Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan's recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a major R&B and pop hit in 1946. In narrating a woman's murder of her abusive husband from a sympathetic first-person point of view, the recording's depiction of domestic violence raises the question of how it achieved mass popularity in a cultural milieu that discouraged frank discussion of this topic. This article accounts for this popularity by tracing the musical and lyrical changes between the hit recording and its sources, the Caribbean folk ballad Payne dead/Murder in the market and calypso performer Wilmouth Houdini's 1939 adaptation He had it coming.
Develops data from interviews about stereotypes of Jamaican and Barbadian men and women. The popular music from Jamaica and Barbados is used as a lens for understanding the cultures within which the respondents develop their gender stereotypes. The stereotype data is then compared with the music that is popular during the interviews.
Explores the idea of diaspora and musical exchanges in relation to changes in Colombian popular music, specifically that from the Caribbean coastal region of the country, often identified as more or less African-influenced. It traces changes that occurred from the 1920s onward, with the commercialization of cumbia and porro and related styles, and looks also at more recent developments around vallenato, champeta, and rap.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
614 p, Cuba has been central to popular music developments throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, no one has ever attempted to survey the extensive literature on the island's music, in particular the vernacular contributions of its Afro-Cuban population. This unprecedented bibliographic guide attempts to do just that. Ranging from the 19th century to early 2009 it offers almost 5000 entries on all of the islandâ¿¿s main genre families, e.g. Cancion Cubana, Danzon, Son, Rumba, and Sacred Musics (Santeria, Palo, Abakua, and Arara), as well as such recent developments as timba, rap and regueton.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
343 p., Explores issues associated with Caribbean women, music, and the global community. By placing the Caribbean within the global community, these essays contribute to the discussion of diasporic musicians and elucidate the relationships between the Caribbean and the larger world. Emphasis is on the remarkable extent of the Caribbean’s influence, especially in the last 50 years.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
661 p., Focuses on the diffusion of Cuban popular musical styles throughout the Americas as well as the creation of new hybrids in places such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Latin New York. Students, scholars and librarians will find Baila! to be an essential resource on Afro-Latin music and dance, language, literature, aesthetics, and more.
During the early 1970s the U.S. songwriter, musician, and producer Van Dyke Parks completed work on a series of albums exploring the musical contours of the circum-Caribbean region and, through them, broader patterns and issues in 20th-century relations between the U.S. and the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
704 p., Comprehensive reference to a range of musical styles, from Bailanta to Bossa Nova and from Salsa to Ska. It includes discussions on cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; typical features of performance and presentation; and, relationships to other genres and sub-genres.
Located in the eastern Brazilian Amazon roughly three hours by boat from the open Atlantic, the port city of Belém do Pará has been an important point of convergence for transnational flows of commodities, people, and culture, including a vast array of up-tempo Caribbean dance genres known locally as lambada. Since the late twentieth century, inhabitants of Belém and surrounding areas have sought to make a virtue of their liminal position between the hegemonic centers of southeastern Brazil and the circum-Caribbean. This article shows how musicians, dancers, listeners, and culture brokers draw on the local history of Caribbean cosmopolitan musicality to articulate an alternative Amazonian regional identity, one characterized by connectedness and proximity to their Caribbean neighbors rather than by isolation and provincialism. In so doing, the article contributes to the remapping of the cultural contours of Brazil, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and Latin America.
