Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist, whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have worked to build a bridge between Black cultural studies and musicology.

Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey’s search to understand America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to new readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.

This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography. Pulled together with the provocative introduction that precedes them are a testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as arousing a call to new readers to ask the hard questions and hard truths about this topic.