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Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages.

In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music.

A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.

A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Hill’s landmark work in southern religious history returns to print updated and expanded—and compellingly relevant.

In 1966, Samuel S. Hill’s Southern Churches in Crisis argued that southern Protestantism, a cornerstone of white southern society and culture, was shirking its moral duty by refusing to join in the fight for racial justice. Hill predicted that the church was risking its standing in southern society and that it would ultimately decline in influence and power. A groundbreaking study at the time, Hill’s book helped establish southern religious history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Three decades later, Southern Churches in Crisis continues to be widely read, quoted, and cited.

In Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited, which reprints the 1966 text in full, Hill reexamines his earlier predictions in an introductory essay that also describes how the study of religion in the South has become a major field of scholarly inquiry. Hill skillfully engages his critics by integrating new perspectives and recent scholarship. He suggests new areas for exploration and provides a selected bibliography of key studies in southern religious history published in the three decades subsequent to the original appearance of this groundbreaking work.

Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants.

Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.

Essays by the distinguished historian of southern religion Wayne Flynt, that illuminate the often overlooked complexity among southern Protestants.

Throughout its dramatic history, the American South has wrestled with issues such as poverty, social change, labor reform, civil rights, and party politics, and Flynt’s writing reaffirms religion as the lens through which southerners understand and attempt to answer these contentious questions. In Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century, however, Flynt gently but persuasively dispels the myth—comforting to some and dismaying to others—of religion in the South as an inert cairn of reactionary conservatism.

Flynt introduces a wealth of stories about individuals and communities of faith whose beliefs and actions map the South’s web of theological fault lines. In the early twentieth century, North Carolinian pastor Alexander McKelway became a relentless crusader against the common practice of child labor. In 1972, Rev. Dr. Ruby Kile, in a time of segregated churches led by men, took the helm of the eight-member Powderly Faith Deliverance Center in Jefferson County, Alabama and built the fledgling group into a robust congregation with more than 700 black and white worshippers. Flynt also examines the role of religion in numerous pivotal court cases, such as the US Supreme Court school prayer case Engel v. Vitale, whose majority opinion was penned by Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian. These fascinating case studies and many more illuminate a religious landscape of far more varied texture and complexity than is commonly believed.

Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century offers much to readers and scholars interested in the South, religion, and theology. Writing with his hallmark wit, warmth, and erudition, Flynt’s Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century is a vital record of gospel-inspired southerners whose stories revivify sclerotic assumptions about the narrow conformity of southern Christians. 

Explores the Southeast’s imperiled river systems and solutions for preserving them in the face of habitat loss, climate change, and extinction

Southern Rivers, by award-winning nature writer and biologist R. Scot Duncan, is a thoroughly crafted exploration of the perilous state of the Southeast’s rivers and the urgent need to safeguard their vitality. The region’s rivers are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and are the top global hotspot for important aquatic animals including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and fish, many of which have made important contributions to southern life and culture.

Centuries of commercial development have impaired the region’s river systems, sacrificing biodiversity and compromising the rivers’ ability to provide resources essential to human life: drinking water, waste disposal, irrigation, navigation, recreation, power production, and more. Now, increased heat and drought caused by climate change are lowering water levels. As such threats increase, it may seem necessary to choose between nature conservation and human needs, but Duncan persuasively demonstrates that this is a false choice. Conservation enhances human life.

In the same engaging voice of an expert friend that won over thousands of readers of his earlier book, Southern Wonder: Alabama’s Surprising Biodiversity, Duncan explains the task of managing southeastern rivers and how river water quality affects the daily lives of the millions who hold these historic waterways dear. He shows how managing rivers wisely can meet the needs of biodiversity and humanity both. With Americans increasingly anxious about the onset of climate change and the accelerating extinction crisis, Southern Rivers illuminates actionable solutions.
 

Spartanburg County, South Carolina, offered an example of the enduring legacy of the southern textile industry, company-owned mill villages, and union struggles of the 1930s. G. C. Waldrep illuminates the complex meshing of community ties and traditions with the goals and ideals of unionism. Unions aligned with a social vision of mutuality, equality, and interdependency already established in mill villages. But because companies owned the villages, labor conflicts involved not only work issues like wages and hours but virtually every other aspect of life. In documenting the high stakes of labor protest, Waldrep shows how the erosion or outright destruction of community undermined the ability of workers to respond to the assaults of employers overwhelmingly supported by government agencies and agents. 

Beautifully written and persuasively argued, Southern Workers and the Search for Community opens the gates of southern company towns to illuminate the human issues behind the mechanics of labor.