Books in the Refiguring American Music series

In Songbooks veteran music critic and popular music scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to American popular music writing, from William Billings's 1770 New-England-Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded.

Examining singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as vocal synthesis technology, Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which the voice and its qualities are socially produced and how listeners assign a series of racialized and gendered set of assumptions to a singing voice.

The autobiography of the pianist, composer, and bandleader Randy Weston, one of the worlds most influential jazz musicians and a remarkable storyteller.

Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it.

Using a theoretical framework built on Lacan and Foucault, Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic female Puerto Rican singers to explore how their voices, performance style, physical appearance, and subject matter of their songs challenged social and cultural norms.

Shana L. Redmond traces Paul Robeson's continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics, showing how he remains a vital force and presence for all those he inspired.

This fourth collection of poetry from the literary and cultural critic Fred Moten is an elegy to his mother and an inquiry into language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical tradition.