Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Part I: "They Sang a Song of Triumph
- 1. "Go Sound the Jubilee": Slave Narratives, William Wells Brown & Martin Delany
- 2. "Uplifting the Race", Pauline E. Hopkins & Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Part II: "Depths to Which Mere Sound Had No Business to Go"
- 3. "The Most Treasured Heritage of the American Negro", James Weldon Johnson
- 4. "Their Joy Runs, Bang! Into Ecstasy", Langston Hughes, Claude McKay & Zora Neale Hurston
- Part III: "The Only True History of the Times"
- 5. "Not Many People Ever Really Hear It", Richard Wright, Ann Petry & James Baldwin
- 6. "The Brother Does Not [Does] Sing, Ralph Ellison
- Part IV: "The Length of the Music Was the Only Form"
- 7. "There Must be Some People Who Lived for Music", Margaret Walker & William Melvin Kelley
- 8. "The Sound Baked Inside Their Heads", Amiri Baraka & Henry Dumas
- Coda: "What Good is a Liturgy Without a Text?"
- Selected Bibliography
- Selected Discography
- Index