The tradition that reorganised twentieth-century music.
11 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
John A. Lomax · 1910
Argues that cowboy songs were a genuine oral folk tradition worth preserving in print before it disappeared, and collects them directly from working…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Book of American Negro Spirituals
James Weldon Johnson & J. Rosamond Johnson · 1925
Argues in its scholarly preface that the spiritual is a deliberate artistic creation of enslaved composers, not an unconscious folk product, and…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music
Henry Edward Krehbiel · 1914
Argues, against the prevailing view of his time, that African-American folksong was a genuinely original American art form rooted in African musical…
+2 more at this level
10 works
John A. Lomax
Argues that cowboy songs were a genuine oral folk tradition worth preserving in print before it disappeared, and collects them directly from working cowboys rather than published sources.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Weldon Johnson & J. Rosamond Johnson
Argues in its scholarly preface that the spiritual is a deliberate artistic creation of enslaved composers, not an unconscious folk product, and presents the songs to make that authorship visible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026W. C. Handy
Collects and annotates blues songs from oral tradition, arguing that the blues had already crystallised into a recognisable musical form well before its commercial popularisation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry O. Osgood
Traces jazz from ragtime and blues through the early New Orleans and New York dance bands, arguing that jazz had already become America's most significant contribution to world music.
link checked 17 Sept 2026R. W. S. Mendl
Argues, unusually early and from outside America, that jazz is a genuine artistic development rather than a passing fashion or a debasement of serious music.
Stephanie DeLane Doktor
Argues that the same arrangements circulated between Fletcher Henderson's Black orchestra and Paul Whiteman's white orchestra were heard and marketed differently purely on the basis of the performers' race, showing genre boundaries in swing to be racial constructs rather than musical ones.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Vilde Aaslid
Argues that Mingus's hybrid narration-and-jazz piece redefines improvisation as a form of spontaneous composition, blurring the line jazz criticism usually draws between composing in advance and playing in the moment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Edward Krehbiel
Argues, against the prevailing view of his time, that African-American folksong was a genuinely original American art form rooted in African musical practice rather than a derivative of European hymnody.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dorothy Scarborough
Documents field collection of African-American folksong across the American South and argues that these songs preserve distinct regional and historical layers rather than being one undifferentiated tradition.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cynthia R. Nielsen
Argues that Gadamer's account of art as an event that happens to its participants, rather than an object they observe, better explains the collective, unscripted give-and-take of free jazz than standard aesthetic theories of musical works.
link checked 17 Sept 2026