To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition

Two of the foremost researchers of sacred and secular black vocal music, Abbott, who works for the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, and Seroff, an independent scholar who lives near Nashville, Tennessee, spent over thirty years gathering archival and oral history materials. Combined with their two earlier major works, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895 (Jackson, Miss., 2002) and Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, Miss., 2007), the authors have provided an invaluable window into the lives of people whose identities were shaped by the music they made.