Music & Movies

From Donald Bogle, the award-winning author of Hollywood Black and leading authority on Black cinema history, this is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive and lavish biography of Hollywood's first African American movie goddess. Lena Horne's life and...

Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, American music theory has been framed and taught almost exclusively by white men. As a result, whiteness and maleness are woven into the fabric of the field, and BIPOC music theorists face enormous...

The drama of In Cold Blood meets the stylings of a Coen brothers film in this long-lost manuscript from musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick, whose research on blues icon Robert Johnson's mysterious life and death became as much of a myth as the musician...

The stories behind the iconic celebrities, brands, and images that defined hip-hop style. On a hot summer night in August of 1973 DJ Kool Herc and his sister, Cindy, put on a "back to school jam" in the recreation room of their apartment block at 1520...

It's Bigger Than Hip Hop takes a bold look at the rise of a generation that sees beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate-manufactured rap and is building a movement that will change not only the face of pop culture, but the world. M. K. Asante, Jr., a...

An NPR Best Book of the YearWithout God Save the Queens, it is possible that the contributions of dozens of important female hip-hop artists who have sold tens of millions of albums, starred in monumental films, and influenced the direction of the...

The Penderyn 2020 Music Book Prize (UK edition)Living Blues Critics Choice Best Blues Book of 2019Living Blues Readers Choice Best Blues Book of 2019Certificate of Merit in the Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Soul, Gospel, or R&B category...

The New York Times bestselling memoir from the legendary Gucci Mane spares no detail in this "cautionary tale that ends in triumph" (GQ). For the first time Gucci Mane tells his extraordinary story in his own words. It is "as wild, unpredictable, and...

James Baldwin used to tell Nina Simone, This is the world you have made for yourself, now you have to live in it. Simone has created for herself a world of magnificent peaks. Often compared to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, Simone is known as one of the...

HIP-HOP (AND OTHER THINGS) is about, as it were, rap, but also some other things. It's a smart, fun, funny, insightful book that spends the entirety of its time celebrating what has become the most dominant form of music these past two and a half decades...

Growing up in the shadow of her superstar sister, Solange Knowles became a pivotal musician in her own right. Defying an industry that attempted to bend her to its rigid image of a Black woman, Solange continually experimented with her sound and embarked...

This book presents a selection of more than 150 superb Color & B&W images. Where previous jazz photographers captured their subjects in the dark, smoky environs of nightclubs, Claxton capitalized on the sun and surf of southern California, posing artists...

An unprecedented insider's look at one of cinema's landmark works and the lasting effect it still has on our culture, this oral and visual history of "Do the Right Thing"--celebrating the movie's 20th anniversary--is told entirely by those who starred in...

This biography on reggae legend Bob Marley reflects the growing popularity and legacy that continues to grow more than 27 years after the singer's death from cancer at age 36. Steckles has been writing about the reggae music scene for many years, and he...

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of...