IU professors document black music in America

IU professor Portia Maultsby reaches across the table and plucks a few pieces of candy from a small bowl. She unwraps a Hershey's Kiss and pops it in her mouth.\nProfessor Mellonee Burnim stares at her colleague across the table through wire-rimmed glasses. After watching her bite into the chocolate, Burnim reaches her hand into the basket to indulge herself.\nBoth sit back in their chairs, relaxed and content.\nAnd they should be.\nThe two professors joined forces five years ago to compile a book to provide easy access to scholarly works on black music for students and educators. After five years of steadfast work, Burnim and Maultsby are finally sitting back and enjoying the success of their first book, "African American Music: An Introduction."\nThe idea to write the book came from years of gathering essays and other scholarly works for course packets and other classroom resources, Burnim said. \n"The book was a result of many years of teaching African-American courses and African-American music," she said. "There were many areas that were still lacking and were not addressed in a way that was adequate for the classes that we taught. We just decided it was time for us to put such a compilation together because we felt it would serve a real need in the field." \nThe professors spent the first year picking topics to be covered and "conceptualizing" the book.\nThe second year was spent recruiting the talent of 25 professors to contribute to the book, many from different universities around the nation. Burnim and Maultsby contacted other colleagues in the profession and former students who were scholars "in their own right."\n"We've been in the field a long time, and we have presented at professional meetings and done many invited talks and lectures and workshops and seminars," Burnim said. "We've gotten to know the major speakers and \nmajor scholars in the field. These are the colleagues that we feel have produced first-rate scholarship in the various genres in which they wrote."\nBurnim and Maultsby spent the next couple of years working with the authors to edit sections and to write their \nown chapters. After advice from their publisher, the authors added an index and a glossary of words to make the book an educational tool for the classroom. \n"We conceived the book as a collection of essays that would represent as comprehensive a view of African-American music as we could provide," Burnim said. "In addition, it was tailored in such a way so that it was very much usable in the broad sense of the word as a textbook, so there were things that were added to enhance its utility in the classroom, even for people who may be nonspecialists in the area."\nThe book covers areas of black music, including the inventors of music trends, women's influence in the history of black music and parts of the black music industry.\n"We look at music ranging from the earliest forms of African-American music created in the new world during \nthe period of slavery up through contemporary genres," Burnim said.\nMany of the book's topics cross over to demonstrate how areas of black music relate to each other.\n"We wanted to show the range of musical styles that have been created by African Americans and their relationships to each other, and how they each represent a continuity of tradition from the very beginning of slavery ... to the present," Maultsby said.\nSunni Fass, a Ph.D. candidate for the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, served as an editorial assistant and later as a managing editor for the book. Fass said she was thankful for the opportunity to work on the book and help shape its content.\n"I am grateful to Dr. Maultsby and Dr. Burnim for giving me the chance to gain this kind of experience, and it is exciting to see this book on the shelf and feel a sense of having helped make it possible," Fass said. "Putting a book like this together is not an easy process, and these two amazing women have been role models for me in terms of their perseverance and hard work."\nProfessor Valerie Grim, chair of the department of African American and African Diaspora studies, has known the professors for almost 16 years. Grim was a part of the "support cast" that encouraged the compilation of the book.\n"The book assembles the top scholars in each of the music genres to discuss black music," Grim said. "Rarely does a publication contain such a group of experts who offer very keen insights about black music."\nGrim said the comprehensive compilation will be a valuable work for many years to come.\n"Burnim and Maultsby are great scholars ... excellent mentors for their students ... and they have assembled and authored a work that will stand the test of time," Grim said. "Some may call it the definitive volume on black music in America"