This book is based on performances and transcriptions from the DCI music videos Herlin Riley: Ragtime & beyond, and Johnny Vidacovich: Street beats modern applications. Additional interviews and essays on: Baby Dodds, Vernel Fournier, Ed Blackwell, James Black and Freddie Kohlman, Smokey Johnson, David Lee, and bassist Bill Huntington.

Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called "bounce." Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a "New Orleans sound" that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions. In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city's poor and working-class African Americans.

Drumsville! The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat traces the history of drums and drumming in the Crescent City, exploring more than three centuries of the instrument and the art form that transformed New Orleans into the musical powerhouse it is today. Created as a companion to the New Orleans Jazz Museum exhibit of the same name, Drumsville! examines the drummer’s role in the evolution of brass bands, Black masking Indians, traditional and modern jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and funk.

Music, magic and myth are elements essential to the identities of New Orleans musicians. The city's singular contributions to popular music around the world have been unrivaled; performing this music authentically requires collective improvisation, taking performers on sonorous sojourns in unanticipated, 'magical' moments; and membership in the city's musical community entails participation in the myth of New Orleans, breathing new life into its storied traditions. On the basis of 56 open-ended interviews with those in the city's musical community, Michael Urban discovers that, indeed, community is what it is all about. In their own words, informants explain that commercial concerns are eclipsed by the pleasure of playing in 'one big band' that disassembles daily into smaller performing units whose rosters are fluid, such that, over time, 'everybody plays with everybody'. Although Hurricane Katrina nearly terminated the city, New Orleans and its music—in no small part due to the sacrifices and labors of its musicians—have come back even stronger. Dancing to their own drum, New Orleanians again prove themselves to be admirably out of step with the rest of America.

"Old Jordan" tells how, when he was a boy, he used his drum to summon General Andrew Jackson's troops into action in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans.

From the eponymous star of one of the most popular reality shows in Fuse’s history, this no-holds-barred memoir and “snappily dictated story of inverted cultural norms in the wards of New Orleans” (East Bay Express) reveals the fascinating truth about a gay, self-proclaimed mama’s boy who exploded onto the formerly underground Bounce music scene and found acceptance, healing, self-expression, and stardom. As the “undisputed ambassador” of the energetic, New Orleans-based Bounce movement, Big Freedia isn’t afraid to twerk, wiggle, and shake her way to self-confidence, and is encouraging her fans to do the same. In her engrossing memoir, Big Freedia tells the inside story of her path to fame, the peaks and valleys of her personal life, and the liberation that Bounce music brings to herself and every one of her fans who is searching for freedom. Big Freedia immediately pulls us into the relationship between her personal life and her career as an artist; being a “twerking sissy” is not just a job, she says, but a salvation. A place to find solace and escape from the battles she faced growing up in the worst neighborhood in New Orleans. To deal with losing loved ones to the violence on the streets, drug overdoses, and jail. To survive hurricane Katrina by living on her roof for two days with three adults and a child. To grapple with the difficulties and celebrate the joys of living. In this eye-opening memoir that bursts with energy, you’ll learn the history of the Bounce movement and meet all the colorful characters that pepper its music scene. “Whether detailing the highs or the lows, Freedia’s tales pop as much as the booty that made her famous” (Out Magazine).

John Edwin Mason is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia, where he teaches African history and the history of photography.