Book Cover Image of Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition by Lorenzo Thomas

Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
by Lorenzo Thomas

Publication Date: May 02, 2008
List Price: $25.95
Format: Paperback, 232 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780472068920
Imprint: University of Michigan Press
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Parent Company: University of Michigan

Paperback Description:

Black musical forms profoundly influenced the work of American poet and leading literary figure Lorenzo Thomas, and he wrote about them with keen insight-and obvious pleasure. This book, begun by Thomas before his death in 2005, collects more than a dozen of his savvy yet engagingly personal essays that probe the links between African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.Don’t Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song by Jelly Roll Morton) begins by laying out the case that the blues is a body of literature that captured the experience of African American migrants to the urban North and newer territories to the West. The essays that follow collectively provide a tour of the movement through classic jazz, bop, and the explosions of the free jazz era, followed by a section on R&B and soul. The penultimate essay is a meditation on rap music that attempts to bring together the extremes of emotion that hip hop elicits, and the collection ends with an unfinished preface to the volume.



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