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The Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and early 1970s was the artistic and aesthetic side of the Black Power Movement. BAM was perhaps more global in scale and remains a subject of scholarly and intellectual interest to this day. Mitchell (Univ. of Memphis) and Davis (San Jacinto College), both professors of English and accomplished specialists in African American literature, have compiled an incisive, captivating history of this radical political and social movement, which raised race consciousness through art and was a unique 20th-century artistic movement. Arranged alphabetically, entries cover political and social leaders, artists, authors, works, and major themes of the movement; this compendium is an excellent introduction to and summary of BAM. Topics such as black women writers, marginalization, sexual identity, voodoo aesthetics, student nonviolence, poetry on Emmett Till, and the black aesthetic are cogent and well summarized. Influential longer works merit attention, but significant short stories and poems--for example, James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Amiri Baraka's "Monday in B-Flat"--also have their own entries. Each entry includes suggestions for further reading. The encyclopedia includes a brief foreword and preface, a time line, and a helpful index.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

As portable recording technology emerged in the early decades of the 20th century, ethnomusicologists made many field recordings of black singers and instrumentalists in the southern and southeastern US and in the Caribbean and West Africa. Alan Lomax is justly famous for his monumental work in this area, but many others were also involved. Usually made in rural areas, such field recordings captured ordinary people making the secular and sacred music that was an integral part of their cultures. These recordings are vitally important to the study of the history of jazz and the blues. Thus, it is surprising that there was apparently no comprehensive discography of this material before Gibbs (who died in 2017) undertook this project. Organized chronologically, the book provides details of each individual recording, including its location. Location is important because though some recordings have been issued commercially, some are found only in archives; some are available for listening online, and others are not. The index includes song titles, performers, and archives. This is an important reference source.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.