Ocean State Libraries

Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings - Joel Chandler Harris - Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books. Harris wanted to show that life in the Southern United States was hard and that they struggled a lot. The term...

Music Is History combines Questlove's deep musical expertise with his curiosity about history, examining America over the past fifty years.

First published in 1867, Slave Songs of the United States represents the work of its three editors, all of whom collected and annotated these songs while working in the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War, and also of other collectors who transcribed songs sung by former slaves in other parts of the country. The transcriptions are preceded by an introduction written by William Francis Allen, the chief editor of the collection, who provides...

Surveys the history of black music in America, from early slavesongs through jazz and the blues to soul, classical music, andcurrent trends.

The early decades of American popular music—Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Caruso—are, for most listeners, the dark ages. It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this music—black and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crude—made it onto records for all to hear. This book brings a forgotten music, hot music, to life by describing how it became the dominant American music—how...