An old gravedigger recites the story of Nicolo Paganini, the 18th-century Italian violinist whose extraordinary skills and eerie stage presence made him a musical legend.

In this gorgeously written and “vividly fascinating” (Elle) account, a prize-winning journalist digs deep into his ancestry looking for the origins of his unusual last name and discovers that he comes from one of America’s earliest mixed-race families. “My dad’s family was a mystery,” writes journalist Joe Mozingo, having grown up with only rumors about where his father’s family was from—Italy, France, the Basque Country. But when a college professor told the blue-eyed Californian that his family name may have come from sub-Saharan Africa, Mozingo set out on an epic journey to uncover the truth. He soon discovered that all Mozingos in America, including his father’s line, appeared to have descended from a black man named Edward Mozingo who was brought to America as a slave in 1644 and, after winning his freedom twenty-eight years later, became a tenant tobacco farmer, married a white woman, and fathered one of the country’s earliest mixed-race family lineages. Tugging at the buried thread of his origins, Joe Mozingo has unearthed a saga that encompasses the full sweep of America’s history and lays bare the country’s tortured and paradoxical experience with race. Haunting and beautiful, Mozingo’s memoir paints a world where the lines based on color are both illusory and life altering. He traces his family line from the ravages of the slave trade to the mixed-race society of colonial Virginia and through the brutal imposition of racial laws.

American Music: An Introduction, Second Edition is a collection of seventeen essays surveying major African American musical genres, both sacred and secular, from slavery to the present. With contributions by leading scholars in the field, the work brings together analyses of African American music based on ethnographic fieldwork, which privileges the voices of the music-makers themselves, woven into a richly textured mosaic of history and culture. At the same time, it incorporates musical treatments that bring clarity to the structural, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics that both distinguish and unify African American music. The second edition has been substantially revised and updated, and includes new essays on African and African American musical continuities, African-derived instrument construction and performance practice, techno, and quartet traditions. Musical transcriptions, photographs, illustrations, and a new audio CD bring the music to life.

Includes a wealth of fiddling lore and illustrations; a guide to buying a fiddle and bow; tips on learning and playing the fiddle; over 800 listings of books, records, fiddling and bluegrass organizations, fiddling schools and camps, violin making supplies, films, etc.; information about fiddle contests.

Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in the English colonies, Eileen Southern weaves a fascinating narrative of intense musical activity. As singers, players, and composers, black American musicians are fully chronicled in this landmark book. Now in the third edition, the author has brought the entire text up to date and has added a wealth of new material covering the latest developments in gospel, blues, jazz, classical, crossover, Broadway, and rap as they relate to African American music.

This novel imagines the journey of a real but, until now, long-forgotten African boy who left Elmina in the Gold Coast in 1829 on a British ship, for the hope to travel to Holland. His ship was wrecked on rocks in January 1830 on the Isles of Scilly, Cornwall. With a strong narrative drive, the story evokes the hard life on board a sailing ship. It relates the boys meeting with members of the crew and his growing awareness of their world and its differences to his. The African boy Kwame, who is unnamed and buried on St. Martins, is a feisty, clever, and ambitious young man whose relationships with the crew expose the violence, bigotry, and hypocrisy of the world they came from. This book explores the worlds of Europe and Africa. Its characters are vividly drawn, and the story evokes a changing world at a time when slavery was being defeated.

If you are looking for exciting and challenging fiddle solos by one of America's hottest fiddlers, this book is for you. Contains Craig's outstanding fiddle arrangements on: Dueling Fiddles; Rocky Top; Black Mountain Rag; Tennessee Waltz; Faded Love; Cajun Fiddle; Jole Blon; Gardenia Waltz; Draggin' the Bow; Granny Does Your Dog Bite?; Black-Eyed Suzie; Wabash Cannonball; and many more. Presents 60 great fiddling tunes! the CD is sparkling stereo listening recording featuring Craig Duncan backed up by a top Nashville country rhythm section!

This biography of 97-year-old fiddler Richard Seaman, who grew up in Kissimmee Park, Florida, relies on oral history and folklore research to define the place of musicianship and storytelling in the state's history from one artist's perspective.

Each of these essays illuminates an important dimension of the complex array of Black male experiences as workers, artists, warriors, and leaders. The essays describe the expectations and demands to struggle, to resist, and facilitate the survival of African American culture and community. Black manhood was shaped not only in relation to Black womanhood, but was variously nurtured and challenged, honed and transformed against a backdrop of white male power and domination, and the relentless expectations and demands on them to struggle, resist, and to facilitate the survival of African-American culture and community.