Early American banjo music is Black music. The banjo was created by enslaved African Americans, and according to the Smithsonian Institute, up until the 1830s, the banjo was exclusively an ...
On December 19, the first African musician ever awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was announced. The honor goes to Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat pioneer and activist who died in 1997. He joins ...
The historical significance of Black popular music in American culture is powerful. Even former President Jimmy Carter dedicated a month to African American music appreciation beginning in ...
The country has a rich, original relationship to jazz, with American techniques layered into regional traditions and rhythms. Explore 50 years of recordings picked by musicians, poets and writers.
The “Black Church in Detroit” explores the history and influence of Black religious music. For Black Music Month, host Stephen Henderson talks with Rev. Larry Simmons of Baber Memorial AME ...
Duke Ellington rejected it, Charles Mingus was ambivalent about it, and Wynton Marsalis is okay with it. For many African American musicians the word “jazz” is a double-edged term, sometimes ...