The transformation of black music : the rhythms, the songs, and the ships that make the African diaspora / Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. with Melanie Zeck and Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-223) and index.

Foreword / Melanie Zeck -- Preface / Samuel A. Floyd Jr. and Melanie Zeck -- Introduction -- Black music and the African Diaspora. Out of Africa: setting sail from the motherland -- The making of the African Diaspora: ships on the oceans -- The Diaspora's concert worlds: Europe and the Americas -- Isles of rhythm: the Cinquillo-Tresillo Complex in the Circum-Caribbean -- Ties that bind: myth and ritual in the Circum-Caribbean and beyond -- Case studies. "Pip's tambourine": black music and Sterling Stuckey's revelations of Herman Melville's hidden sources -- "Git on board, lil' chillun": children and music in the Diaspora / (by Melanie Zeck) -- The movement: black identities and the paths forward -- Afro-modernism and music: on science, community, and magic in the black avant-garde / (by Guthrie Ramsey Jr.) -- Africa and the trope of the return -- Epilogue -- Appendix A: Excerpt from "Ring shout!: literary studies, historical studies, and black music inquiry" -- Appendix B: Figures and institutions from the "first black renaissance."

The Transformation of Black Music includes a full spectrum of black musics from four continents as it argues for a re-codification of black musics and performers. Framed by a call and response argument, the authors present not only a more holistic and historically accurate understanding of musics in the African Diaspora, but also an intellectually robust future for the field of black music research.