Music of the Common Tongue

"A magnificent book about Afro-American music and its impact on western culture."

~Race and Class

""Christopher Small has written a magnificent book about Afro-American music and its impact on western culture. He totally fulfills his aim of showing that black American music has become of far greater human significance than any superficial assessment of classically-oriented evaluation would allow.""

~Race and Class

""Essential for anyone interested in obtaining another perspective on the aesthetics of African-American music and hot it relates to culture.""

~The Black Perspective in Music

""A magnificent book about Afro-American music and its impact on western culture.""

~Race and Class

""A real gem: deeply committed, pesuasively argued and imbued throughout with a love and understanding of the music.""

~The Wire

""I think this is the best and most comprehensive book about African-American musicking this century. As such, it will continually encourage us to celebrate our liberation from abstract knowledge, competitive individualism and the death dealing industrial state.""

~Charles Keil, SUNY at Buffalo

"I think this is the best and most comprehensive book about African-American musicking this century. As such, it will continually encourage us to celebrate our liberation from abstract knowledge, competitive individualism and the death dealing industrial state."

~Charles Keil, SUNY at Buffalo

"This book makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of the complex interweaving of African and European musical and cultural traditions that have brought African-American music and most other American musics in to being. His mastery of both musical traditions-as well as his acute sensitivity to the cultural and political contexts for musical production –sets this book apart. A must read for those of us concerned with the production of twentieth-century music and for those of us who wan to unravel the history of race, racism and cultural hybridity in America.""

~Tricia Rose, author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America