African American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

Learn more

• Learn more about African American history, African Americans, American history, music, sheet music, and song lyrics.

Legal

African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project is a digital collection of sheet music selected from the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University.“This collection consists of 1,305 pieces of African-American sheet music dating from 1850 through 1920. The collection includes many songs from the heyday of antebellum black face minstrelsy in the 1850s and from the abolitionist movement of the same period. Numerous titles are associated with the novel and the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Civil War period music includes songs about African-American soldiers and the plight of the newly emancipated slave. Post-Civil War music reflects the problems of Reconstruction and the beginnings of urbanization and the northern migration of African Americans…Particularly significant in this collection are the visual depictions of African-Americans which provide much information about racial attitudes over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”Search this collection by keyword or browse the subject, name, or title indexes.Additional resources on this website include a special presentation called The Development of an African-American Musical Theatre 865-1910, a selected discography, a selected bibliography, and related resources.