Ranging Across Time and Scale, V. Shayne Frederick Holds Office Hours at Uncle Bobbie’s
MusiQ Department Artist Vince Anthony Debuts “Hurricane” Music Video
MusiQology Rx Fundraiser for One Art Community Center
Beyoncé’s Homecoming Film Preserves and Reveres Black History
Why Country Music is So Scared of Black People
DaMaris B. Hill’s New Book is a Powerful, Wondrous Thing
(FREE SHOW) Dr. Guy Performs with Ursula Rucker this Thursday, March 14, at World Café
Hide/Melt/Ghost’s Harlem Debut is a Major Moment for Black Music Scholarship & Performance
The Time Stevie Wonder Taught White Surfers how to Dance
Music Lives with MusiQology Events in Virginia and Philadelphia
The 2019 GRAMMYs: Streaks Broken, Questions Unanswered
The 2019 MusiQology GRAMMYs Preview
Ursula Rucker Talks Womanhood and Courage in Art
I Remember Roy: Remembering Roy Hargrove
Save the Date!: Dr. Guy brings Hide/Melt/Ghost to Harlem Stage on March 9!
Happy Holidays from MusiQology!
The Encouraging 2019 GRAMMY Nominations are Just One Step in a Long Process
“What’s Going On” is MusiQology’s semi-regular news round-up. We curate a selection of relevant news items from across the spectrum of popular culture, adding our own commentary and contextualizing the moments within a broader conversation. In some cases, we’ll be drawing your attention...
One of Dr. Guy’s special guests for his upcoming The Poets & A Song is Hettie Jones. Ms. Jones is a hugely influential figure and prolific writer whose memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, is a seminal text for understanding the complexities of the Civil Rights Era. Her latest, a collection of letters...
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it,” James Baldwin once wrote. What does it mean to “really hear it” and why is it experienced so differently from listener to listener? When is a love song happy for some and bittersweet for others? When is a hip-hop song politically...
Coming this May, there’s a new biopic about famed blues woman, Bessie Smith. We loved it before we even got a glimpse of the production because it is directed by Dee Rees (Pariah) and stars luminaries such as Queen Latifah as Bessie; Mo’Nique as Ma Rainey; and Charles S. Dutton as William...
Lecture 2: Exceptional Errors Something was terribly wrong among the black Methodists in the early 19th century. In 1819, John F. Watson, a disapproving minister, published a diatribe called Methodist Error: Or Friendly Christian Advice to those Methodists Who Indulge in Extravagant Emotions and Bodily...
The years between Reconstruction and World War 1 witnessed an amplified and varied African American presence in the public sphere. During the last years of the 19th century a dramatic rise of “public amusements” occurred that was marked by an explosion of commercialized leisure that indexed America’s...
Part I Black Music Month, Day #15 I first discovered the ML3556 section of the library as an undergraduate and grew enamored of the literature about black music, a topic that truly charged me up academically. Browsing the stacks became a favorite pastime as I read books by LeRoi Jones, Charlie Keil,...
Black Music Month, Day 8 Nina Simone’s performance of the spiritual “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” enjoys several aesthetic and ideological tributaries that contribute to its power, its riveting grip on listeners (check out the youtube comments). Simone’s alto voice combines with her own piano...
Last week was not only my time to wind up my fall classes. (Yes!) It was also a great time to get out on the town and enjoy an eclectic mix of wintertime musicking in Philly. Although one hears many laments about what the music scene here (and everywhere, it seems) lacks, if you’re persistent […]
When you say blues, many people think of an historical genre of the American past. In his 1963 classic book Blues People, a young, and then uncontroversial, LeRoi Jones wrote so eloquently about the blues aesthetic in black vernacular music that the book is used almost as a “passport to adventure”...
