Ragtime, Jazz, Swing and Blues: 40 Books to Read for Lindy Hoppers, Jazz Dancers, and Black Music Lovers.
Books!
This is a robust but not exhaustive list of books to read if you’re interested in the people, politics, stories, geographies, and histories of jazz music and black dance in general. I’m only included things I’ve read (or read most of); so it’s kind of my extended greatest hits culled from a lifetime. It includes fiction, biography, auto-biography, comparative studies, and some zoomed-out theory. You can find most of these in the public library system, though you might have to request them to be loaned from another library. If you can’t find them in your local bookstore, check out Better World Books to order online.
This list is alphabetical. I am listing the editions I’ve read, but you do you. For older texts, I suggest finding newer editions with an introduction or preface by a contemporary guest author; often this will provide a roadmap to today’s reader.
I put an *asterisk next to things that are little more ‘academic’; but I have not included anything that’s a pompous pain in the ass to read (ie. Homi Bhabha).
With one exception — being Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent — these are all cover-to-cover books, rather than collections of scholarly articles published as a book. I made an exception for Brooks because it truly reads like a book, and it’s less commonly known than more canonical jazz history collections.
Also, as a reminder, it’s totally okay to struggle reading more complex texts; stopping to look up words, googling concepts, reading sentences out loud, or looking up the cliffs notes are all okay! And it gets easier with practice.
Basie, Count, and Albert Murrary. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie. 2nd ed. De Capo Press, 2002.
Bichet, Sydney. Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography. 2nd ed. De Capo Press, 2002.
*Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performance of Race & Freedom 1850-1910. Duke University Press, 2006.
*Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Duke University Press, 2009.
Brown, Wesley. Darktown Strutters. Cane Hill Pr, 1994.
Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Vintage Books, 1998.
Dixon Gottschild, Brenda. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. Springer, 2016.
Dunham, Katherine, et al. Kaiso! Writing by and about Katherine Dunham. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
Duval Harrison, Daphne. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. 4th ed. Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Granta Books, 2007.
Ellison, Ralph. Juneteenth: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.
Emery, Lynne Fauley. Black Dance: From 1619 to Today. 2nd ed. Princeton Book Company, 1988.
Gioia, Ted. The History of Jazz. 6th ptg. edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Golden, Eve. Vernon and Irene Castle’s Ragtime Revolution. University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Northon & Co. 2019.
Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Temple University Press, 2010.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston : Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road, Selected Articles. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall, The Library of America, 2001. [This is a double! I particularly recommend Mules & Men and Dust Tracks on the Road, which you can find as stand-alone publications, as being most relevant to this list but Tell My Horse is particularly relevant to those interested in Afro-Caribbean religion. So are her articles. And if you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God, go do it right now.]
Jones, Bessie and Bess Lomax Hawes. Step it Down: Games, Play, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. Dell Publishing, 1993.
Lott, Eric, and Greil Marcus. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. 20 edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. First Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Manning, Frankie and Cynthia R. Millman. Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop. Temple University Press, 2007.
Moskowitz, P.E. How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. Bold Type Books, 2018.
Miller, Norma. Stompin’ at the Savoy: The Story of Norma Miller. Candlewick Press, 2006.
Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. 2nd ed. De Capo Press, 2000.
Hill, Errol G. A History of African American Theatre. 1st Pbk. Ed edition. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Robinson, Danielle. Modern Moves: Dancing During the Ragtime and Jazz Eras, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Jazz. De Capo Press, 1994.
Taylor, Yuval, et al. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music. First printing edition. New York, NY: Periscope, 2011.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.
Wagner, Anne Louise. Adversaries of Dance: from the Puritans to Present. University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Walker, Rebecca. Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Original edition. New York City: Soft Skull, 2012.
Waters, Ethel, and Charles Samuels. His Eye Is On The Sparrow: An Autobiography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.
If you want to dig deeper into gender, racial construction, the body, and global capitalism, here are my top three suggestions They are dense but not full of themselves and represent major shifts in ‘the discourse’. I think all of the books below you can get something out of without having read Karl Marx or Michel Foucault, but if you’re up for it, reading the original theories the writers are referencing or debating is pretty rad. Federici and The Fields sisters also have shorter articles, interviews, and lectures boppin’ around the internet if you want more of an appetizer.
*Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Penguin, 2014.
*Fields, Karen E., and Barbara Jeanne Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso Books, 2014.
* Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. 2nd ed. University of North Carolina Press, 1994.'
- Lily Kind
P.S. Shout out to the many wonderful teachers whose suggestions and syllabi inform this list: Jose de Jesus, Prof. George Baca, Prof. Rory Turner, Dr. Komozi Woodard, and Dr. Gale Jackson.