In the course of preparing this bibliography, I discovered that although many studies have been published on African American popular music, this subject did not receive serious scholarly interest until the 1970s, when researchers began producing works on blues. Responding to social and political events in black culture in the 1970s, researchers began documenting the many different musical expressions of blacks. Several scholarly writings on both rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul music were produced during the 1970s. Yet everything changed in the 1990s when the proliferation of research
in all areas of African American popular music increased dramatically, with studies on hip hop culture and rap music leading the way.
This introductory essay provides a limited appraisal of the trends in
musical research on blues, funk, R&B, soul, hip hop and rap, with special focus on works published during the 1990s and later, when popular music studies blossomed. Two cursory observations emerge from these categories of study. First, research in the 1990s was no longer limited to topics on music and musical analyses, but expanded into autobiographies, biographies, histories and beyond. Second, by the 1990s researchers from a variety of disciplines displayed interest in issues more diverse, such as gender, identity, representation, and regional and global perspectives. In this essay, I highlight selected works that demonstrate major trends in popular music studies of
African American musical genres.