Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music
historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and
critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and
musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and
scholarship, these essays document Ramsey's search to understand
America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an
African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching
collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism,
musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black
musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop.
Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that
precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a
field, as well as a rousing call to readers to continue to ask the hard
questions and write the hard truths.