"Unvoiced longings": Du Bois and the "sorrow songs" -- Swan songs and art songs: the spirituals and the "new Negro" in the 1920s -- "The twilight of aestheticism": Locke on cosmopolitanism and musical evolution -- "Beneath the seeming informality": Hughes, Hurston, and the politics of form -- Saving jazz from its friends: the predicament of jazz criticism in the swing era
Summary
A critical and historical study of the debate over early African-American music that draws on the views of W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and others to show competing notions of how this music relates to cultural inherita
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-323) and index