During the 19th and early 20th centuries, sheet music was produced in enormous quantities in the United States. To historians and other interested parties, much of this material serves as a way to look at social and cultural mores of the times. This digital collection from Brown University takes a look at the sheet music that reflected attitudes towards African-Americans. Containing several...

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a number of African American musicians and bandleaders had garnered the attention of the music-going public, and names such as Eubie Blake and Scott Joplin remain familiar to this very day. This rather fine online collection offered by the Library of Congress's Performing Arts division brings together a number of so-called "stock" arrangements...

The indefatigable Library of Congress American Memory collection has expanded yet again with these a new exhibit. This site contains 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The pieces span from the antebellum black face minstrelsy of the 1850s to the Civil War to Reconstruction to the early period of urbanization and the northern migration of African Americans....

Take a tour of African American music through the ages. As part of Carnegie Hall’s Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy exhibit, Portia K. Maultsby’s timeline of African American music illustrates the dynamic flow of genres from the sacred and secular traditions of the 17th century to the hip-hop, techno, and new jazz swing movements of today. Click on any of the genres to...