Gotham City Soul

"Emerson needed more musicians, preferably cheap and loud. What about that middle-aged black man with the melodious whistle and hearty laugh he’d seen performing for coins at the Hudson River ferryboat terminal? Johnson listened to the proposition of the neatly dressed young man and said, “Why, sure . . . how much did you say you would pay?” “Twenty cents a song,” said Emerson, “and you can work all afternoon.” “Well, suh , just show me where you want me to go,” said Johnson, throwing in one of his hearty laughs for free. Emerson had his second recording artist." —From Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, by Tim Brooks. One could make a case that the American music industry was born when the inventor Thomas Edison first devised a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders in 1877, famously consigning his own voice to posterity (it should be noted that a somewhat newly discovered audio fragment of the French folk song “Au ...

“Dear kith and kin, I'm writing with information and invitations related to the documentary film project I have embarked upon about our mutual DeWolf ancestors and the slave trade.” From a letter by Katrina Browne to 200 family members and descendants of Rhode Island slave trader Mark Anthony DeWolf Although Traces of the Trade debuted in 2006, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in last year, and aired on PBS's POV series , we never felt the noise around it was big enough. Over the past few years the North has had to take its sorrowful, yet rightful place as a key player in slavery in America (the New-York Historical Society's fantastic two-year exhibition “Slavery in New York” , brought  home the unalterable fact that New York City was a slave capital for two centuries). Still, we often look to the South.  We think that it can't be told enough, the story of how the American colonies, and then our entire nation was at one time or another completely ...