This article explores the historiography of early black music and its legacy. In examining texts from the 19th century to the 1940s, Ramsey finds that black music has always been a fertile source of controversy-and that the same issues still resonate in current debates. He takes as his starting point the cleavage between "cosmopolitan" and "provincial" outlooks, which viewed American music from a European perspective, or a more resolutely and defiantly American one, respectively.
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1850-1940, early jazz, early jazz journalism, Eileen Southern, jazz history, Nineteenth Century jazz, research methods, The Music of Black Americans: A History