rhapsode

Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

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Southern — The Music of Black Americans

Cited in 2 notes
Classical music, Horowitz — Dvořák's Prophecy

Find it in a library:WorldCat·Open Library

Author: Eileen Southern
Title: The Music of Black Americans: A History
Year: 1971
Type: Academic history (W. W. Norton; third edition 1997)

The book began in a room where somebody said the field didn’t exist. In 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a CUNY faculty meeting took up Black-music course offerings and a colleague announced there was “nothing to Black music”; Southern later recalled, “I was very, very hurt… I was really furious at all these racist remarks.”1 She was a Renaissance musicologist — a University of Chicago graduate and concert-trained pianist whose NYU dissertation became The Buxheim Organ Book — and when she checked the library she found exactly three prior books on the subject, dated 1878, 1936, and 1936. So she wrote the fourth: a scholarly history of Black American music from the first Africans’ arrival in the English colonies forward, its four parts titled from the spirituals: “Song in a Strange Land,” “Let My People Go,” “Blow Ye the Trumpet,” “Lift Every Voice.”2 Her original conception leaned toward the notated concert tradition; her Norton editor pushed her to take in jazz, blues, folk music, and the performers, making it, in her words, “a very comprehensive book instead of just a one-sided book.” She printed complete folksongs “that can—and should—be sung by the reader,” and priced the paperback at $4.45 so, as she put it, Black readers could afford it.3

The assessments that stuck are about what the book made possible. David Horn’s tribute in Popular Music called it “the first academic study to give serious scholarly attention to the totality of African-American music” and judged that “It did more to establish the validity of the subject in the academy than any other single book”; the scholar Samuel A. Floyd Jr. called its publication “a watershed event.”4 The career around it kept founding things. In 1973 Southern and her husband Joseph launched The Black Perspective in Music, the first long-running academic journal devoted to Black music and, in one profile’s phrase, “a lifeline” for Black scholars seeking tenure. In 1975–76 she became the first Black woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; in 2001 she received the National Humanities Medal for having “helped transform the study and understanding of American music.”5 Harvard was not gentle and she said so: “I do think that Harvard is very racist… it’s not different from any other place. What I’m saying is you don’t expect it.”6 The contemporary reviews carried real dissents alongside the praise — the ethnomusicologist Charles Keil complained the book was “all when, where, and who, very little how, and almost no why at all,” and a Black Scholar reviewer noted that The Supremes and The Temptations “are mentioned so incidentally that they are not listed in the index.”7

One 1971 reviewer called the book “a reconciliation, not a confrontation,” and meant it as a limit; it reads now as the division of labor. Southern documents where later writers argue (Horn’s summary of her method: “resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced”), and the confrontation the reviewer missed arrived fifty years later, on this same shelf, as Dvořák’s Prophecy, standing on the record she built.8 rhapsode already leans on her without saying so: the “America’s classical music” argument in Jazz cites Billy Taylor’s essay from her journal.9 On this shelf she is the authority under the family’s whole color-line argument, and the proof that the history of Black music in America — concert hall included, “Concert Artists” and “Opera Companies” chapters and all — was written, by a Black woman, decades before the trade press noticed the gap.

Key contributions

  • The field-founding history: Black American music treated as one continuous, documented story from 1619 forward, when the prior scholarly literature was three books.
  • The full span on equal terms: spirituals, church music, minstrelsy, ragtime, blues, jazz, Broadway, and the concert tradition in a single narrative, with the composers at one end of the arc.
  • The infrastructure: The Black Perspective in Music (1973–1990) as the field’s first durable journal, edited from her own study for seventeen years.
  • The method as argument: unpolemical, exhaustively factual — the “reconciliation” its critics wanted confronted, which later, argued books stand on.

See also

  • Dvořák’s Prophecy — the confrontation this book’s documentation makes possible, and the shelf’s argued counterpart
  • Classical Music in America — the institutional history of the concert world whose color line Southern’s subjects lived
  • Classical music — the family whose American color-line story stands on this book

Footnotes

  1. The 1968 faculty-meeting scene and Southern’s recollection per Harvard’s Eileen Southern exhibit, Scholarship page; Harvard’s carriers differ on the campus (Brooklyn College vs. York College), so it is given here as CUNY (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  2. Her degrees, the Renaissance dissertation, and The Buxheim Organ Book per the Harvard Gazette obituary; the three prior books (Trotter 1878, Hare 1936, Locke 1936), the book’s span, and the four hymn-titled parts per the Harvard exhibit’s Scholarship page (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  3. The editor’s push toward comprehensiveness (Norton’s David Hamilton), the “one-sided book” quote, the printed folksongs, and the $4.45 pricing per the Harvard exhibit’s Scholarship page (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  4. Horn’s assessments quoted verbatim from his tribute in Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003); Floyd’s “watershed event” per the Harvard exhibit’s Life and Career page (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  5. The journal’s 1973 founding, first-of-its-kind standing, and 1990 close per Eileen Southern, Wikipedia and the Harvard Gazette obituary; “a lifeline” per the NEH’s National Humanities Medal profile, which also carries the medal citation; the Harvard first in the FAS-scoped wording per Harvard Library’s exhibit, with the appointment dated 1975 by Harvard’s memorial minute and her joining the tenured faculty January 1976 per the exhibit (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  6. Quoted verbatim per the Harvard exhibit’s Life and Career page (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  7. Charles Keil’s Ethnomusicology (1974) complaint and Ione Vargus’s Black Scholar (1972) index observation, both as quoted in the Harvard exhibit’s Scholarship page (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  8. James C. Downey’s 1971 “a reconciliation, not a confrontation” as quoted in the Harvard exhibit’s Scholarship page; “resolutely unpolemical and meticulously balanced” per Horn’s Popular Music tribute (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  9. Billy Taylor, “Jazz: America’s Classical Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 14, no. 1 (1986) — the citation already carried in rhapsode’s jazz history; the “Concert Artists” and “Opera Companies” chapter sections per the third edition’s Google Books record (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

Published July 20, 2026