African American Music Archives

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Heard but Not Seen | Slate

Black music in white spaces. . Away from home, I walk into unfamiliar spaces with my shoulders hunched and tight. Instinctively, I scan my surroundings, stretching every sense around the corners of the room until it feels safe. What the eye see? What the ears hear? What the nose smell? It’s Sunday afternoon and Toups South, a restaurant serving “regional southern cuisine” in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans, is mostly empty. A handful of patrons sit at the bar and at a smattering of tables. Everyone’s white: the patrons, the hostess, the bartenders. In the open kitchen I […]

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Remembering Curtis Mayfield Today on the 20th Anniversary of His Passing (December 26, 1999) | Albumism

Please join the Albumism team in celebrating Curtis Mayfield’s musical legacy and revisit audio & video highlights from his career below! Biography: Perhaps because he didn’t cross over to the pop audience as heavily as Motown’s stars, it may be that the scope of Curtis Mayfield’s talents and contributions have yet to be fully recognized. Judged merely by his records alone, the man’s legacy is enormous. As the leader of the Impressions, he recorded some of the finest soul vocal group music of the 1960s. As a solo artist in the 1970s, he helped pioneer funk and helped introduce hard-hitting […]

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Roberta Flack to Make Rare Appearance At GRAMMY Awards | American Songwriter

In a press release earlier this week, the Recording Academy® announced its 2020 Special Merit Awards recipients. The Lifetime Achievement Award honorees include Roberta Flack. The legendary musician and singer will make a rare public appearance to attend the GRAMMY Awards on Sunday, January 26, 2020 at Los Angeles’ STAPLES Center. “I am humbled and honored to be recognized in the company of such esteemed and diverse talents,” Flack said. “The dreams and love that we sing of connect our hearts – reaching across oceans, generations, and time. Our music is the legacy we leave to our children, the world’s […]

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What Louis Armstrong Really Thinks | The New Yorker

On October 31, 1965, Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong gave his first performance in New Orleans, his home town, in nine years. At twelve, he marched in parades for the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he was given his first cornet. But he had publicly boycotted the city since its banning of integrated bands, in 1956. It took the Civil Rights Act, of 1964, to undo the law. Returning should have been a victory lap. At sixty-four, his popular appeal had never been broader. His recording of “Hello, Dolly!,” from the musical then in its initial run on Broadway, bumped the […]

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Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Finally Recognizes Woman Who Practically Invented Rock and Roll | Jezebel

This year’s inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced, and they have finally gotten around to adding Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who’s got a pretty good claim to having invented that shit. She got her credit the same year as Dire Straits and Bon Jovi. The Wall Street Journal reported that Tharpe—a major gospel star who broke ground with her electric guitar style and tackling of secular themes, predating the Sun Records crew and paving the way for basically everybody who came afterward—will be inducted in the “early influences” category. Jessica Diaz-Hurtado wrote of Tharpe’s distinctive […]

African American Music

Lovely Pics of Billie Holiday With Her Dog Mister in 1949 | Vintage Everyday

African American jazz singer Billie Holiday who had a career spanning nearly thirty years was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills. Her hit “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. By the late 1940s, however, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, she performed at a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, but her reputation deteriorated because of her drug and alcohol problems. Staff,Vintage Everyday Photographs: photographed by Carl Van Vechten Full article […]

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Atlanta pays tribute to the legendary rap duo OutKast with a huge mural | CNN

(CNN) – The South has something to say — or show, rather. Finally, the city at the heart of southern hip-hop has been given what it deserves — the benevolent gaze of André 3000 and Big Boi watching over it in full photorealism. The mural, painted by an artist who goes by JEKS, presents André “André 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton on a sweeping wall in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood. In black and white, a shirtless André gives you a watchful side-eye while he presses his back to Big Boi’s shoulder. Big Boi stares viewers down intently, […]