Louis Armstrong and the "Invention" of Scatting
What would become known as scatting (also called scat singing) could only be heard in the brass bands of New Orleans. However when Louis Armstrong recorded Heebie Jeebies with Okeh Records in 1926, scatting was introduced to a much wider audience. During the 1920s recording time was so expensive that when Armstrong's music fell off his stand instead of stopping the session to pick it up he just began to scat. This would change singing forever as even today many singers use this technique across a variety of musical genres.
Bessie Smith Sings the St. Louis Blues
Known as the "Empress of the Blues," Bessie Smith is one of the greatest female blues singers in the world. She recorded "Down Hearted Blues" in 1923 on the Columbia Record label. Listen to her sing in the short film above and think about how the blues has influenced many musical genres including country music and R&B.
Academic Video Online
Music Research Databases
Use the library resources below to locate scholarly information on composers, performers, or musical genres related to the Harlem Renaissance.
- Black Sacred Music
Published from 1987 to 1995, Black Sacred Music sought to establish theomusicology—a theologically informed musicology—as a distinct discipline, incorporating methods from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy to examine the full range of black sacred music. Topics included black secular music, the early days of rap, soul, jazz, civil rights songs, the religious music of Africa and the African diaspora, spirituals, gospel music, and the music of the black church.
The journal consisted of scholarly articles, essays, hymns and folk songs, sermons, historical reprints, and reviews of books, hymn books, and recordings. It also published volumes of archival writings by R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, and Willis Laurence James. - JSTOR
Jstor Is a highly selective digital library of academic content in many formats and disciplines. The collections include top peer-reviewed scholarly journals as well as respected literary journals, academic monographs, research reports from trusted institutes, and primary sources. The library has the entire Arts & Sciences Collection, the Life Sciences Collection and Business Journal IV. We have both archival and current subscriptions.
- Project Muse Journals-Basic Research Collection
Is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community around the world. For over 20 years, Project MUSE has been the trusted and reliable source of complete, full-text versions of scholarly journals from many of the world's leading universities and scholarly societies. Currently, Project MUSE has over 674 journals from 125 publishers and offers over 50,000 books from more than 100 presses.
Remembering Duke Ellington
RTÉ Concert Orchestra pays tribute to Duke Ellington and his legendary arrangements from this time period. Listen to this album in its entirety on Naxos Music Library.
Harlem Renaissance Music Books
Singing down the barriers : a guide to centering African American song for concert performers
| Location | Call No. |
|---|---|
| Shelf 3rd Flr - Main | ML3556.S866 2023 |
"This book, from the series Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, examines African-American musical activity during the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that began in the mid-1920s as an effort to secure economic, social, and cultural equality. The musicians whose compositions, performances, and lives are described worked primarily in the United States and England; the book includes a bibliography of works composed from 1919 to 1936."-Music Educators Journal
The Heart of a Woman
Book Prize Winner of the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works. Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives,
Harlem Renaissance Composers and Performers
Click on a NAME or IMAGE to find library resources about a composer or performer from this time period.
