This book retraces the African origins of African-American forms of worship. During a five-year period in the field, Pitts played the piano at and recorded numerous worship services in black Baptist churches throughout rural Texas. His historical comparisons and linguistic analyses of this material uncover striking parallels between "Afro-Baptist" services and the religious rituals of Western and Central Africa, as well as other African-derived rituals in the United States Sea Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Pitts demonstrates that African and African-American worship share an underlying binary ritual frame: the somber melancholy of the first frame and the high emotion of the second frame. Pitts's revealing perspective on this often misunderstood aspect of African-American religion provides an investigative model for the study of diaspora cultural practices and the residual influence of their African sources.

Traditional songs from the Catskill area of New York State are accompanied by detailed discusssions of their roots, development, musical structure, and subject matter

While his father works in the city over the winter, a young boy thinks of some good times they've shared and looks forward to his return to their South African home in the spring.

Traditional African musical forms have long been accepted as fundamental to the emergence of blues and jazz. Yet there has been little effort at compiling recorded evidence to document their development. This discography brings together hundreds of recordings that trace in detail the evolution of the African American musical experience, from early wax cylinder recordings made in West Africa to voodoo rituals from the Carribean Basin to the songs of former slaves in the American South.