On June 5, 2006, the United States government officially designated June as National Caribbean-American Heritage Month, and a presidential proclamation recognizing its observance has been issued annually ever since. In this list below we take a look at the music of the Caribbean through books about artists who have made a significant impact on the world stage as well as those who have produced hits behind the scenes. We also highlight works that examine the ways in which Caribbean music has been created, enjoyed, performed, and studied.

Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae by Peter Lamarche Manuel with Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage.

 

Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-Caribbean Musical Tradition by Tina K. Ramnarine

Characterized by fast-paced, highly danceable rhythms, Chutney is a fusion of traditional and contemporary Indian and Caribbean influences. With its roots in the Hindi folk songs performed at birth and wedding ceremonies, Chutney has recently emerged in contemporary Indian-Caribbean life and has gone largely unrecognized in the body of scholarly literature. In this volume Tina K. Ramnarine explores the revolution of Chutney and introduces the emerging Indian-Caribbean genre into the arena of scholarly discourse about music.

 

Dancehall: A Reader on Jamaican Music and Culture edited by Sonjah Stanley Niaah

Dancehall: A Reader on Jamaican Music and Culture contextualizes the emergence of the globally popular dancehall genre, while tracing the complex and often contradictory aspects of its evolution, dispersion and politics. This collection of foundational essays places dancehall in context with cutting-edge analyses of performance modes and expression, genre development, and impact in the wider local, regional and international socio-political milieu of struggles by Black Jamaicans in particular and cultural adherents more broadly.

 

I & I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Wailerby Colin Grant

One of our best and brightest nonfiction writers examines for the first time the story of the Wailers. It charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, illuminating why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, Colin Grant travels in search of the last surviving Wailer. 

 

 

Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and  Identity in Jamaica and the United States by Melvin L Butler

Pentecostals throughout Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora use music to declare what they believe and where they stand in relation to religious and cultural outsiders. Yet the inclusion of secular music forms like ska, reggae, and dancehall complicated music's place in social and ritual practice, challenging Jamaican Pentecostals to reconcile their religious and cultural identities. Melvin Butler journeys into this crossing of boundaries and its impact on Jamaican congregations and the music they make. Using the concept of flow, Butler's ethnography evokes both the experience of Spirit-influenced performance and the transmigrations that fuel the controversial sharing of musical and ritual resources between Jamaica and the United States.  

Jump Up: Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City by Ray Allen

Jump Up! is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community.

My Song: A Memoir by Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson

An eloquently told personal account of an era of enormous cultural and political change, which reveals Harry Belafonte as not only one of America’s greatest entertainers, but also one of our most profoundly influential activists. Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. 

Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora by Paul Sullivan

Starting in 1970s Kingston, Paul Sullivan examines the origins of dub as a genre, approach, and attitude. He stops off in London, Berlin, Toronto, Bristol, and New York, exploring those places where dub had the most impact and investigates its effect on postpunk, dub-techno, jungle, and the dubstep. Along the way, Sullivan speaks with a host of international musicians, DJs, and luminaries of the dub world, from DJ Spooky, Adrian Sherwood, Channel, and Roy to Shut Up and Dance and Roots Manuva. Wide-ranging and lucid, Remixology sheds new light on the dub-born notions of remix and reinterpretation that set the stage for the music of the twenty-first century.

 

Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture  edited by Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell

This collection brings together US- and Caribbean-based scholars to discuss issues of class, gender, sexuality, race, culture and economy. Using the concept of diasporic citizenship as a theoretical frame, the authors intervene in current questions of national and transnational circuits of exchange as they pertain to the commoditization and movement of culture, knowledge, values and identity. The contributors approach the subjects of Rihanna, globalization, gender and sexuality, commerce, transnationalism, Caribbean regionalism, and Barbadian national identity and development from different disciplinary and at times radically divergent perspectives.

Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation​ by Heather Augustyn

In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. 

 

Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze by Shane Vogel

In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US; it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework; Black fad performance; for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era.

 

Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall by Kenneth Bilby

This is the first book devoted to the studio musicians who were central to Jamaica's popular-music explosion. With color portraits and interview excerpts, over 100 musical pioneers—such as Prince Buster, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and many of Bob Marley's early musical collaborators—provide new insights into the birth of Jamaican popular music in the recording studios of Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

 

 

The Sounds of Black Music is a blog series featuring resources on music genres and influential artists from across the African Diaspora. This series is written and curated by Tracy Crawford and A.J. Muhammad.

More from The Sounds of Black Music: 

• The Sounds of Black Music: There Are Many Kings, But Only One Prince
• The Sounds of Black Music: Folk Voices
• The Sounds of Black Music: Black Artists in the Heart of Country Music
• The Sounds of Black Music: Hip-Hop Stories
   

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Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.