The common language of music brings people of diverse backgrounds together throughout the world, while also opening new doors to appreciation for the musical sounds and styles that distinguish individual regions and cultures. 
 
Even a quick glance at the music of Africa, the world’s second-largest continent, will reveal a diverse set of traditions and expressions. Musicologists note a constantly diversifying blossoming of genres across the continent, with each culture producing notable musicians and distinctive forms of music. 
 
Here are summaries of only a few of the African musical genres that are today both highly influential and particularly notable. All are worth taking the time to get to know and enjoy.
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Afrobeat fuses the sounds of Western jazz and nightclub life into the centuries-old traditions of Nigerian music. Now often heard around the world, Afrobeat often incorporates beats common to other, non-African styles, such as hip-hop. The style is typically marked by strong vocal melodies backed by bass percussion, making it one of the world’s most danceable music genres. 
 
Afrobeat’s ultimate origins can be traced to Ghana in the 1920s. In those days, local Ghanaian musicians seasoned their songs with calypso beats and even the popular Western foxtrot. Then in the late 1960s, a musician who would earn the nickname of the “Father of Afrobeat,” Fela Kuti—strongly influenced by American artist James Brown—put his own spin on the style. By the mid-1970s, it had become widely popular in Nigeria.
 
Fela, who died in 1997 at only 58 years of age, remains a legend among Nigerian music-lovers in particular. He has also influenced later generations of younger musicians worldwide, including Mos Def and Erykah Badu.
 
Afrobeats—a linear descendent of Fela’s 1960s and ‘70s Afrobeat—features heavily in Beyoncé’s 2019 album The Lion King: The Gift. She collaborated extensively with young musicians from Nigeria, Cameroon, and other parts of Africa, showcasing their talents in a way that brought many of them to the attention of a global audience for the first time. 
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The Sahara Desert region is the homeland of Gnawa music, which also goes by the names of Gnawi Blues and Ethno-Pop. Its beats are anchored in the traditions of the Gnawa community, which derives from groups of sub-Saharan peoples who were enslaved and first brought to Morocco in about the 11th century CE.
 
Over centuries of enslavement, during which they were typically forced to serve as soldiers, the Gnawa assembled themselves as a distinct people out of several previously unconnected sub-Saharan groups. They formed their own cultural traditions in the process and gradually gained their freedom.
 
Gnawa music originated in religious ceremonies—blending music, dance, and poetry—that resulted from a blend of the group’s highly spiritualized version of Islam and the local traditions of West Africa. In recent years, the tone of this music became more secularized even as it has gained popularity across Moroccan society. 
 
Knowledgeable listeners often find parallels between Gnawa musical styles and the blues in the United States. Gnawa is especially distinctive in its use of drumming, metallic castanets, and the guembri, a bass lute with three strings. Gnawa music has gained so much popularity that the Moroccan government has established an annual festival in the city of Essaouira, dedicated to the style as one of the country’s prominent cultural heritage products. 
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Mali has gained a worldwide reputation as a focal point for blues music. As music scholars have pointed out, the blues is a uniquely African American art form, but one with deep roots in West Africa, deriving as it does from the spirituals and work songs brought to the New World by enslaved people centuries ago. 
 
Many recent Malian blues artists, including the late Ali Farka Touré, have grounded their style in the music of their own cultures, rather than in that of the United States. Others are influenced to one degree or another by Western pop music. African American blues, traditional Malian sounds, and world beats all continue to play off against each other throughout this genre. 
 
Other Malian blues artists include Afel Bocoum, who mixes musical traditions from the north and south of his country with the sounds of Western and Malian instruments. 
 
One of the world’s premier annual blues events, Festival in the Desert, has taken place outside Timbuktu since 2001, highlighting the work of Tuareg musicians, blues artists, and others. With the festival suspended indefinitely due to recent unrest in Mali, organizers hope to showcase the talents of Malian blues musicians by promoting tours elsewhere. 
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Also known as Ethiopian jazz, Ethio-Jazz offers a one-of-a-kind melding of Western-inflected jazz, soul, Latin stylings, and Afro-funk with the often-haunting sounds of ancient Ethiopian music. Today recognized as one of Ethiopia’s most sought-after cultural exports, Ethio-Jazz dates back to the 1950s.
 
As it has developed over the decades since, this sound has expanded Africa’s—and the world’s—musical vocabulary. Its melodious sounds are anchored in ages-old Ethiopian ballads often evoking a sense of love, yearning, and nostalgia. 
 
In the 1950s, Nerses Nalbandian, whose family had settled in Ethiopia as refugees from the 1915 genocide against Armenians, laid the groundwork for the development of the genre. Nalbandian’s uncle had led Ethiopia’s National Opera, and Nalbandian himself took up the baton after his uncle’s retirement.
 
He composed music for the country’s National Theatre, working out ways to preserve authenticity while incorporating local musical traditions in arrangements for big bands. His solution to this problem centered on adapting Western instrumentation while acknowledging the distinctive musical scales indigenous to Ethiopia.
 
Bandleader and composer Mulatu Astatke—also renowned as a keyboardist and vibraphonist—is another monumental figure in the history of Ethio-Jazz. Astatke, often credited as the “Godfather” of the genre who fully brought American jazz rhythms into traditional Ethiopian forms, is largely responsible for the recent popularity of Ethio-Jazz on the world stage. 

​The precise origins of jazz as a distinct musical art form remain a matter of contention among experts and fans, and researchers learn new information about its development seemingly every day. The first documented jazz recording is one central point of entry that can help us understand its history.
 
That recording was made on February 26, 1917, at the Victor Talking Machine Company’s offices in New York City. That was the day the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (whose name originally used the spelling “jass”) quintet recorded the tune “Livery Stable Blues.” While the Chicago-based ensemble’s “Tiger Rag” would prove far more influential, “Livery Stable Blues” is acknowledged as the first. Among today’s listeners, the song may sound silly, with the instruments imitating barnyard animal sounds, and the recording quality is not the best. (Interested fans can hear the full recording in numerous venues online, including an uploaded Smithsonian magazine article celebrating the recording’s centenary.)

​The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) brand included shiny black dinner jackets over white, buttoned-collar shirts. ODJB was a publicity-seeking group, whose public cavortings received widespread media coverage. At the time they cut “Livery Stable Blues,” the group was performing to large and adoring crowds in New York at Reisenweber’s Café near Columbus Circle, not far from the current site of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
 
Musicologists know that this all-white band had shamelessly borrowed both style and substance from music they’d heard played by African American bands back home in New Orleans. The recording of “Livery Stable Blues” went on to become one of the first-ever hit singles, with estimates of copies sold ranging from between about 250,000 to 1 million. 

​The origins of jazz lie squarely in the African American experience. Its notes outline the story of Black life in America, with all the pain, sorrow, triumphs, and joy that the community has experienced since long before the founding of the country. For example, the genre’s blue notes offer a modernized take on the sounds of slave spirituals and work songs. Its fast-paced syncopation and swinging exuberance went on to drive the boogie-woogie beats of the many tenement “rent parties” popular among growing Black populations in New York and other big cities from the 1920s until after World War II.
 
Most scholars date the birth of jazz as an identifiable style to the honky-tonks, barrelhouses, and saloons of Storyville, the New Orleans red light district that flourished from 1897 to 1917. Tuxedo Dance Hall and other venues gave budding composers and performers the opportunity to hone their skills and improvisational ability in front of largely mixed-race audiences. The whole of the district was filled with opportunities for work for Black musicians and composers, and the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Joe “King” Oliver all got their starts there.
 
The original New Orleans jazz sound drew from the city’s rich history and ethnic mix. Originally a French, then a Spanish colony, the city was already steeped in a distinctive musical culture by the time it was incorporated into the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. It continued to retain its cosmopolitan outlook and its love of music, dance, and spectacle.
 
The city’s large population of Creole people of color—with a heritage in both African and European roots—was a particularly distinguishing factor. People from a variety of backgrounds lived close together in New Orleans’ narrow streets and squares, resulting in a true blending of cultures and musical sounds.

​Beginning in about 1890, brass bands were also a big part of the music scene in New Orleans. In those days, before the city had put up the type of “Jim Crow” color barriers, these bands were often integrated. So, while the roots of jazz lie squarely in the African American tradition, its growth was nourished by numerous multicultural influences. The musical traditions developed through African American funerals and mutual aid society parades met the sounds of ragtime and dance bands and the city’s many ethnic communities’ Mardi Gras walking clubs, all establishing a uniquely New Orleans quality.
 
Morton, Oliver, Armstrong, and their contemporaries built distinctive personal styles, and all three were among the many Black innovators who went north to Chicago to perform in the days after World War I. It was they who formed a recognizable nexus at the core of building the sound we know today as classic jazz.

​The blues puts into music what we all feel when it seems like we just can’t go on: lost jobs, friends, love, and dreams. But the very music that was made to express the depths of despair can, by its very artistry, lift us up again. The blues is also cathartic. It’s about overcoming obstacles.
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The blues was born out of African American history. It traces its origins to plantation slavery, through the toiling oppression of the Jim Crow era, and into the days of escape to a completely new world during the Great Migration. Ultimately, the blues has its roots in African American work songs and chants, spirituals, and rural “field hollers.” It came to early maturity in the Mississippi River Delta around New Orleans, growing up alongside jazz, before branching out west, east, north, and finally around the world.

Here is a look at three of the many distinctive styles of the blues that developed in the United States throughout the mid-20th century, along with portraits of three of their leading creators.

​The boogie-woogie blues, heavy on rhythm and percussion and with a varied and unpredictable style, was the first and only type of piano music born directly out of the blues. In boogie-woogie, the right hand’s riffs play off against the left hand’s ostinato drive.
 
Boogie-woogie flourished from the beginning of the 1920s until the end of World War II in 1945. The word “boogie” referred to a house rent party among people living in tenements in big cities with large African American populations. Rent parties opened up new ways to socialize while helping to pay their rent during hard economic times.
 
The ultimate source of the boogie-woogie style may have been the logging camps, gin mills, and other labor groups offering some of the few means of good employment available to Black workers in the early 20th century. Just as “field hollers” and hawking shout-outs were earlier, boogie-woogie rhythms were highly personalized.
 
Meade “Lux” Lewis (1905-1964) was one of the driving forces behind the popularity of boogie-woogie and its rolling beat. Born in Chicago, “Lux” started out playing violin, but turned to piano in the ‘20s. In 1927, he recorded the enormously popular “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” a pull-out-all-the-stops cascade of sound, and a now-legendary piece in the blues catalog. His musically sophisticated tunes also included “Whistlin’ Blues,” “Bear Cat Crawl,” and “Low Down Dog.”
 
By the mid-1930s, the song had fallen into obscurity, until Lewis was rediscovered while working in a car wash. Producer John Hammond reissued the song, and Lewis gained a brief nationwide fame before boogie-woogie faded from the charts.
 
In the late 1930s, Lewis joined fellow boogie-woogie masters Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson in a series of star-studded “six-handed” performances, and his three film appearances include an uncredited role as a bar piano player in the 1946 Jimmy Stewart classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Lewis died tragically in a car accident in Minneapolis when he was only 58.

Jump blues was a highly danceable mix that blended blues, jazz, swing, and boogie-woogie. The style originated—just as boogie-woogie did—amid hard economic times, although jump blues was reaching widespread popularity as boogie-woogie was winding down. During and after World War II, full swing bands were too expensive, so bands scaled down to simply a rhythm section and often a single soloist. The smaller size enabled musicians to concentrate on innovating with a more fast-paced and uninhibited “jump” sound.
 
Louis Jordan (1908-1975), saxophonist, singer, movie performer, and bandleader of the Tympany Five, as well as an accomplished all-around entertainer known as the “King of the Jukebox,” is credited as the originator of this style. Jordan’s talent shone on numbers like “Jumpin’ at the Jubilee,” “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” and “Caledonia,” and he became one of the most popular and successful Black artists of the 1940s and ‘50s.
 
The vibrant, bouncy rhythms and clever lyrics of his songs—not to mention his high-energy, engaging stage presence—made the Arkansas-born Jordan wildly popular with audiences of all backgrounds. In fact, he is one of the few African American artists to gain widespread acceptance among white fans of his era. He had at least four million-selling hit songs over his career, and in earnings and name recognition ranked near Duke Ellington and Count Basie among African American musicians of his day. Numerous critics consider “Caledonia” (1945) to be the immediate ancestor of rock and roll. Jordan is also often credited as the father of rhythm and blues and rap.
 
The growth of Chicago blues followed right along with the growth of the Black population of major northern cities. During the Great Migration that began in the final years of World War I and that continued into the 1970s, some 6 million African Americans picked up everything and moved from the rural, segregated South to the industrial and at least nominally more accepting cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago. And they took their music with them.
 
Alongside New Orleans and Austin, Texas, Chicago remains one of the three key cities involved in the development of the blues art form. The blues musicians who moved north continued the evolution of the sound as it played out in people’s everyday lives on street corners, in open-air markets, at rent parties, and a host of other community events.

​The rough-and-tumble action along the city’s streets was further inflected by emerging technologies that amped it up with an electric beat, forming the nexus of a new kind of club atmosphere. Chicago’s South Side saw numerous Black-focused blues clubs spring up, including big names such as Smoke Daddy, Ruby Lee Gatewood's Tavern, and Blue Chicago.
 
Also think Buddy Guy’s Legends. Buddy Guy, now age 84, is among Chicago’s blues greats. Born in Louisiana in 1936 as George Guy, the legendary guitarist is world-famous for his lightning electric riffs, accompanied by his deeply felt vocals. In the 1990s, Guy’s popularity soared again after an already distinguished four-decade career, and he continued touring and performing live until the coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020. His hits include “Stone Crazy,” “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” and “Leave My Girl Alone.”
 
When barely into his teens, Guy made his own guitar and learned to play by listening to the radio, copying previous legends such as John Lee Hooker. After performing in New Orleans clubs, he relocated to Chicago in his early 20s and was discovered by yet another legend, Muddy Waters. Guy continued learning from the best, as he worked alongside performers like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Koko Taylor. He is the recipient of multiple Grammy awards, including a 2015 Grammy for Lifetime Achievement.
 
Rolling Stone magazine caught up with Guy in June 2020, when he noted that he was then in the longest hiatus of his career due to the nationwide shutdowns of performing arts venues. Guy’s club also suffered damage amid rising protests against police brutality. But the bluesman remained upbeat, saying that the outpouring of people into the streets demanding justice might be just what the country needs to finally set things right.

​Over the decades, social and racial justice movements have produced powerful, memorable music that can be performed and enjoyed for years afterward. The enduring nature of the songs created to elevate the struggle for peace, justice, and equality, as well as those written to memorialize lives unjustly brutalized or cut short, continue to enrich American culture even years after the events that they commemorate.

Now, a new generation is adding its distinctive voice to our culture through music composed to accompany the Black Lives Matter protests, which have existed as a movement under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag since 2013. This new music has also revitalized the already universally popular genres of traditional hip hop, rap, and R&B.

​In 2014, Eric Garner of Staten Island, New York, was killed at the hands of police while saying, “I Can’t Breathe” 11 times in succession. Two years later, the Garner Family formed a group to release a single titled, “I Can’t Breathe.” The song is not only a tribute to Garner, but an updated R&B-style rallying cry for principled protest against police brutality. The lyrics echo the ongoing tension between local communities of color and oppressive policing tactics (“We all know the solution, but they blame you and me”), while at the same time offering a positive plea for unity and mutual support and noting with tragic finality, “A life can change as the wind blows.”

In early June 2020, rapper Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” skyrocketed into first place among the most popular protest songs available on the Internet, tallying some 65 million streamed views within the space of two weeks. In his video, the singer-songwriter’s harrowing depiction of unjust death and the grinding brutality of dealing with trauma on a daily basis are complemented by images in the media chronicling the coronavirus pandemic and divisions around the nation.
 
Starting with its introduction that references the killing of George Floyd and his  “I can’t breathe,” echoing Eric Garner, the song runs its lyrics against background footage of some of the protests in support of Black Lives Matter, and highlights both black and white faces among people fighting for positive change.
 
The singer zooms out to reflect on the fact that, “It's a problem with the whole way of life,” then asks listeners to understand that we need to “start here.”

​In Usher’s “I Cry,” the Grammy-winning singer of the 2015 hit “Chains” gives us another poignant song decrying police brutality.
 
The raw emotion in “I Cry” is Usher’s way of letting his sons know that it’s acceptable for men to show emotion, particularly in the face of waves of overwhelming violence against Black communities. In the related music video, he sings the spare lyrics against a backdrop of newspaper headlines describing the horrific killings of innocent Black Americans. The words summarize Usher’s feelings of helplessness at what is happening in the world around him, as well as his determination to be a part of the solution: “I’ll fight for the future we’re making.”
 
While “I Cry” is gentler in terms of the lyrics and beats than the more raw “Chains” (featuring Nas and Bibi Bourelly), the two songs complement each other in their ability to portray the African American experience in the present moment as fraught with tension and a constant sense of being unfairly targeted, while refusing to accept the untenable status quo.

​With their 2020 album RTJ4, the hip hop supergroup duo Run the Jewels (Killer Mike and Jaime “El-P” Meline) released a work that the online publication Vox immediately dubbed as “required listening” for the year. The Vox reviewer wrote that the performers had put “racial unrest to music.”
 
Coming as it did after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis that galvanized street protests even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the entire album hit the nation where it still had a number of unhealed wounds.
 
“Walking in the Snow” is one of RTJ4’s central songs. “They feed you fear for free,” the lyrics go, leading listeners through the numbness and pain of seeing victims’ names unroll on the evening news. The song goes on to try to help listeners see the urgent need to replace “apathy” with “empathy” for the sake of those targeted with hate, as well as those expressing the hating. 

​In 2016, Beyoncé began using her enormous platform to come out strongly on behalf of racial justice in general and Black Lives Matter in particular. After the widely publicized police shooting deaths of Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that year, the superstar posted a call to action on her social media pages, pleading with fans to speak out against police brutality and demand solutions.
 
The video for her 2016 song “Formation” includes an image of the phrase “Stop killing us.” Another video that year, for “Freedom” (featuring Kendrick Lamar), juxtaposed the song’s moving lyrics against a visual backdrop that included images of the mothers of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin holding up photos of their slain sons. Both songs appear on the Grammy-winning album Lemonade.
 
To celebrate Juneteenth on June 19, 2020, Beyoncé dropped “Black Parade,” a single focused less on suffering than on the abiding resilience and solidarity of the Black community. Juneteenth is a holiday that marks the end of slavery, observed by African American communities since the end of the Civil War in 1865.
 
Describing the new song that aims to uplift roots, history, and the beauty of the Black communities and voices, regardless of the circumstances, Beyoncé wrote a message on her Instagram highlighting the need to focus on “joy,” while posting an authorized directory of Black-owned businesses and rallying fans to support them throughout the year.

Music and literature have met and mingled countless times, as composers have taken inspiration from poems, plays, novels, and stories to create listening experiences that bring out new dimensions of original literary works. Many of these musical pieces have become classics in their own right, part of the lasting cultural heritage of humanity. 
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One of the great American poets, Langston Hughes (1901 or 1902 - 1967), is today remembered as a writer who gave voice to the hopes, dreams, and common experiences of African Americans. A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in New York, Hughes wrote in numerous genres, but is best-remembered today for his lyrical poems that contain a sense of both the joy of living and the painful path of history within their sinuous lines. 

Hughes drew enormous inspiration from music to feed his creative process throughout his life. Composer Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes developed an enduring personal friendship that began a decade after she discovered his poems as a teenage music student at Northwestern University in 1929. 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” shortly after his high school graduation. The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, published the poem in 1921. Hughes went on to study at Columbia University, becoming immersed in New York’s vibrant cultural scene, which he soon helped shape.
 
“I have known rivers,” the poem opens. Its lines wind down through history, as Hughes’ voices speaks on behalf of the millions of voiceless Black and Brown men and women over centuries who lived, loved, dreamed, and died beside the world’s great rivers, from the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Congo, to the Mississippi. 
 
Margaret Bonds (1913 - 1972) was an accomplished musician and composer who had begun composing at age 13. According to Bonds, Northwestern University was a “terribly prejudiced place.” She had made enormous sacrifices to be able to study at a well-known school, and she won prizes in piano and composition during her time there. Yet, due to the practice of segregation, she was not even allowed to use the Northwestern swimming pool. Restaurants in the area refused to serve her. 
 
Then one day, going through books at her neighborhood public library outside Chicago, Bonds began reading “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” from Hughes’ first poetry collection, The Weary Blues. Reading it gave her a sense of security, a belief that she, as a young, African American woman, had a rightful place in the world. “I know that poem helped save me,” she said. 

Bonds’ discovery of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was the touchstone that led her and Hughes to a decades-long artistic collaboration. She finally met him after she finished her university education, at the home of a mutual friend. They became inseparable, “like brother and sister,” Bonds later said, getting to know each other’s families and becoming comfortable in one another’s homes.
 
Bonds even often sent Hughes melodies she had composed, asking him to write lyrics for them. By the mid-1930s, she had set numerous Hughes compositions to music, including “Poème d’Automne,” “Winter Moon,” and “Joy.” Bonds’ interpretation of Hughes’ “Love’s Runnin’ Riot” went on to be performed and recorded by Duke Ellington. In 1940, Hughes and Bonds worked on the revue Tropics After Dark, collaborating with Arna Bontemps, another writer who played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance.
 
Bonds set “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to music in 1941. Bonds’ music unwinds Hughes’ words at a stately and sonorous pace as it sets to music the historical events in which Black people moved through the world through deliberate or forced migrations. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” remains perhaps Bonds’ most often-performed art piece, and she always remembered it as among her favorites.

The 1959 Three Dream Portraits is a song cycle of three Hughes poems set to music by Bonds. “Minstrel Man,” once notably recorded as a poem read by legendary African American bass-baritone Paul Robeson, is a soliloquy juxtaposing the speaker’s outward mask of frivolity with his inner pain. The irony lies in the fact that this pain went largely unnoticed by the white audiences that typically attended minstrel shows.
 
“Dream Variation,” the center movement, speaks of “a place in the sun.” It is filled with harmonies gathered from world cultures beyond American borders, and has a joyous sense of movement through dance. 
 
The concluding movement, “I, Too,” uses Hughes’ poignant yet ringing words, “I, too, sing America.” Even as the speaker, the “darker brother,” is banished and forced to eat in the kitchen, he feels that when others “see how beautiful I am,” they will invite him to the table, ashamed that they ever excluded him. Critics note that Bonds’ music becomes more self-assured with each of the three movements. It reaches a crescendo of confidence toward the end of “I, Too” that winds down into wistful uncertainty by its concluding notes.
 
This artistic choice by Bonds in the late 1950s mirrored the world around her. The Civil Rights struggle was beginning to gain momentum, with enormous struggle and loss ahead.  When Bonds wrote her music for Hughes’ words, the outcome of this struggle was still unknown. Three Dream Portraits remains a deeply meaningful work more than half a century later. 

The spirituals that developed within the African-American tradition still form the core of the melodies and lyrics that make up the American folk song treasury. These spirituals, typically composed around Bible passages that poetically describe a longing for salvation and freedom, were originally sung among enslaved people in the American South.
 
Scholars have catalogued approximately 6,000 African-American spirituals. Some fell into the category of work songs. Others focused on uplifting lyrics describing life in a better world to come. Still others served as psychological supports that helped enslaved men and women keep a measure of their individuality and dignity under inhuman conditions.
 
Many of these songs became widely known during the abolition movement of the mid-19th century. They were particularly popular among “conductors” and “passengers” along the Underground Railroad, the network of safehouses through which slaves escaped north into freedom. Many scholars believe that the lyrics of some of the songs held deliberate clues that helped escaping slaves on their way along the Underground Railroad.
 
There is not universal consensus about this issue, or even regarding the precise provenance of each song. However, it is certain that many were used during the days of slavery to encourage thoughts of freedom, and to provide solace and spiritual sustenance to enslaved people. Here are five of the most important such spirituals:

In “Go Down, Moses,” the lyrics describe the escape of the ancient Israelites, led by Moses, as they fled Pharaoh’s armies. The first sheet music publication of a form of this song, entitled “The Song of the Contrabands,” appeared in 1861. Some scholars trace its first widespread use to 1862. It is said to have served as a fighting anthem for escaped slaves sheltered at Fort Monroe, nicknamed “Freedom’s Fortress,” in Virginia.
 
Tubman herself earned the nickname “Moses” for her role in freeing enslaved people, so it is easy to find double references in the song. The ancient Israelites and African-American slaves were both “oppressed so hard they could not stand.” And Tubman took on the responsibility of saying to modern-day Pharaohs, “let my people go.”
 
For her biography of Harriet Tubman, published in 1869, author Sarah Bradford was able to speak directly to her subject. According to Bradford’s book, Tubman used both “Go Down, Moses” and another hymn, “Thorny Desert,” to alert waiting slaves that she was nearby, ready and able to help them escape to freedom. Tubman’s first-person account further supports the conclusion that at least some spirituals carried a double, coded meaning, and were deliberately used as tools in the fight against slavery. 

“When the sun comes back, and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd,” say the opening lines of this song. The lyrics continue, asserting that an “old man” will be waiting to show the way to freedom. Some scholars believe there is strong evidence to suggest that “Follow the Drinking Gourd” encoded instructions for escaping slavery by navigating according to the position of the Big Dipper, popularly called the “Drinking Gourd” among enslaved African-Americans.
 
The Big Dipper points toward the North Star, which slaves are said to have used as a marker to keep them bearing north. The Newark Museum, in Newark, New Jersey, has prepared an analysis of each line of the song, comparing it to landmarks known to have appeared along many slaves’ escape routes. 
 
Other researchers aren’t sure that this song is even that old, pointing to its first known publication in 1928. Regardless, it continues to serve as a striking “map” song that illustrates the way escaping slaves used landmarks in the natural world on their path to freedom. 

“Jordan River is deep and wide, hallelujah, milk and honey on the other side, hallelujah.” It’s not heard to hear an echo of an enslaved person’s longing for freedom. A number of music historians trace “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” back to Civil War days, noting that it may have first been written down on St. Helena Island near South Carolina.
 
St. Helena lies at a geographic focal point of the distinctive and linguistically rich African-American Gullah creole culture. Traditional folklore surrounding St. Michael depicts him as a guide of souls to heaven. The Jordan River itself represents the experience of crossing a divide, from life into death and eternal reward—or into freedom from slavery. 
 
The Reverend Velma Maia Thomas, a contemporary public historian and author, has noted that rivers figure prominently in African-American spirituals, and for good reason. Rivers cleanse and heal. They also represent a transition from one state of being to another. Coincidentally, rivers conceal the scent of humans from any dogs tracking them.

The Jordan River in “Swing Low” equals the Ohio River, and the “band of angels” are the “conductors,” who are “coming for to carry me home.” As Thomas explained it in an interview recorded for a recent PBS broadcast, slave owners would hear what they thought were innocuous lyrics about heaven. But, “next day, two or three people would be gone.”
 
“Swing Low” was among Harriet Tubman’s favorite songs, according to scholars at Eastern Illinois University. Its authorship is often credited to Wallace Wallis, a mid-19th century enslaved man (possibly later a freedman) who worked on an Oklahoma plantation owned by members of the Choctaw Nation.
 
Another account credits it to enslaved woman Sarah Hannah Sheppard, whose daughter Ella Sheppard would grow up to join the Fisk Jubilee Singers. What is certain is that the Fisk Jubilee Singers were among the numerous African-American groups who performed the song widely in the last years of the 19th century. 

This song, also often credited to Wallace Wallis, is frequently cited as a coded song. The title does refer to spiritual salvation after death. The determined, stately, slow music is filled with a sense of longing and melancholy, even of resignation to whatever fate will bring. But the song also describes the sense of escaping into a physical state of freedom. “I ain’t got long to stay here,” say the lyrics. 
 
“Steal Away to Jesus” has been recorded by numerous performers over recent generations, no time more memorably than when renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson guest-starred on jazz great Nat King Cole’s television variety program in 1957 (a clip is available on YouTube). Cole joined Jackson at the mic for the final verses of the song. Their rich voices blend into an incomparable listening experience—one filled with deeper historic meanings. 

​Movie theme songs can serve as touchstones for personal memories, define key cultural moments, and even become part of history. The following are a few of the greatest and most popular theme songs that have been made famous on the big screen. All of them can evoke the spirit of the movies they defined with just a few notes.

​“You must remember this.” As sung in the 1942 film Casablanca by performer Dooley Wilson, “As Time Goes By” carries with it a bittersweet sense of longing for the past, along with resignation and affirmation of the power of an enduring love.
 
We all know the story: Humphrey Bogart plays world-weary cafe owner Rick, existing on the periphery of the fighting in Casablanca, Morocco, during World War II. His former love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) suddenly appears, begging him for help in getting her husband, a resistance fighter played by Paul Henreid, to safety in Lisbon.
 
“As Time Goes By” was Rick’s and Ilsa’s song, and they both request to hear it, becoming immersed in the glow of the past. Torn between love and duty, Ilsa and Rick enjoy a few stolen moments before she joins her husband in order to help support his work.
The song was actually repurposed for the film. Songwriter Herman Hupfeld originally wrote it for a now-forgotten 1931 musical, and pop icon Rudy Vallee recorded it.
 
Now honored with a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame as a “Towering Song,” “As Time Goes By” still reminds us that “The world will always welcome lovers.”

​Audrey Hepburn remains a legend, for her grace, style, and warm personality, as well as her role as a UNICEF Special Ambassador. Hepburn’s most memorable performances include playing the lead role in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) as Holly Golightly, a madcap young woman in New York who makes her way through life by mooching off of the admirers she gathers, while she lives a vivid fantasy life.
 
“Moon River,” with wistful lyrics that perfectly complement the soulful flow of its music, is the song Hepburn’s character sings, playing her guitar while musing and dreaming on her fire escape: “Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.” The song, for which Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics to Henry Mancini’s music, won an Oscar for Best Original Song, followed by two Grammys.
 
The movie’s storyline, with its twists and turns of plot as Holly’s past threatens to shatter the genuinely tender love that develops between her and her handsome neighbor (played by George Peppard), works the song into its most vivid and heartbreaking moments, until these two lost souls find each other again and are “off to see the world” together.

​The 1969 western “buddy” film about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford in a fictionalized version of the life stories of the famous outlaws, and Katharine Ross played their mutual love interest. The film won multiple Oscars, including one for William Goldman’s witty, highly quotable script. The film also won an Oscar for Best Original Song for Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
 
The simple lyrics and joyful tune, performed in the film by BJ Thomas, accompany a now-iconic moment in the film, when Newman and Ross ride together on a bike down a dirt road through an orchard. The song lifts the scene into a depiction of pure happiness about being alive, despite the “raindrops” that may fall. It’s a pick-me-up song whose rhythms and lyrics have made it a favorite among young performers over the decades, even while adults get its more poignant references to keeping the “blues” at bay.

​In 1980, singer-songwriter Dolly Parton joined actress Jane Fonda and comedian Lily Tomlin in one of the first female “buddy” comedies ever. The movie 9 to 5 also delivered a stinging message of social commentary about women’s rights and the fair treatment of employees. The movie’s eponymous theme song, written by Parton, remains a popular anthem for people struggling for dignity in the workplace.
 
The storyline involves the three friends, who all work as secretaries, in an epic take-down of their sexist tyrant of a boss who denies women promotions while using and abusing them for their abilities. Ultimately, he is dethroned and the three women are finally recognized for their talents.
 
The song’s lyrics ingeniously weave social satire with a buoyant can-do attitude, as the music bounces through Parton’s descriptions of stumbling through another day fraught with ambition denied and dreams shattered, but still with the confidence that there are some things no one can take away.
 
As Parton reminds us in the song’s refrain: “There’s a better life.” 

​Once you’ve heard the song “Happy,” it will probably be impossible to get its upbeat and danceable rhythms out of your head. Pharrell Williams’ hit song seems to be an embodiment of dance itself.
 
The song was a central part of the 2014 animated film Despicable Me 2, the second in the already-classic series of movies about the villain-turned loving father Felonious Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), his adopted children, and the hordes of bright yellow, exuberantly chaos-making Minions. “Happy” went on to become the biggest-selling song of the year.
 
Don’t we all want “a room without a roof?” The playful visual imagery of the song also seems to hold deeper meanings about an acceptance of life’s wanderings, whether by hot air balloon or otherwise, and always with the attitude that “happiness is the truth.”
 
“Happy” will bring back a whole wealth of fun family memories for many people. It will also be part of the joyous history of the life of the late civil rights hero and United States Congressman John Lewis. Vital and life-affirming to the end of his 80 years, Lewis was captured on a now-viral piece of campaign film footage moving with confidence and fluid grace, as he danced alongside supporters of then-Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to the beats of “Happy.”

​Musicians around the world have paid tribute to civil rights leader and human rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The tributes began immediately after his death by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, and have continued over the decades since then. Here are a few of the songs honoring Dr. King that have conveyed grief, remembrance, inspiration, and hope to millions of Americans, as well as to people around the world struggling to assert their rights amid bigotry and violence.

​“Abraham, Martin and John,” with words and music by rock musician Dick Holler, was written as a tribute to Dr. King and to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated just shortly after King was gunned down. It was a tumultuous time, and communities nationwide—the black community in particular—were torn apart by anger and grief. Holler’s spare, repetitive chords, and gentle, evocative, and simple words—as originally recorded by singer Dion DiMucci—seemed just right for the moment.

The song references, in turn, President Abraham Lincoln, President John F. Kennedy, King, and Robert Kennedy, each of whom “freed a lot of people” but died violent, untimely deaths amid cataclysmic events that would change the course of history. The song’s four verses are identical except for the name of each man. Each one asks the listener if anyone has seen “my old friend Abraham,” “my old friend John,” and so on. The concluding words paint a picture of the four men walking side by side over a hill together.

The words and sentiments may be considered old-fashioned—even simplistic—to some listeners today. But for many who were alive at the time and looked up to King and the Kennedy brothers as the best of America, they can still summon tears and—often—a smile of wistfulness for the bright future that these men stood for that remains only partially realized.

​“Happy Birthday” by Stevie Wonder is a song written for a didactic purpose, but one whose lyrics and music still bring joy to audiences who may not even be aware of their original meaning. Wonder, the blind superstar singer-songwriter whose poetic lyrics and musically complex and ingenious melodies embody the joys and struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s, has always been an activist.

So, he wrote “Happy Birthday” in 1981 as part of a campaign to get King’s birthday declared an official national holiday. At the time, there was vigorous opposition from conservative politicians and interest groups to a federal holiday honoring King. Wonder’s up-tempo beat and lyrics celebrate King and ask how anyone could oppose the national recognition of “a man who died for good.” Wonder’s lively refrain of “Happy Birthday to ya!” is still very danceable and much deserving of celebration.

In 1982, Wonder joined King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, in delivering a petition with 6 million signatures on it in support of the holiday directly to the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. The following year, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill declaring Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a federal holiday to be observed every third Monday in January, beginning in 1986.

​“Pride (In the Name of Love)” by the Irish rock group U2 was released in 1984 as the lead single on the album “Unforgettable Fire.” The band’s lead singer, Bono, initially put together a set of lyrics intended to condemn the militaristic focus of the United States under President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

But after a 1983 visit to an exhibit honoring King’s legacy at Chicago’s Peace Museum, Bono began crafting the song to highlight King’s achievements, as well as those of other martyrs to the cause of peace throughout history. The finished lyrics echo King’s own phrases, such as “Free at last,” and “One man come in the name of love.”

The phrase “pride” in the title is used in two ways in the lyrics. One kind of “pride” that Bono refers to is the pride of aggression and violence. The second is the kind of pride moral heroes like King embodied, pride in being on the side of justice and freedom for all people.

​Pioneering New York hip hop composer and performer Grandmaster Flash, with his group the Furious Five, produced another moving tribute to King, with a song simply titled “The King,” which was featured on the 1988 album On the Strength. The song’s beats and rhythms alone serve as an example of Grandmaster Flash’s classic and fresh musicianship, even as its lyrics provide a lasting artistic memorial to King, a man who “brought hope to the hopeless.”

“His name is Martin Luther King,” and he dedicated his life to “making freedom ring,” the rap song proclaims. It relates how King, who was fearless in his convictions, was vilified and persecuted as a black man taking constructive action for freedom for all blacks, and it laments the fact that too many turned away from King’s message of peace and hope, during his lifetime and after. 

​“A Dream,” which is rapper Common’s 2006 tribute to King, samples the words of the hero’s most famous speech. The music video for the song incorporates historical footage of King delivering the speech at the March on Washington in 1963. 

Common weaves King’s original words and story (“I have a dream”) into his own perspective (“I got a dream”) as a 21st century black man “born on the blacklist” to struggle against enduring racism, but working to find the hope that still endures through the inspiration he draws from King’s words.

Common’s performance, featuring fellow American rapper will.i.am, elaborates on King’s words “one day” throughout its lyrics, and adds, of dreams, “I still have one.”

​Many young people—and even many adults—are not aware that many of the world’s foremost musicians and performing artists have lived with one or more disabilities. Here are six of some of the best-known singers, songwriters, and performers of the 20th and early 21st centuries who can serve as vivid role models of creativity and perseverance for musicians of all types of ability:

Django Reinhardt (1910 - 1953) was a Roma musician born in an itinerant camp near Paris. As a young man, he became skilled on banjo, violin, and guitar, but at age 18 received severe burns from a caravan fire.
 
The accident left him with one leg paralyzed and with a badly damaged hand. He relearned how to play guitar with his hand injuries. He also relearned how to walk using a cane. At only 24 years old, he joined with violinist Stéphane Grappelli to co-lead the Quintette du Hot Club de France, and later toured with Duke Ellington. 
 
A master of improvisation, Reinhardt is beloved today by scholars and music-lovers for the exceptional originality of his compositions. He is honored as one of the most richly creative spirits in the history of jazz.

Hank Williams (1923 - 1953) was one of the world’s major country music stars, known for his talents as a singer, a guitarist, and a songwriter. Williams gave intense, lyrical performances of songs like “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Howlin’ at the Moon,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and “Lost Highway.” After he joined Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry he catapulted to international fame. His songs remain iconic and deeply moving expressions of the best of American popular music. 
 
Williams was born with spina bifida oculta, a malformation of the spinal column that typically goes unnoticed, but that in his case resulted in lifelong chronic pain. Williams was a driven composer and performer who threw himself completely into his music. His use of drugs and alcohol intensified after a failed surgery to repair his spinal defect, and he died of a heart attack at age 29.
 
In 2010, Williams received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize citation for the extraordinary technical and emotional quality of his compositions, and for his role in transforming American country music on the world stage. 

Rosemary Clooney (1928 - 2002) may be more famous today as the aunt of movie superstar and humanitarian George Clooney. But in the mid-20th century, the Irish-American jazz and pop singer was among the world’s best-known female vocalists, and was widely beloved by fans the world over.
 
She had an extraordinarily rich vocal quality and an unbeatable sense of timing and phrasing. Her 1951 recording of “Come On-a My House” topped the charts in its day, and remains popular. 
 
After the assassination of her friend Robert F. Kennedy, a shock that was exacerbated by drug addiction, Clooney was hospitalized for several years. She relied on her music to help pull herself through. She battled bipolar disorder for decades, writing courageously about her experiences with the condition in her 1977 autobiography, This for Remembrance. The year that she died, she received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. 

Itzhak Perlman (born 1945) is an Israeli-born virtuoso of the violin. His range of interpretation and mastery of the technicalities of musicianship have caused numerous critics to rank him among the greatest musicians in history. Perlman contracted polio as a 4-year-old, and as a result he uses crutches to help him walk. As a teen, he made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York. 
 
In the decades since, Perlman has played and conducted with major orchestras around the world. He has recorded an extensive catalog of classical, jazz, traditional Jewish, and theatrical music, including the solo violin portions of John Williams’ score for the film Schindler’s List. He has earned 15 Grammy Awards to date.
 
Perlman, a vocal advocate for music education and for people with disabilities, also received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. 

Diane Schuur (born 1953) has been blind from birth due to a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. She is also one of the leading jazz vocalists in the world today as well as an accomplished pianist. Schuur, who began performing for family and friends while still a preschooler, went on to a genre-bending recording and performing career, earning two Grammy Awards to date. 
 
Heavily influenced by jazz legends like Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and the blind pianist George Shearing, Schuur rose to fame in the mid-1970s. Her smooth, effervescent interpretations of classic and contemporary songs made her a hit with the public, with musicians like Stan Getz and Stevie Wonder championing her talent. 
 
In 2020, Schuur released a new album, Running on Faith. It includes interpretations of her favorite standards, including a thrilling rendition of Washington’s signature song, “This Bitter Earth.” In 2000, Schuur was honored with a Helen Keller Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind.

Stevie Wonder (born 1950) needs no introduction, even to music fans born long after the peak of his fame. Born Steveland Morris, the now world-famous singer received too much oxygen in an incubator as a newborn, which resulted in permanent blindness. As a young boy growing up in inner-city Detroit, Wonder idolized musicians like Ray Charles—who was also blind—and learned to play multiple instruments.
 
When he was only 11, Wonder was discovered by singer Ronnie White of The Miracles, a popular Motown singing group. At 12, he cut his first album for Motown Records, beginning a varied career of brilliant performance and composition that endures into the present.
 
Wonder’s work ranges from lighthearted love ballads like “My Cherie Amour” to powerful, driving, musically intricate pieces like “Superstition,” to songs that capture the chaos, deprivation, passion, and hope of the social changes of the 1960s and early ‘70s. Albums like Songs in the Key of Life (1976) have achieved milestone status among music critics, and Wonder has earned a total of 25 Grammys to date. 

Despite centuries of injustice and limited opportunities, African-Americans have made countless contributions to science, medicine, public service, and the arts, among many other areas. American music, for example, would be far less rich, innovative, and memorable without the creative work of black composers.
 
Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, and Florence Price were gifted musicians. Additionally, their lives exemplify the obstacles 20th-century people of color had to overcome regardless of profession. Here’s what you need to know about their lives and work:

​Around the turn of the 20th century, Scott Joplin’s innovations in syncopated ragtime music made him one of the most acclaimed and influential American pianists and composers. His “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” are now staples of the popular repertoire.
 
Later audiences rediscovered this “King of Ragtime” through the use of his music in movies such as The Sting. The 1973 production won multiple Oscars, including one for Marvin Hamlisch’s adaptation and orchestration of Joplin’s music into its score. 
 
Joplin was born into a family of musicians in about 1867, probably in northeast Texas. He grew up in Texarkana and studied piano in his early teens. He performed in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and two years later studied music at a segregated school in Missouri. After his early work made him famous, Joplin moved to St. Louis. 
 
Hoping to reduce the prejudice shown by some critics to ragtime because of its African-American origins, Joplin published an instructional series called The School of Ragtime: Six Exercises for Piano. His ambitions as a composer of more traditional music led him to compose the opera A Guest of Honor and the ballet Rag Time Dance. 
 
Before his death in 1917, Joplin’s multi-genre operatic theater piece Treemonisha, whose African-American themes prefigured George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, was presented in a small-scale version. Critics have noted Treemonisha’s vivid blending of influences from Richard Wagner to Giuseppe Verdi to Tin Pan Alley. Notable recent stagings include a 2019 production at East London’s Grimeborn music festival.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington composed the score for Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life, which was also the film debut of then 19-year-old singer Billie Holiday. Revered as the most talented American jazz composer and conductor of his day, Duke Ellington wrote thousands of scores and is largely responsible for the distinctive sound of the Big Band era. 
 
Born in Washington, DC, in 1899 to a middle-class family that encouraged his artistic ambitions, Ellington studied piano at age 7 and began performing in ragtime bands in his teens. Working in New York City from 1923, he eventually assembled a 14-piece orchestra. Ellington’s band became a fixture at Harlem’s Cotton Club in the 1920s and ‘30s, and he hired musicians who were themselves major figures in the development of jazz.
 
This group of musicians became a wildly popular touring ensemble, appeared in multiple films, and went on the road in Europe from 1933 to 1939. Ellington’s music, and swing and jazz in general, were popular among anti-Nazi German youth. As a result, he was among the many black performers banned from working in Germany after the mid-1930s. 
 
However, at that time, the Cotton Club was an all-white establishment as far as patrons were concerned, and black musicians had to enter by the back door. While on tour in the United Kingdom in 1933, Ellington’s troupe was turned away from several hotels, and he suffered many other such slights on tour in the United States. This inspired him to begin working on behalf of the NAACP’s fight for racial justice. His extraordinary talent and personality forced white critics and audiences to take African-American music and performers seriously.
 
By the late 1930s, Ellington had begun composing long-form pieces, and the 1940s saw him compose a string of fast-tempo hits and pieces rich in tonal color. Ellington also expanded his talents into theater scores, including the 1964 production My People, a tribute to the Civil Rights movement. Ellington’s band continued touring the world with him for many years. Many of the same performers remained with him for four decades or more. His regal demeanor and charm continued to draw audiences until shortly before his death in 1974.

Florence Price is one of the few African-American female composers of symphonic music whose work achieved significant recognition from white audiences during her lifetime. She was the first black woman to have her work performed by a well-known orchestra. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E minor. One critic wrote that the piece was “faultless” in its passion and restraint. 
 
Many of Price’s hundreds of classical compositions were anchored in the tunes and rhythms of classic African-American spirituals. They were performed throughout the United States and Europe. Marian Anderson, one of the world’s great contraltos and herself a breaker of color barriers in a segregated society, included Price’s song “My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord” among the pieces she sang at her famous 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 
 
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, Price studied music as a child under the guidance of her mother, a schoolteacher and pianist. She went on to study at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, a rare opportunity for a black woman in those days. Before returning to Arkansas to marry, she spent two years teaching music at Clark University in Atlanta.
 
Back in Arkansas, she continued to teach and compose. However, because she was African-American, she was refused admission into the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association. Despite the international reputation she earned, her work was knocked well-known in the decades after her death in 1953. 
 
In 2009, the new owners of Price’s summer home in Illinois discovered a long-lost trove of her manuscripts. At that time, musicians began to edit, share, and record them, to the delight of new audiences.