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African American Studies — Home Page

Primary and selected secondary sources for research in African American Studies at Princeton University.

Music databases

African American Music Reference    

Brings together text reference, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes, and discographies which chronicle the history and culture of the African American experience through music. The database will expand to include coverage of blues, jazz, spirituals, civil rights songs, slave songs, minstrelsy, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other forms of black American musical expression.

American Song    

History database that contains 50,000 tracks that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. Will include songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. Included are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.

Contemporary Musicians  

Biographical information on important figures in today's musical arena, covering artists working in all genres of modern music, including rock, jazz, pop, rap, rhythm and blues, folk, New Age, country, gospel and reggae.

RIPM: Retrospective Index, Online Archive, and E-Library of Music Periodicals (1973+)  

Note: Print volumes covering 1949-1972 are available in Mendel Music Library: Reference (SV) ML 118 M84.

Smithsonian Global Sound  

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. It includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.

Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship

African American Sheet Music

“The sheet music in this digital collection has been selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University.  The full collection consists of approximately 500,000 items, of which perhaps 250,000 are currently available for use.  It is one of the largest collections of sheet music in any library in the United States.  The sheet music, primarily vocal music of American imprint dates from the 18th century to the present day, with the largest concentration of titles in the period 1840-1950. The African-American related sheet music includes songs from the heyday of antebellum blackface minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period.”

Center for Black Music Research

"The Center for Black Music Research documents and preserves information and materials related to the black music experience throughout the world."  The CBMR is located on the campus of Columbia College in Chicago, Ill.

Dance in Video

Dance in Video  
Includes video dance productions and documentaries by performers and companies of the 20th century. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and more.

Hip Hop sites

Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner   History, news, and commentary by journalist and hip hop scholar, Davey D.

The Hiphop Archive at The Du Bois Institute, Harvard University  “The Hiphop Archive’s mission is to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”

The Original Hip-Hop (Rap) Lyrics Archive  rap and hip hop lyrics, compilations, reviews, soundtracks, links to culture and music, and hip hop magazine web sites.

Institute of Jazz Studies

"The Institute of Jazz Studies is the world's foremost jazz archive and research facility.  The IJS is part of Rutgers University Libraries, and is located in the John Cotton Dana Library on the Newark Campus."

Theatre in Video

Theatre in Video 
Includes more than 250 performances of the world's leading plays, together with more than 100 film documentaries, online in streaming video.