African American music

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

Inmates at this bucolic but brutal prison have long been singing the blues to sustain themselves, and a new compilation of gospel songs continues the legacy.

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York.

And it's all thanks to this mother-daughter dream team.

Louis Armstrong’s complicated relationship with New Orleans.

The Sugarhill Gang song remains one of rap's most beloved. But it took serendipity, a book of rhymes, and an agreement to settle a lawsuit for it to survive.

A look at "Biography Of A Phantom", Robert McCormick's book about blues legend Robert Johnson.

The music that grew out of Durham's tobacco manufacturing plants influenced some of the most widely recorded musicians of the last 65 years—and still does.

Incarcerated musicians have crafted some of the most iconic songs in American music history while prisons reap the profits.

The rediscovery of demos performed by the songwriters of the legendary Memphis recording studio reveals a hidden history of soul.

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

The new documentary “I Am Everything” explores the gulf between what Richard accomplished and what he got for it.

The ragtime composer's life, career, and resurrection.

Sha-Rock claims her place as the first female MC in hip-hop history.

The Pointer Sisters, the Great Migration, and the soul of country.

The banjo did not exist before it was created by the hands of enslaved people in the New World.

In search of the mythical blues—and their real urban origins.

“That spirit of community, which we all talk about as the roots of hip-hop, really originates in that block party concept.”

It's where legends like Tina Turner and Ray Charles launched their careers.

A legendary singer on faith, loss, and a family legacy.