An award-winning Black feminist music critic takes us on an epic journey through radical sound from Bessie Smith to Beyoncé. Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America’s first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae’s liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians. With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.

The most successful and influential rock band to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane created the sound of a generation. Their smash hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" virtually invented the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music and, during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, came to personify the decade's radical counterculture. In this groundbreaking biography of the band, veteran music writer and historian Jeff Tamarkin produces a portrait of the band like none that has come before it. Having worked closely with Jefferson Airplane for more than a decade, Tamarkin had unprecedented access to the band members, their families, friends, lovers, crew members, fellow musicians, cultural luminaries, even the highest-ranking politicians of the time. More than just a definitive history, Got a Revolution! is a rock legend unto itself. Jann Wenner, editor-in-chief and publisher of Rolling Stone, wrote, "The classic [Jefferson] Airplane lineup were both architects and messengers of a psychedelic age, a liberation of mind and body that profoundly changed American art, politics, and spirituality. It was a renaissance that could only have been born in San Francisco, and the Airplane, more than any other band in town, spread the good news nationwide."

The Detroitist is an anthology of poems and stories about Detroit written by a daughter of Detroit. Natives of Detroit will recognize the places, faces, and history of their city. Newcomers to Detroit will learn about a Detroit that was and is a real locale, not a media-driven invention. Those returning to the Detroit their parents and grandparents fled will realize that they are not here to save Detroit, but to be saved by their new hometown. Words of hope. Words of grief. Words of joy. Words of sadness. Stories about a long-ago time. Stories about today and tomorrow. The Detroitist is a fascinating combination of poetry and prose that will entertain you, engage you, and educate you. The Detroitist is a book about Detroiters, for Detroiters, written by a Detroiter. If you are not already a Detroiter, The Detroitist will probably make you want to be a Detroiter. The Detroitist is about "Detroit Pride," past, present, and future. Marsha Battle Philpot, known in Detroit as "Marsha Music," was born in Detroit and grew up in Highland Park, Michigan. In 2012, she was awarded a prestigious Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship, and in 2015 she received a Knight Arts Award. She is also recognized as an exemplar of Detroit style.

Performance and identity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Arican-American creative work.

African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

The author of What Was the First Rock 'n' Roll Record? chronicles the spectacular chart-topping success of Bill Haley's hit record "Rock Around the Clock," focusing particular attention on the cultural setting that surrounded the birth of rock music in 1955. Original.