descriptive notes
Sam Myers the Blues is My Story by Sam Myers; Jeff Horton
Call Number: Alexander Street Press Music Online
ISBN: 9781604731453
Slave Songs of the United States; the complete original collection (136 songs)
Call Number: Online - free - HathiTrust
collected and compiled by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison in 1867, with new piano arrangements and guitar chords by Irving Schlein.
Songs of the Unsung by Horace Tapscott
Call Number: ML417.T18 A3 2001
ISBN: 0822325314
The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott
Steven L. Isoardi (Editor)
To Stretch Our Ears by James Heywood Alexander
Call Number: ML200 .T67 2002
ISBN: 0393974111
A Documentary History of America's Music

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