Music
African American Music
Books on African American music are at these call numbers:
- General ML 3556
- Blues ML 3521
- Gospel ML 3187
- Jazz ML 3506-3509; ML 3561 .J3
- Rap ML 3531
- Soul ML 3537
See also Popular Music under the Special Topics tab.
Some primary resources:
- Music Online: African American Music Reference This link opens in a new window
Contains reference texts, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies chronicling the diverse history and culture of the African American experience through music. Covers blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of musical expression. Links to the audio streaming database American Song enable users to listen to music that accompanies the liner notes and album information. Users must create an account to create and access play lists.
- Music Online: American Music This link opens in a new window
More than 100,000 tracks of streaming audio, including songs by and about African Americans, American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Includes songs of the Civil Rights movement, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. Note: Content from the former African American Song database is now in American Song.
- American Memory This link opens in a new window
Multimedia collections from the Library of Congress of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. Over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few.
- Black Thought and Culture (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
A digital collection of monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews by leaders within the black community.
- Black GroovesOnline newsletter from the Archives of Black Music and Culture at Indiana University.
- The Spirituals DatabaseThis database can be used to find recordings of African American Spirituals performed by solo voices.
Essential Resource for American Music
Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd editionCall Number: Ref ML 101 .U6 N48 2013Publication Date: 2013Available in Reference section of the Music & Dance Library. Articles are being incorporated into Oxford Music Online (link in box below).
Other Library and Web Resources
Books about music in the U.S. are at ML 200 - ML 200.8 in General Stacks.
- American Memory This link opens in a new window
Multimedia collections from the Library of Congress of digitized documents, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures, and texts. Over 100 collections, including, for example, African-American pamphlets, Chautauqua flyers, Depression photographs, Coca-Cola advertising, and the papers of Alexander Graham Bell, to name just a few.
- Music Online: American Music This link opens in a new window
More than 100,000 tracks of streaming audio, including songs by and about African Americans, American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Includes songs of the Civil Rights movement, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests, and more. Note: Content from the former African American Song database is now in American Song.
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Includes more than 20,000 streaming videos which allow searching for specific video segments, organize videos into folders, create personal playlists for your students to view, and even create customized bookmarks within any program. Includes videos from the Humanities & Social Sciences, Business & Economics, Science & Mathematics, and Health & Medicine collections.
- Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Covers music and musicians of all types and time periods; includes bibliographies, composers' worklists, links to related sites, audio and music examples. Provides access to Grove Music Online (incorporating the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and New Grove Dictionary of Jazz), as well as The Oxford Dictionary of Music and The Oxford Companion to Music.
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- Performing Arts Encyclopedia - Library of CongressA guide to the music, dance and theatre collections and exhibitions at Library of Congress.
- Songs of AmericaAmerican history through songs. Recordings, essays, articles. From the Library of Congress.
Research Institutions and Archives
- Archives of African American Music and CultureA repository of research materials at Indiana University. Links to related sites.
- New Music USAA merger of the American Music Center and Meet the Composer. Their Online Library contains works by more than 6,000 composers with over 14,000 media samples (recordings and scores).