New Website Explores the Origins of African American Music

dukeuniversitylogoScholars at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, have debuted an interactive website that chronicles what is believed to be among the earliest examples of the music of the African diaspora. The website Musical Passage tells the story of an important, but little known record of early African diasporic music.

The project focuses on two pages of sheet music from Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica It is believed to be the first transcription of African music in the Caribbean, and possibly, in the Americas.

The project was created by Mary Caton Lingold a doctoral candidate in English at Duke, Laurent Dubois, a professor of Romance studies and history at Duke, and David K. Garner, a composer with Ph.D. from Duke who has been hired as an assistant professor of music at the University of South Carolina.

Lingold says that “you’d be hard pressed to name a living genre of music that enslaved musicians didn’t help to create or transform. Jazz, country, rock, blues, reggae and the list goes on. Turn on the radio and you are hearing these musicians’ story. But we don’t know a lot about their early music because it was not preserved in conventional ways. And that is why a little artifact like this is so important, because it helps us to know more about what their performances may have sounded like.”

Related Articles

3 COMMENTS

Leave a Reply

Get the JBHE Weekly Bulletin

Receive our weekly email newsletter delivered to your inbox

Latest News

Ball State University Combines Women’s, Gender, and African American Studies

The women and gender studies program and the African American studies program at  Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, have been combined to form the Department of Women's, Gender and African American Studies. Sharon Jones, a professor of English at Ball State University, has been named chair of the new department.

Higher Education Grants or Gifts of Interest to African Americans

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.

Vanderbilt’s New Center for Research on Inequality and Health

The center’s scholarship aims to deepen society’s understanding of the causes of health-related inequalities, how they intersect, and how they affect population health. The center’s research hopes to formulate potential solutions to these challenges through advocacy, intervention, and public policy.

The Official Poverty Rate for African Americans Is the Lowest in History

The bad news is that In 2022, the Black poverty rate was still more than double to rate for non-Hispanic Whites. In 2022, 22.3 percent of all Black children lived in poverty.

Featured Jobs