How Black Music Took Over the World

One of the world’s greatest bassists lays down the heart of Black music, revealing how its rhythmic structures and the long history of the African diaspora made it the world’s most popular form.

“A revelatory new book.” —New York Times

Why do Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone move us the way they do? What drives the worried notes of the Delta blues? What makes Beyoncé’s triumph Cowboy Carter inescapably great?

As Melvin Gibbs shows in How Black Music Took Over the World, it is the musical inheritance of Africa. Beginning with two rhythmic building blocks he calls the cell and the frame, Gibbs demonstrates how those tools can transport listeners to “a realm where sounds become vehicles for human movement.” Reforged in the African diaspora throughout the Americas, these musical traditions are played today on church organs, electric guitars, computers, telephones, and even simple gourds. Kool & the Gang once called Black musicians the “scientists of sound”—and Gibbs reveals how they discovered the world’s music.

Gibbs’s perspective is uniquely his own. A world-class musician fluent in multiple genres, he is equally at home digging through records in an old-school Times Square shop as he is discussing mathematics and music theory with university professors. Infused with his personal journey and a sharp understanding of history’s triumphs and injustices, How Black Music Took Over the World is a powerful exploration of one of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements.