African American Music History

Product List
    • The Lives and Times of Sun Ra
    • By: John Szwed
    • Narrated by: Leon Nixon
    • Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
    • Release date: 11-09-21
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 28 ratings
    • Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra - a.k.a. Herman Blount - was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn....

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    • A Very Short Introduction
    • By: Jonathan Scott Holloway
    • Narrated by: Diontae Black
    • Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
    • Release date: 02-21-23
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 1 rating
    • What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. This book illuminates the US's core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being....

    Regular price: $11.17 or 1 credit

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    • How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
    • By: Larry Tye
    • Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
    • Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
    • Release date: 05-07-24
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
    • From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie.

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    • A Captivating Guide to the People and Events that Shaped the History of the United States
    • By: Captivating History
    • Narrated by: Duke Holm
    • Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins
    • Release date: 01-16-18
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 33 ratings
    • Explore captivating stories and facts about African American history! The history of African Americans is a long and tragic chronicle of events....

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    • Notes in Praise of Black Performance
    • By: Hanif Abdurraqib
    • Narrated by: JD Jackson
    • Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
    • Release date: 03-30-21
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 235 ratings
    • MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and best-selling author Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture....

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    • The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
    • By: Judith Tick
    • Narrated by: Carmen Jewel Jones
    • Length: 19 hrs and 55 mins
    • Release date: 12-26-23
    • Language: English
    • 3.5 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
    • Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. Historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist....

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    • Searching for Tupac Shakur
    • By: Michael Eric Dyson
    • Narrated by: Cary Hite
    • Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
    • Release date: 06-29-11
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 353 ratings
    • Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971–1996) was an American rap artist, actor, and social activist....

    Regular price: $15.56 or 1 credit

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    • By: Peter Benjaminson, Greil Macus - foreword
    • Narrated by: Sean Crisden
    • Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
    • Release date: 10-16-18
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 67 ratings
    • In January 1959, Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family and founded the Detroit-based record company that in less than a decade was to become the largest Black-owned business in the United States....

    Regular price: $21.49 or 1 credit

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    • The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound
    • By: Nelson George
    • Narrated by: Ron Butler
    • Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
    • Release date: 05-05-21
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 16 ratings
    • Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder, Berry Gordy Jr....

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    • Making Race and Popular Music in the United States
    • By: Matthew D. Morrison
    • Narrated by: Matthew D. Morrison
    • Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
    • Release date: 08-27-24
    • Language: English
    • Not rated yet
    • Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century.

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    • Slavery, Underground Railroad, People Including Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks (Black History Month, Book 1)
    • By: Adam Brown
    • Narrated by: Jim D. Johnston
    • Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
    • Release date: 05-12-20
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 1 rating
    • Discover the real truth behind African American history. You will be amazed to learn about some of the great African Americans and their legacies....

    Regular price: $11.69 or 1 credit

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    • By: Yona Zeldis McDonough
    • Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
    • Length: 53 mins
    • Release date: 03-26-19
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
    • If not for a stint in reform school, young Louis Armstrong might never have become a musician. It was a teacher at the Colored Waifs' Home who gave him a cornet, promoted him to band leader, and saw talent in the tough kid from the even tougher New Orleans neighborhood called Storyville....

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    • By: Nelson George
    • Narrated by: Brandon Dirden
    • Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
    • Release date: 05-18-21
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
    • From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, this passionate and provocative book tells the complete story of Black music in the last 50 years....

    Regular price: $19.95 or 1 credit

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    • Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
    • By: Penny M. Von Eschen
    • Narrated by: Christina Delaine
    • Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
    • Release date: 07-10-18
    • Language: English
    • 4 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
    • At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the US State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth....

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    • Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop
    • By: Imani Perry
    • Narrated by: Emil Nicholas Gallina
    • Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
    • Release date: 06-16-15
    • Language: English
    • 4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
    • At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip-hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here....

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    • The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
    • By: Daphne A. Brooks
    • Narrated by: Janina Edwards
    • Length: 20 hrs and 26 mins
    • Release date: 05-24-22
    • Language: English
    • 3.5 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
    • Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a new perspective on acclaimed figures such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce, who exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women....

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    • By: Nelson George
    • Narrated by: Brandon Dirden
    • Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
    • Release date: 05-18-21
    • Language: English
    • 5 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
    • From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between Black youth culture and the mass media....

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    • Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America
    • By: Raymond Arsenault
    • Narrated by: David Crommett
    • Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
    • Release date: 03-04-13
    • Language: English
    • 4.5 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
    • Award-winning civil rights historian Ray Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial....

    Regular price: $24.95 or 1 credit

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